Zadkine, Ossip [Zadkin, Osip]
(b Vitebsk, 14 July 1890; d Paris, 25 Nov 1967).
French sculptor, draughtsman and printmaker of Belorussian birth. He spent his childhood in Smolensk in a circle of cultured and assimilated Jews. His father was a convert to the Orthodox Church, and his mother came from an immigrant family of Scottish shipwrights. While staying with his mother's relatives in Sunderland, northern England, in 1905, he attended the local art school and taught himself to carve furniture ornaments. At the age of 16 he continued his artistic training in London, taking evening classes in life drawing and making his living as an ornamental woodcarver. During this time he became friendly with the painter David Bomberg. He continued his studies at the Regent Street Polytechnic, London, and later, in 1908, at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London, where he concentrated on techniques in wood.
Early works such as Volga Boatmen (1908; destr.) were oriented towards a socially critical realism. During a brief return to Russia in summer 1909, he met Marc Chagall in Vitebsk and completed works in wood and stone (untraced). Zadkine arrived in Paris in October 1909, and after a disappointing six months at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts with Antoine Injalbert he finally broke with official academic sculpture.
In 1910 Zadkine returned to Smolensk for the last time and he took part in the Union of Youth exhibition (Soyuz Molodyozhi) in St Petersburg. On his return to Paris in the autumn he moved into the studio complex of la Ruche, where he lived and worked in the company of like-minded artists including Fernand Leger, Joseph Csaky, Alexander Archipenko and Chagall. He regularly took part in the Salon des Independants and the Salon d'Automne and from 1912 lived in the artists' quarter of Montparnasse, where he mixed with Picasso, Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Andre Salmon and Modigliani. The diverse influences on Zadkine's pre-World War I lyrical style culminated in the large group of figures, carved in elm wood, Job and his Friends (1914; Antwerp, Kon. Mus. S. Kst).
Zadkine served as a volunteer in the French Army from early 1915 to 1917 and was employed as a hospital helper and later as an interpreter. At the front he twice suffered gas-poisoning. In his war drawings of 1916--17, such as The Sickroom (1916; Paris, Mus. Hist. Contemp.), he expressed his shocking experiences at the military hospital in a new formal language clearly oriented towards Cubism. Instead of the elegant linear sensitivity of his pre-war works, a harsh, sculptural style is predominant. The exaggeratedly high point of view, the unrealistic spatial setting for the figures and the dynamic, geometric style indicate a new direction in Zadkine's sculptural development.
The key work in this transition to a more stylized treatment of form and space in the wood and stone carvings of 1917--18 is the wooden figure The Prophet (1917--18; Grenoble, Mus. Grenoble). The success of this hieratic and ecstatic praying man lies in the emergence of the figure from the original form of the treetrunk and in the influence of South Russian idols. Zadkine's figure style owes much to the primitivism of Gauguin, Derain and Picasso and to the early paintings of Natal'ya Goncharova. His aim was to release the attitudes and structures of his figures from within the treetrunk or stone block in such a way as to stress their elemental qualities and deliberate lack of refinement. In this process an interest in pure form indicated by a strict adherence to direct carving and truth to materials was wedded to an expressive archaism communicated in geometric quasi-Cubist forms, as can be seen in the marble Mother and Child (Forms and Lights) (c. 1921--2; Washington, DC, Hirshhorn; see fig.), as well as in the five works Zadkine produced between 1922 and 1926 (see Lichtenstern, illus. 53, 55, 58, 60, 63), which indicate the continued influence of Analytical Cubism in the rhythmic arrangement of parts of the body, the interchange of full and empty forms and their reintegration into a geometrical system. Other sculptors, however, had introduced Cubism into sculpture much earlier, and Zadkine cannot be seen as a Cubist in the strictest sense, in that he was not interested in new autonomous conceptions of volume and space. Devoted to the human figure as a formal unity and as a source of emotional expression, he explained that he drew on Cubism as a technique that would permit him 'to construct the human object, represent its architecture as a totality of lines and forms which, as a totality, provoke emotions ...' (quoted in Lichtenstern, p. 74).
