Ossip Zadkine

Ossip Zadkine
Zadkine in 1914
Born	Yossel Aronovich Tsadkin (1890-07-04)4 July 1890 Vitsebsk, Russian Empire (now Belarus)
Died	Paris, France
Resting place	Cimetière Montparnasse
Known for	Sculpture, painting, lithography
Movement	Cubism, Art Deco

Ossip Zadkine (Russian: Осип Цадкин; July 4, 1890 – November 25, 1967) was a Russian-born artist who lived in France. He is primarily known as a sculptor, but also produced paintings and lithographs.

Early years and career

Zadkine was born on 4 July 1890 as Yossel Aronovich Tsadkin (Russian: Иосель Аронович Цадкин) in the city of Vitsebsk, part of the Russian Empire (now Belarus). He was born to a Jewish father and a mother of Scottish origin.

After attending art school in London, Zadkine settled in Paris in 1910. He studied at the Ecole 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.

1921 he obtained obtain French citizenship. 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 German Luftwaffe.

Personal life

In August 1920, Zadkine married Valentine Prax (1899—1991), an Algerian-born painter of Sicilian and French Catalan descent. They had no children.

Zadkine was a friend of Henry Miller and was represented by the character Borowski in Miller's Tropic of Cancer.

The artist's only child, Nicolas Hasle (born 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.

Zadkine died in Paris in 1967 at the age of 77 after undergoing abdominal surgery and was interred in the Cimetière du Montparnasse. His former home and studio is now the Musée Zadkine.

There is also a Musée Zadkine in the village of Les Arques in the Midi-Pyrénées region. 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.

Awards

• 1950 Venice Biennale sculpture prize
• 1961 Grand Prix National des Arts

Gallery

• Ossip Zadkine, 1913, Maternité, painted elmwood, 81 cm, exhibited Salon des Independants, Paris, 1914 Published in Montjolie, 1914.jpg

  Ossip Zadkine, 1913, Maternité, painted elmwood, 81 cm, exhibited at the 1914 Salon des Indépendants, Paris, Published in Montjoie, 1914

• Ossip Zadkine, 1918, Femme au violon (Woman with a Violin).jpg

  Ossip Zadkine, 1918, Femme au violon (Woman with a Violin), photograph by Pierre Choumoff

• Ossip Zadkine, 1920, Venus.jpg

  Venus, 1920, published in Action: Cahiers individualistes de philosophie et d’art, Volume 1, Number 4, July 1920

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  Lotophage, bronze, 1961-1962, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv

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  De Verwoeste Stad, 1951-1953, Rotterdam

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  Orpheus, 1956

See also

• Musée Zadkine
• Rue Zadkine

References

• 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

• Zadkine Research Center
• Zadkine Museum in Paris
• Zadkine Museum in Les Arques
• Ossip Zadkine in American public collections on the French Sculpture Census website