Professor Gosset

After beginning to study medicine, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, one of Marcel Duchamp’s two elder brothers, turned to sculpture. Initially he oriented himself on the work of Auguste Rodin but in 1910 he discovered Cubism. However, the formal structures in his work never showed a tendency towards creating pure rhythmic surfaces but continued to exhibit physiognomic features. This made him into an important portraitist. Duchamp-Villon was a soldier in the First World War and stationed at Champagne where, in 1916, he became ill with typhoid. He was taken to the military hospital in Mourmelon and was mainly cared for by Professor Gosset. His doctor, with whom he rapidly became friends, served as the model for his last group of sculptures. In addition to a realistic portrait he produced increasingly simplified versions: the abstraction and stereometry increased from head to head. The Gosset portrait from 1917 divides the head into a convex forehead-nose section and a concave lower face. The fixed gaze from the depths of the eye sockets could be interpreted as a premonition of his own death. Satisfied with the developments, the artist said in a letter that he considered the portrait a starting point for something new but that he was too weak to complete the work. He died in October 1918.