Rooster by Duchamp-Villon in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, August 2009

Rooster (Gallic Cock)

Raymond Duchamp-Villon (Pierre-Maurice-Raymond Duchamp), French, 1876 - 1918

Geography: Made in Europe

Date: 1916

Medium: Painted bronze

Dimensions: 17 1/2 x 14 1/2 x 3 inches (44.4 x 36.8 x 7.6cm)

Curatorial Department: Modern Art

Object Location: Currently not on view

Accession Number: 1985-93-1

Credit Line: Purchased with funds contributed by Muriel and Philip Berman, 1985

Additional information:

Publication- Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections

Raymond Duchamp-Villon was the middle brother of the artists Jacques Villon and Marcel Duchamp. During a career cut short by his death from typhoid fever during World War I, Duchamp-Villon produced a body of sculpture crucial to the development of early twentieth-century art. His emphasis on dynamic form and geometric structure perfectly expressed the advances of Cubism in three-dimensional form. Duchamp-Villon made the original plaster for The Rooster as a medallion for a temporary theater at the war's front. The stylized relief continued his exploration of animal images in geometric form, but here he restrained the level of abstraction in acknowledgment of the taste of his audience of enlisted men. The image of a rooster combined with the rising sun would have been understood as a clear reference to the heraldic and popular symbol for France. This bronze was cast from the original plaster as a memorial after the artist's death by John Quinn, his most devoted American collector. John B. Ravenal, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 314.


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