Mechanical Centaur

As a cavalry doctor with the 11th Cuirassiers during World War I, Raymond Duchamp-Villon knew equine anatomy well. As a sculptor, and one of the triumvirate of brothers that included Painter Jacques Villon and Marcel Duchamp, a founder of Dada, he was familiar with the idea that the horse gave aristocratic stature to its rider and had long been the very symbol of man in power. With the beginning of World War I, Duchamp-Villon foresaw that the power of the horse would metamorphose into machine power. The result was his Large Horse of 1914.

Commuting back and forth between his army camp and his studio in a Paris suburb, Duchamp-Villon modeled his first equestrian studies with horse and rider. Then as he continued working, he merged the two, smoothed down the surfaces to the metallic glisten of machinery. Only the vaguest form of a hoof in the cubistic sculpture resembles a steed thundering down the stretch. Fetlocks and hindquarters dissolved into the hard shape of cams, pistons and gears. Through the years, Duchamp-Villon's Horse has been known only in terms of the final small-scale model. Even as such, it has been hailed as a major breakthrough in 20th century sculpture. Henri Matisse, paying a visit to the sculptor's studio, could only gasp at its completion: "It's a projectile."

Now, thanks to Marcel Duchamp, the surviving brother, the work has finally been cast in full scale--some 1,155 lbs. of bronze bulking 5 ft. tall--and is currently on view in Paris' Galerie Louis Carre. The gallery has wisely fulfilled the sculpture's kinetic dynamism by exhibiting it on a motor-driven turntable. This would no doubt have pleased Duchamp-Villon. "The power of the machine imposes itself on us," he wrote in 1913, "and we can no longer even conceive of humans without it. We are shaken in a strange manner by the rapid friction of beings and things, and we become accustomed to perceive the forces of beings through the very forces enslaved by them." The machinery of war captured the artist. In 1918, he died in a military hospital of blood poisoning contracted in the trenches.

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