Ossip Zadkine - Ephebus

1918

48 cm high

Elmwood, partially painted

 

More about this sculpture

Ossip Zadkine - Ephebus partially painted elmwood sculpture was carved and painted in 1918.

'I think that the sculptors of my generation such as Gaudier-Brzeska, Villon, Archipenko, Brâncuși, Lipschitz and myself can be considered as upholders of the ancient tradition of those stone and wood sculptors, who having left the forest, gave free rein to their dreams of fantastical birds and large tree trunks.' Ossip Zadkine.

Alongside Constantin Brâncuși, Amedeo Modigliani and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Ossip Zadkine stands as a pioneer of the sculptural revitalisation in the early twentieth century. In the years following the First World War, Zadkine's sculptures expressed an overwhelming desire to revive the human spirit and to restore order, peace and beauty to a fractured world. Realised in 1918, shortly after Zadkine's return to Paris after being wounded in action, Ephebus stands as a masterful embodiment of this aspiration and remains an exquisite and rare example of the aesthetics and technique which defined Modern Sculpture.

Zadkine's work was nourished from a young age by a deep affinity for natural materials - stone, wood and clay - elements which recalled the pine forests and rocky banks of the Dvina river near his childhood town of Vitebsk in Belarus. His formative artistic talents and intrinsic desire to work with wood were developed in England where he attended art school and worked as a carpenter's apprentice, yet Paris' reputation for artistic experimentation, cosmopolitan living and the exceptional Salons proved irresistible for the young artist. Arriving in the capital in 1909 at the age of nineteen, Zadkine was immediately immersed in the cocktail of nationalities and influences which characterised the bohemian quarters of the city in the early years of the twentieth century. He initially enrolled at the École des Beaux Arts and was quick to seek inspiration in the wealth of galleries and museums, including the anthropological collections of the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro as well as the treasures of the Louvre. These visits and the myriad of objects which heralded from antiquity and across the globe captured the imagination of Zadkine and his fellow students and proved to be far more educational than the stultified academicism of the École