Ossip Zadkine
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Ossip Alexeevich Zadkine (Template:Langx; 28 January 1888 – 25 November 1967) was a Russian and French artist of the School of Paris.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> He is best known as a sculptor, but also produced paintings and lithographs.<ref>Zadkine Research Center</ref>
Early years and education
[edit]Zadkine was born on 28 January 1888 as Yossel Aronovich Tsadkin (Template:Langx) in the city of Vitebsk, in the Russian Empire (now Belarus).<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> He was born to a baptized Jewish father and a mother named Zippa-Dvoyra, who he claimed to be of Scottish origin.<ref name=":0" /> Archival materials state that Iosel-Shmuila Aronovich Tsadkin was of Jewish faith and studied in the Vitebsk City Technical School between 1900 and 1904. He also studied in the Yury Pen's art school with would-be artists Marc Chagall (then Movsha Shagal)<ref name="Diment">Template:Cite journal</ref> and Victor Mekler (then Avigdor Mekler). Archival materials contradict Zadkine himself and states that his father did not convert to the Russian Orthodox religion and his mother was not of a Scottish extraction.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> He had 5 siblings: sisters Mira, Roza and Fania and brothers Mark and Moses.
Zadkine claimed in his memoir that at the age of fifteen he had been sent by his father to Sunderland in the north of England, to stay with distant Scottish relatives and learn some "good manners". However, recent research has discovered that he ran away from home with a younger brother,and ended up living in Sunderland with the family of his paternal uncle, Joseph Zadkin, who had himself emigrated from Belarus a few years previously. In Sunderland he took art classes in Sunderland Town Hall and was taught to use a chisel by his uncle who was a cabinetmaker.<ref>Cathy Corbett, "Ossip Zadkine: The reinvention of an émigré sculptor". Essay in catalogue for Zadkine aan Zee/ Zadkine by the Sea exhibition at Museum Beelden aan Zee, Den Haag, October 2018 - Feb 2019 (Waanders Uitgevers, 2018)</ref> He then moved to London and attended lessons at the Regent Street Polytechnic where he won a prize for modelling in 1908<ref>Regent Street Polytechnic School of Art prizewinners Book, Archive of Regent Street Polytechnic, University of Westminster</ref> but considered the teachers to be too conservative.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
Zadkine settled in Paris in 1910. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts for six months. In 1911 he lived and worked in La Ruche. While in Paris he joined the Cubist movement, working in a Cubist idiom from 1914 to 1925. He later developed his own style, one that was strongly influenced by African and Greek art.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
Career
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In 1921 he obtained French citizenship.<ref name=":0">Ossip Joselyn Zadkine Facts, YourDictionary</ref> Zadkine served as a stretcher-bearer in the French Army during World War I, and was wounded in action. He spent World War II in the US. His best-known work is probably the sculpture The Destroyed City (1951–1953), representing a man without a heart, a memorial to the destruction of the center of the Dutch city of Rotterdam in 1940 by the Nazi-German Luftwaffe.<ref name="Age">Template:Cite news</ref>
He taught sculpture classes at Académie de la Grande Chaumière until 1958, students of his included artists Geula Dagan (1925–2008), Gunnar Aagaard Andersen and Genevieve Pezet.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
Death and legacy
[edit]Zadkine died in Paris in 1967 at the age of 79 after undergoing abdominal surgery<ref name="Age" /> and was interred in the Cimetière du Montparnasse.
Museums
[edit]His former home and studio in Montparnasse is now the Musée Zadkine.<ref name=":1">Template:Cite web</ref> When his former wife Prax died, she donated the house and art studio to the City of Paris for the formation of Musée Zadkine.<ref name=":1" />
There is also a Musée Zadkine in the village of Les Arques in the Midi-Pyrénées region of France. Zadkine lived in Les Arques for a number of years, and while there, carved an enormous Christ on the Cross and Pieta that are featured in the 12th-century church which stands opposite the museum.
Personal life
[edit]In August 1920, Zadkine married Valentine Prax (1897–1981), an Algerian-born painter of Sicilian and French-Catalan descent.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Prax and Zadkine had no children.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
Zadkine was a neighbor in Montparnasse and a friend of Henry Miller and was represented by the character "Borowski" in Miller's novel, Tropic of Cancer (1934).<ref name=":1" /><ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Frederick Turner: Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of "Tropic of Cancer", Yale University Press, 2012.</ref> His other neighbors there included Chaïm Soutine, and Tsuguharu Foujita.<ref name=":1" />
While living in Manhattan during wartime from 1942 to 1945, Zadkine had a relationship with American artist Carol Janeway<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> and created several portraits of her.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
The artist's only child, Nicolas Hasle (born 1960), was born after an affair with a Danish woman, Annelise Hasle.<ref name=":2">Template:Cite web</ref> Since 2009, Hasle, a psychiatrist, who had been 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.<ref name="estate">Template:Cite web</ref><ref name=":2" /><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
Awards
[edit]- 1950 Venice Biennale sculpture prize<ref name="Obit">Template:Cite news</ref>
- 1961 Grand Prix National des Arts<ref name="Obit"/>
Legacy
[edit]- A school in Rotterdam was named after Zadkine.<ref>Zadkine college</ref>
Gallery
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Maternité, 1913, painted elmwood, 81 cm, exhibited at the 1914 Salon des Indépendants, Paris, Published in Montjoie, 1914
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Femme au violon (Woman with a Violin), 1918 photograph by Pierre Choumoff
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Venus, 1920, published in Action: Cahiers individualistes de philosophie et d'art, Volume 1, Number 4, July 1920
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Prometheus, c. 1930–1940, wooden sculpture
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The prisoners (Die Gefangenen), 1943, bronze sculpture
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The Destroyed City (De Verwoeste Stad), 1951–53, bronze sculpture in Rotterdam, which is now a registered monument.<ref>Rijksmonumenten</ref>
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Orpheus, 1956, bronze sculpture
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Lotophage, 1961–62, bronze sculpture, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv
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Vincent and Theo van Gogh, 1963–64, bronze sculpture, in Zundert, The Netherlands
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Bas-relief of the Blomme House in Brussels representing the architect's instruments
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Public collections
[edit]Among the public collections holding works by Ossip Zadkine are:
- Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles
- Musée Zadkine, Paris
- Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle, Netherlands
- Museum of Modern Art, New York City
- National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
- Tate Gallery, London
- Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel
- Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands
See also
[edit]References
[edit]- Czwiklitzer, Christophe, Ossip Zadkine, le sculpteur-graveure de 1919 à 1967, Paris, Chez l'auteur, 1967.
- Yamanashi Kenritsu Bijutsukan, Ossip Zadkine, Tokyo, Yomiuri Shinbunsha, 1989.
- Andreas Weiland, "(Re-)Discovering Zadkine", in: Art in Society, issue # 10
External links
[edit]- Pages with broken file links
- 1888 births
- 1967 deaths
- 20th-century Russian sculptors
- 20th-century Russian male artists
- Russian male sculptors
- Modern sculptors
- Jewish Russian sculptors
- Jewish French sculptors
- French people of Russian-Jewish descent
- People from the Russian Empire of Scottish descent
- French people of Scottish descent
- Alumni of Chelsea College of Arts
- Burials at Montparnasse Cemetery
- School of Paris
- Emigrants from the Russian Empire to France
- 20th-century French sculptors
- French male sculptors