Ossip Zadkine (1888-1967) - Jeune fille à la Colombe

1928

Height: 79.4 cm

Bronze

 

Until 1924, Zadkine was in essence an investigative sculptor, his earlier works aligning themselves with the respective practices of Modigliani, Archipenko, Lipchitz, and Picasso.

The primary basis of his artistic motivation had been an innate feeling for the nature of wood and stone and a resultantly innovative and expressive carving process. As A.M. Hammacher states, 'It was in 1924 or thereabouts, when his work was already formed and mature, that Zadkine went more deeply into the problem the Cubists had set, first for painting, then for sculpture. [...] the Zadkine whose style unfolded in accordance with his own nature was not the Zadkine of earlier years [...]; the new Zadkine handled the forms and proportions of the body more freely, with an Expressionism that was no longer Latin, but was not German or Flemish either. The figures of mythical women rising out of the material and in the simple heads built up out of large surfaces, there is enough myth to give the figures airiness, the free flight of the poetic soul, but not enough to destroy belief in reality.

Around 1924, Zadkine successfully adopted the convex-concave principle that had come to the fore in the sculpture of the Cubists, a principle that had not been unknown to him but which he had not quite yet applied. He did not handle it in a doctrinarian way; he used the principle more pictorially than Lipchitz. His work was more lyrical and had an element of the epic that was completely in keeping with his personality. [...] The figurative in Zadkine remains basic; the enclosed volume is all important. Concavity is used with moderation, and it never affects the volume essentially'. (A.M. Hammacher, The Evolution of Modern Sculpture, New York 1969, p. 151-152).

In reference to the surface elements, such as the incised lines and dramatic details that are apparent in Jeune fille à la Colombe, Hammacher continues by saying that Zadkine "likes to associate volume with the graphic by incising on the surface a hand, a flower, or, in the manner of the Sumerians, a poem. From time to time, preoccupied with the interpenetration of surfaces, the convex and concave, and the transparent - all of which elements derive from Cubism - he also makes Baroque figurative constructions with a relief character corresponding to emotional nature, which in later years manifests itself in a dramatic, sometimes stormy, expression".

Jeune fille à la Colombe is an extraordinary example of the sculpture that encapsulates the best-known characteristics of the artist’s work at this time. The subject of the young, beautiful woman holding a dove a conveys a universal message of peace, purity, love and harmony, in line with the Jewish symbolism of the artist’s heritage, and also the figure of Aphrodite in Ancient Greek mythology whose symbol is the dove. He would depict a reworking of this motif in a full-length 1938 cast entitled Venus, removing the bird, while retaining a similar pose for the bust and similar contrasts in patina.

This work work assumes an emblematic quality with a serenity and gracefulness achieved through her subliminal counterparts throughout history and her undistorted, classical proportion. At the same time, spatial innovations between the concave and convex surfaces, produce dramatic silhouettes from every angle, a quintessentially avant-garde adaptation of form that unites with its material gloriousness in gold, to produce a modern icon of universal symbolic power and magnificence.