Le Grand Cheval

Review by Giovanni Varazzani


Le Gran Cheval, name translate as Large Horse in English, is a sculpture made by the French artist Raymond Duchamp-Villon, brother of famous artists as Marcel Duchamp and Jacques Villon.
On the beginning of his career Raymond was studying medicine at the Sorbonne but rheumatism fever forced him to quit his studies and left him with temporary problems. This event altered the course of his life, so he matured his interest for sculpture, he start then to work closely with his brothers thus to have artistic influences coming from different ways.
After a first influence by Auguste Rodin with his figurative sculpture, Raymond was then the first artist to apply the rules of the Cubist movement to a sculpture that, basically, study still images from different point of view and the use of simple forms as cylinder, cube and sphere.
The choice of the horse probably comes from his past as an auxiliary doctor in a cavalry regiment, and the initial idea was the horse with his knight, developed after to a representation of a horse with all his energy and power.
The bronze sculpture is also notable for its dynamic depiction of mechanical motion, one of the themes of the Futurist style, influence that came from his friendship with the Italian Umberto Boccioni.
So the artist use in these sculpture simple forms built in a way, like spirals and layers in which he create motion and aggressive energy. It is probably the simplicity, the little detail of this sculpture that makes the big difference.