Raymond Duchamp-Villon

Duchamp-Villon's gold-washed Seated Woman represents a modern reaction to the modeled forms of traditional realist sculpture. The artist re-formed the female figure using a pared-down vocabulary of geometric shapes to represent her head, torso, and limbs. The parts of Seated Woman resemble the uniformly turned components of a jointed wooden artist's mannequin. Duchamp-Villon embeds in this simplified form a witty reference to the pose Michelangelo invented for the muscular female Sibyls he painted on the Sistine Chapel ceiling in the early 1500s.