Ossip Zadkine was a Russian-born French naturalized artist. He is primarily known as a sculptor, but also produced paintings and lithographs.
Early years and education
Zadkine was born on 28 January 1888 as Yossel Aronovich Tsadkin in the city ofVitsebsk, part of the Russian Empire. He was born to a Jewish father and a mother named Zippa-Dvoyra, who he claimed to be of Scottish origin. 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. Zadkine settled in Paris in 1910. He studied at the École 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.
Zadkine died in Paris in 1967 at the age of 79 after undergoing abdominal surgery and was interred in the Cimetière du Montparnasse.
Museums
His former home and studio in Montparnasse is now the Musée Zadkine. When his former wife Prax died, she donated the house and art studio to the City of Paris for the formation of Musée Zadkine. There is also a Musée Zadkine in the village of Les Arques in the Midi-Pyrénées region of France. Zadkine lived in Les Arques for a number of years, and while there, carved an enormous Christ on the Cross and Pieta that are featured in the 12th-century church which stands opposite the museum.
Personal life
In August 1920, Zadkine married Valentine Prax, an Algerian-born painter of Sicilian and French-Catalan descent. Prax and Zadkine had no children. Zadkine was a neighbor in Montparnasse and a friend of Henry Miller and he was represented by the character "Borowski" in Miller's novel, Tropic of Cancer. His other neighbors there included; Chaim Soutine, and Tsuguharu Foujita. While living in exile during wartime in Manhattan from 1942 to 1945, Zadkine had a relationship with American artistCarol Janeway and he created several portraits of her. The artist's only child, Nicolas Hasle, was the result of his affair with a Danish woman, Annelise Hasle. Since 2009, Hasle, a psychiatrist, who had been acknowledged by the artist and had his parentage legally established in France in the 1980s, has been party to a lawsuit with the City of Paris to establish his claim to his father's estate.
