Ossip Zadkine, 1967
Photo: Christophe Czwiklitzer
The work of Zadkine
...My materials often dictate my change of aims, and I choose to work in a different material much as a man may suddenly feel an appetite for a change of diet. After a steady diet of moulding plaster models for bronzes, I enjoy returning to a discipline of carving stone or wood, and the wood or the stone Inevitably suggests to me a shift of principles or of aims."
Though this influence of materials is obvious in Zadkine's art that of events in no less so. The war cycle reflects the artist's response to the march of history. The acutely baroque quality of his post-war works expresses the anguish of the period. His choice of subjects was not always deliberately made. "In every human being," he remarks, "there are dormant memories which suddenly rise to the surface of the conscious mind. Niobe, for instance, developed out of one of my most remote childhood recollections. A cholera epidemic had broken out in the Smolensk area, and there were many casualties. One day, on the top of a hill, I saw a giant of a peasant with arms raised toward the sky crying out his grief at having lost his children. From this image, which emerged from my subconscious mind many years later, came the statue of Niobe."
Zadkine is not interested in history on a minor scale. He is interested in the content of mythological legends. The legend of Orpheus has haunted him for over thirty years, and the six versions of it which he has created bear witness to his effort to translate into the language of sculpture the very essence of that myth.
Of all the sculptors of the Paris School. Zadkine possesses the largest range of subjects and treats them in the widest variety of materials. He has striven to evoke not only the legend of Man, but the mystery of a face, the quivering intimacy of two torsos, poetic auras, the magic spell of music, the realm of dreams, tenderness, love, anguish, or revolt. A man of passion and of meditation, he has committed himself to the pursuit of" the most profound and forever new truths" blending in his work heart-felt impulsiveness, intellectual fertility and technical excellence.
In his urge to select the medium best suited to his specific mood and artistic concept he has used In his work such varied items as wood, stone, marble, sandstone, granite, quartz, porphyry, alabaster, crystal. lead, aluminum, bronze, terra cotta, and stanniferous potter's clay.
His thorough acquaintance With the structure of wood has determined his preference for elm, ebony, and acacia, but he has also carved in box-wood, oak, pear-tree wood, apple-tree wood, cherry-wood, in Brazilian woods and Ugandan woods.
Ionel Jianou, 1964 (excerpt)
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