Alon Zakaim Fine Art

Ossip Zadkine was born in Vitebsk, Belarus on 14 July 1890 to a Jewish father and Scottish mother. In 1905 his parents sent him to his mother's northern English homeland. He called himself Joe Zadkine until 1914. 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 quit soon after in order to work as freelance artist. In 1911 he took part in the ‘Salon des Indépendants' for the first time and one year later joined the Cubists.

Zadkine’s early works reveal a great admiration for the expressive power of primitive art and an ability to adapt its boldness and stark simplicity in his own work. From 1914 the influence mainly of Lipchitz led to his cubist creations. These works translated the abstract character of cubist painting into shifting flat planes, angularity, and contrasts of convex and concave areas, both in sculpture and in painting.

World War One left its traces in his person and his work. He found initial fame in Belgium and Holland, later in France, England, and America. Already during the 1920s retrospective exhibitions of his work took place. In 1942 he fled to the United States. He worked in New York, Arizona and North Carolina. He only returned to the liberated Paris in 1945, and worked as lecturer at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière from 1946 to 1958. In 1950 he was awarded the first prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale and in 1960 the ‘Grand Prix de la Sculpture’ of the city of Paris.

Whilst Zadkine was better known as a sculptor; primarily of deconstructed stone and wooden statues, striking in their strongly geometric, closed forms; from around 1922 he worked on a number of gouaches, watercolours, drawings and lithographs. ‘Maternité’, 1934, is an important example of the period: much of Zadkine’s art after 1930 contained neo-classical elements. An expert on Greco-Roman civilisation, he revered European culture, often utilising elements to provide a complex narrative to his works. This is an exceptionally modern depiction of an age-old subject: the tender love between a mother and child; rendered in the powerful and original style that was to make Zadkine a major influence on twentieth-century art.

In the 1960s he reached the peak of his fame. His works travelled around the world in countless exhibitions and Zadkine worked at home on graphic series, monumental sculptures and book projects.

Ossip Zadkine was married to the painter Valentine Prax (1899-1981) who, in 1978, bequeathed two of Zadkine's former studios as well as the main body of his works to the city of Paris as a basis for the foundation of a Zadkine museum.

Ossip Zadkine died in Paris on 25 November 1967.

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