Sold at Auction: Ossip Zadkine

Ossip Zadkine (28 January 1888 – 25 November 1967) was a Russian-born artist who lived in France. He is primarily known as a sculptor, but also produced paintings and lithographs.

Zadkine was born on 28 January 1888 as Yossel Aronovich Tsadkin in the city of Vitsebsk, part of the Russian Empire (now Belarus). He was born to a Jewish father and a mother named Zippa-Dvoyra, who he claimed to be of Scottish origin.[5] Ossip had 5 siblings: sisters Mira, Roza and Fania and brothers Mark and Moses.

At the age of fifteen, Zadkine was sent by his father to Sunderland to learn English and ‘good manners’. He then moved to London and attended lessons at the Regent Street Polytechnic where he considered the teachers to be too conservative.[6] 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 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.