2. Artists & stock
3. Ossip Zadkine
4. Biography

Notes of biography

Ossip Zadkine is born in 1890 in Smolensk (Russia). At the age of 16, his family sends him to Sunderland, England, to learn “good manners”. He attends night courses at the Art School of Sunderland. Already fascinated by sculpture, he flees to London to learn the basics of the art form. There, Ossip Zadkine will be a student at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, the city where he becomes a passionate visitor of the British Museum.
In 1909, he returns to Paris, and enrols for a time in the Ecole des Beaux Arts (School of Fine Arts) in the studio of Antoine Injalbert; shortly thereafter, he leaves, unable to become adapted to formal study. He develops a passion for Rodin. Zadkine acquires a studio in 1911. The following year, he meets Apollinaire, Cendrars, Archipenko, Lipchitz, Picasso and Survage. In 1912, he discovers primitive sculpture, which brings new solutions for the synthesis of volumes, the alternation of concave and convex forms, of curves and opposing curves.
In 1914, like Lipchiz and Laurens, Zadkine adopts cubism, knowing how to adapt its principles to his own objectives. When war is declared, he enlists in the Foreign Legion; he will be gassed, hospitalised, then rehabilitated. Zadkine obtains French nationality in 1918.
From 1921 to 1925, with the help of Brancusi and Archipenko, Zadkine will appreciate cubism less for its spirit than for its direction, and this new slant will leave a profound mark on his production (etchings, watercolours, gouaches).
Always faithful to carving, it is in the medium of stone that Zadkine will find the formal rigour that corresponds to his ambitions. His sculpture will become lyrical, finding harmony in the marriage of classical rigour and Baroque freedom, of order and fantasy, of structure and imagination. Starting in 1925, Zadkine will begin to systematically reverse the elements that constitute volume: reliefs are replaced by hollows, curves by planes and vice versa, resulting in an inversion of shadow and light, releasing forms of weightlessness. After the war, Zadkine will subordinate this technique to the expression of feelings that are powerful, even violent.
With the exception of a few trips abroad and five years in the United States, where he fled during the Second World War, Ossip Zadkine would never leave Paris. Whether at the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière or in his own studio, Zadkine will train several generations of artists from all over the world.
Sculptor, painter, draghtsman, Ossip Zadkine will have taken part, from 1910, in numerous group exhibitions in France and abroad; his first solo exhibitions in Paris will be organised in 1920. His work will receive many awards, most notably the grand prizes for sculpture at both the Venice Biennale (1950) and the City of Paris (Ville de Paris, 1960).
Ossip Zadkine dies in Paris in 1967.

“In my own research and in my creations, I have always insisted on plastic and sculptural values and also on that which I call the poetic climate.” – Ossip Zadkine

• Back to the works ARTIST ALARM

  You want to be alarmed for any new work by this artist ? Enter your email address to get an alarm

  * Your phone number allows us to stay in touch in case our answer goes to your spam folder !

  I have read and accept the website mchampetier.com's Confidentiality and personal data protection charter.

  
  Alarm me