ZADKINE, OSSIP

born July 14, 1890, Smolensk, Russia died Nov. 25, 1967, Paris, Fr. Russian-born French sculptor and a member of the School of Paris group. His work, which is marked by highly original liberties with figure and form without losing recognizability, is epitomized in the Rotterdam monument The Destroyed City (1951). As a boy, Zadkine, son of a professor of Greek and Latin, much preferred clay modeling to his studies. He was sent to England by his father to learn English and good manners and eventually worked for an ornament maker there. After living alternately in London and Smolensk, he moved to Paris, where he studied at the cole des Beaux-Arts and in 1911 had a show of his sculpture. A Cubist at the outset of his career but influenced also by classical Greek sculpture, Zadkine in 1920 began to develop the individuality that is manifest in his graceful Musicians (1924). In 1939 he executed from elm wood his haunting, seemingly writhing Christ, whose arms suggest the limbs of a bare tree. During World War II Zadkine, because of his Jewish ancestry, fled to unoccupied France and then to the United States, where he taught at the Art Students League in New York City. After the war he returned to France and visited bombed Rotterdam, the ruinous state of which made a deep impression on him. In the resultant Destroyed City the arms of a larger-than-life-size man are outstretched in horror. Zadkine's technique, as seen, for example, in the complex Birth of Forms (1947), includes the use of convexities, concavities, lines, and parallel planes to achieve a freshness of rhythm and multidimensional unity. He received the grand prize for sculpture at the 1950 Venice Biennale, the 1960 grand prix of the city of Paris, and (in the 1960s) commissions for statues in Jerusalem, Amsterdam, and other cities.