Around 1929--30, Zadkine began working in bronze, depicting clothed figures in interwoven and spacious compositions and lively groups of three figures such as Les Menades (1929) and Laokoon (1930; both Paris, Mus. Zadkine). Zadkine was widely recognized by about 1930, his reputation having grown steadily since his first one-man exhibition in 1919 at the Galerie Le Centaure in Brussels. In 1920 he married the French painter Valentine Prax (1897--1981), and in 1921 he applied for French citizenship. The first monograph on the artist, by Maurice Raynal, appeared in the same year. During the 1920s he began exhibiting internationally, establishing close links with the USA, the Netherlands, Belgium, England and Japan. He received numerous commissions, including sculptures for buildings and gardens both inside and outside France, such as the wooden Garden Sculpture (1927; Maresfield Park, E. Sussex), and he was represented by 47 sculptures at the 1937 Exposition Universelle, Paris. After the outbreak of World War II Zadkine lived in the USA (1941--5), where he taught briefly at the Art Students League in New York, but despite several exhibitions he never felt at home there because of his ties to Europe. In September 1945 he returned to France, where from 1946 he successfully taught young artists from many countries at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere and at the private sculpture school that he had established in 1928 at his home (now the Musee Zadkine) in the Rue d'Assas.
Zadkine's international reputation was consolidated by the retrospectives in Paris and Rotterdam in 1949 and the Venice Biennale of 1950, where he was awarded the Grand Prix de Sculpture with the model for the Destroyed City (1951--3; Rotterdam), a monument commemorating the bombing of the city of Rotterdam and Zadkine's most popular work. The first design for the anti-war statement was the result of a journey through the Netherlands in 1946. The monument represents a fleeing female figure with her body torn open and her arms upstretched. Zadkine depicted a moment of hope amidst profound despair: the raised arms are a traditional expression of lament but they simultaneously show the figure pleading for help from above.
In the post-war years Zadkine produced a highly regarded series of sculptures symbolizing creativity, for example Orpheus (after 1948; Duisburg, Lehmbruck-Mus.) and Poet: Homage to Eluard (1952--4; Paris, Pompidou). In his view sculpture had to appeal to the emotions. To this end he represented the vitality of nature through metaphors of tree and forest in bronzes such as the Human Forest series, for example Human Forest II (1955; Mannheim, Stadt. Ksthalle) and Daphne (1950; Paris, Mus. Zadkine).
Zadkine was also a prolific and skilled draughtsman, producing drawings and lithographs in a wide range of styles, exploring themes similar to those in his sculpture, for example the lithograph Human Forest (Czwiklitzer, p. 166). Zadkine's oeuvre shows a thematic and formal pluralism that derives from the mixed influences of his Russian birth and his life in Europe.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
M. Raynal: Ossip Zadkine (Rome, 1921) [numerous illus. of early works now untraced]
A. de Ridder: Zadkine (Paris, 1929) [good illus.]
A. M. Hammacher: Zadkine (Cologne and Berlin, 1954)
G. L. Marchal: Avec Zadkine (Paris, 1956) [mem. from a student]
J. Langner: Ossip Zadkine: Mahnmal fur Rotterdam (Stuttgart, 1963)
J. Jianou: Zadkine, preface W. George (Paris, 1964, 2/1979) [with list of works; good illus.]
U. Gertz: Ossip Zadkine (Duisburg, 1965)
C. Czwiklitzer: Ossip Zadkine: Le Sculpteur-graveur de 1919 a 1967, preface J. Adhemar (Paris, 1967)
J. Cassou, ed.: Ossip Zadkine: Vingt Eaux-fortes de la guerre 1914--1918 (St Gall, 1978)
C. Lichtenstern: Ossip Zadkine (1890--1967): Der Bildhauer und seine Ikonographie (Berlin, 1980) [with detailed doc., bibliog. and exh. list]
M. C. Dane: Catalogue, Musee Zadkine: Sculptures (Paris, 1982)
CHRISTA LICHTENSTERN
Autres biographies
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