Osip Zadkine

Biography of Ossip Zadkine

Ossip Zadkine, born Yossel Aronovitch Tsadkine on January 28, 1888 in Vitebsk (Russian Empire, today Belarus) and died on November 25, 1967 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, is a French painter and sculptor of Belarusian origin. Established in France in 1910, he is recognized as one of the greatest masters of Cubist sculpture. His artistic production spans half a century and includes more than four hundred sculptures, thousands of drawings, watercolors, gouaches, engravings, book illustrations and tapestry cartoons.
In 1907, Zadkine was sent by his father to Sunderland, England, to study English. There he took lessons in woodcarving before moving to London, where he visited the British Museum and studied classical sculpture at the Regent Street Polytechnicum. After returning to Smolensk, where he made his first sculpture, he continued his studies at the Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1909 and 1910, and worked at La Ruche in the 15th arrondissement. In 1911, he exhibited his works at the Salon d'Automne and the Salon des Indépendants.


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In 1912 and 1913, Zadkine studied Romanesque sculpture and met important figures such as Brancusi, Apollinaire, Lipchitz, Picasso, Artemoff, Bourdelle, Survage, and Sonia Delaunay, with Matisse also visiting his studio. He exhibited at the Freie Sezession in Berlin, the De Onafhankelijke in Amsterdam, and the Allied Artists Association in London in 1914 and 1915. The collector Paul Rodocanachi allowed him to have a studio on Rue Rousselet in Paris, and he became friends with Modigliani.
Zadkine took part in the First World War in 1916 and 1917, assigned to a Russian ambulance, which inspired him to paint many watercolours about the war. Demobilised in 1917, he declared himself physically and morally destroyed by the war. After a stay in hospital in Épernay, he went to Bruniquel and produced twenty etchings in 1918 and 1919. In 1920, he married Valentine Prax (1897-1981).
Maurice Raynal wrote the first monograph on Zadkine's work, published in 1921 by the Italian publisher Valori Plastici. From 1923 to 1925, Zadkine traveled in Italy and exhibited at the Takanodai gallery in Tokyo. The Grenoble museum acquired his gilded wooden statue, *Le Fauve*. He also exhibited at Eileen Gray's Jean Désert gallery in 1925, alongside Chana Orloff and Seizo Sugawara. The Barbazanges gallery in Paris organized a retrospective of his works in February 1925. In Brussels, he created a fresco for the Métropole cinema, saved in 1994 when the cinema was transformed into a store. He also met the sculptor Charles Leplae.
In 1928, Zadkine moved to 100 bis rue d'Assas in Paris, where his house would become the Zadkine Museum after his death. A retrospective was dedicated to him in London. In 1934, during their first trip to the Lot, Zadkine and his wife bought a house in Les Arques, a small village in Quercy, which became a place of creation for many sculptures. In October of that year, a bas-relief by Zadkine surmounted the false bronze door of the funerary monument of the art dealer Paul Guillaume, transferred to the Passy cemetery.
During the Second World War, Zadkine stayed in the United States, taught at the Arts Students League from 1944, and returned to France in September 1945, "sick, sad and penniless". Between 1948 and 1950, he was the subject of numerous exhibitions, notably at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris, and the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam. He presented the first sketch of *The Destroyed City* (De verwoeste stad), a six-metre monument dedicated to the war, permanently installed on 15 May 1953 in Rotterdam.
Zadkine taught at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris until 1958, counting among his students Géula Dagan, Geneviève Pezet, Antanas Mončys, and Pauline Eecen. Between 1955 and 1960, he made sculptures dedicated to Vincent van Gogh. He exhibited in Canada, the United States, and Japan, devoting himself more to graphic art. In his studio in Les Arques, he sculpted numerous works, including a Pietà in 1957. The Statue of Vincent Van Gogh was installed in Auvers-sur-Oise in 1961, and in 1962, the Galerie Lacloche in Paris exhibited the Tapestries with Élie Grekoff. In 1963, he began the third version of *La Demeure* for the Bank of the Netherlands, and Zundert, Vincent Van Gogh's birthplace, hosted his Monument to the Van Gogh Brothers. A bust of Vincent Van Gogh is also installed in Wasmes in the Borinage, in Belgium.
In 1965 and 1966, *Le Monde secret de Zadkine*, with photographs by D. Buchanan and twenty-five poems by Zadkine, and *La Forêt humaine*, containing eighteen lithographs, were published. A major retrospective was devoted to him at the Kunsthaus in Zurich. Ossip Zadkine died on November 25, 1967 in Neuilly-sur-Seine and is buried in the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris, in the eighth division.