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FRAME BY FRAME

Cubist take on icon of 1800s

By Sebastian Smee

 |  Globe Staff  

  February 28, 2012

Raymond Duchamp-Villon sculpted this terracotta head of the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire, at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, in 1911. Baudelaire had been dead 44 years. Here, with his smooth and swollen dome, his ruthless nose, his terrifyingly thin lips, and those dead, unseeing, angled eyes with ogee eyebrows, he combines ancient severity with diabolical, you-will-not-be-spared modernity.

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