Nasher Sculpture Center

The year before making Maggy, Duchamp-Villon described the art of sculpture: "Mistress of three dimensions, it has at its service line, plane and volume. The life in its balance, its cadences, its rhythms provides its themes." Duchamp-Villon was a self-taught artist, learning from ideas and artistic developments circulating around him, especially among the so-called Puteaux Cubists, who met frequently at the studio of his older brother Jacques Villon in the town of Puteaux outside Paris. The subject of this work is Mrs. Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, wife of a painter and poet associated with the Puteaux circle. Duchamp-Villon gives her a starkly powerful presence, combining a Cubist vocabulary of geometric forms with features drawn seemingly from tribal masks.