Ossip Zadkine was a Russian-born French sculptor known for his dramatic Cubist-inspired sculptures of the human figure.
Background
Ossip Zadkine was born in Vitebsk, Belarus on July 14, 1890, into the family of Alexis and Sophie (Lester) Zadkine. His father was Jewish. In 1905 his parents sent him to his mother's northern English homeland. He called himself Joe Zadkine until 1914. Ossip had 5 siblings: sisters Mira, Roza and Fania and brothers Mark and Moses.
Education
After attending the polytechnic and the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, the young artist went to Paris in 1909. There, he enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts which he quits again soon after in order to work as freelance artist.
Ossip Zadkine quickly became dissatisfied with what he considered the academy's rigid approach to art, and quit his studying to start his own studio. In Paris he met many of the influential artists and abstract sculptors of his day including Constantin Brancusi, Naum Gabo, Modigliani, Robert Delaunay, and Henri Matisse. In 1912, he met El Lissitzky, his childhood friend from Vitebsk, who was in Paris on a summer visit. He also exhibited at the Salon d'Automne, along with Brancusi and others.
In 1914 Ossip Zadkine held shows at the Freie Sezession in Berlin, the De Onafhankelijken in Amsterdam, and at the Allied Artists Association, London. While based in Paris he studied the works of Picasso and Georges Braque, who between 1907 and 1911 were discovering the first branch of Cubism, known as Analytical Cubism. In 1915, Zadkine joined the War. He was released from duty in 1917 after sustaining injuries.
In 1919 Zadkine held his first solo exhibition in Brussels. His early sculptures show demonstrate the influence of Cubism and primitive art. He adapted the boldness of Cubist painting, into simple, angular sculptures. A good example of this is "Mother and Child" (1912), which sold in 2009 to a private collector. But probably his most famous Cubist works are "Woman and Fan" (1923, bronze, Zadkine Museum, Paris) and "The Beautiful Servant" (1926, stone, Zadkine Museum).
By the 1930's Zadkine's style had taken on some neoclassical elements and a softer style emerged. He was also highly productive in lithography, showing influences of the Surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico. The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco has three excellent examples of lithographs by Zadkine: "The Couple" (1921) "The Musicians" (1955) and "Peasant Fete" (1960). In 1930 he has an exhibition at the Arts Club of Chicago, mainly gouaches which displayed a new agile, almost baroque style. In 1932, with growing international recognition, Zadkine was awarded several important commissions for relief sculpture on public buildings in Paris, Brussels, and Poissy. In 1935 the City of Paris bought his three metre high wooden sculpture Orpheus.
Between the years 1941 and 1945, Zadkine lived in New York and taught at the Art Students League. The League was a progressive art school established in 1875 and gave rise to avant-garde artists such as Jackson Pollock. It was one of the first schools to add minimalism, photography, and conceptual art to its program. In 1942 he participated in the Artists in Exile Exhibition held at the Pierre Matisse Gallery. Other artists, who were fleeing the persecution of Nazi Germany after the infamous 1937 exhibition of Degenerate Modern Art in Munich, including Marc Chagall, displayed their work.
After the war, Zadkine returned to Paris, re-opened his studio and took on students. In 1947 he received one of the most important commissions of his career: the city of Rotterdam ordered a monument to commemorate its near escape from destruction during the war. The bronze sculpture, called "The Destroyed City", was a gift from the firm De Bijenkorf in honour of its Jewish employees who perished under Nazi occupation. The initial drawings were displayed at an exhibition at the Museum Boymans in 1949, and received much criticism. However, by the time of it's completion in 1953, the criticism had died down. The monument depicts a mutilated, agonized giant whose abstract limbs bend in painful angles, suggesting an intense inner torment. Since the monument was unveiled, it has become world famous.
In 1960 Zadkine received the Grand Prix at the Venice Biennale and the Grand Prix de la Sculpture of the city of Paris. By the 1960s he had reached the peak of his fame. His works traveled the world in countless exhibitions, while at home Zadkine worked on graphic prints, book projects and sculptures (including many commissions from cities for statues of Van Gogh). In 1962 he gave a series of popular lectures at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He died in Paris in 1967, just weeks after a large retrospective exhibition of his plastic art opened at the Bibliotheque Nationale. His former home and studio is now the Zadkine Museum.
Quotations:
"How should one approach the person of van Gogh in order to be able to build a statue of him? How can one place him outside of himself, separate him from the tragic character of his life? How can one build a statue in the open air which simultaneously evokes the rare and the new person who was van Gogh, as also the enormity of the new aspect of the current and future art of painting?"
Interests
Artists
Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso
Connections
In August 1920, Zadkine married Valentine Prax, an Algerian-born painter of Sicilian and French Catalan descent. They had no children. The artist's only child, Nicolas Hasle, born in 1960, was the result of his affair with a Danish woman, Annelise Hasle. Since 2009, Hasle, a psychiatrist, who was acknowledged by the artist and had his parentage legally established in France in the 1980s, has been party to a lawsuit with the City of Paris to establish his claim to his father's estate.