Ossip Zadkine - Maternité

1919

115 x 58 x 35 cm

Painted wood

 

About this wood sculpture

This early Ossip Zadkine - Maternité painted wooden sculpture was carved in 1919.

After returning from his war deployment, Ossip Zadkine resumed his friendship with Modigliani in Paris in 1917. Together they decided to share a studio. The direct experience of the First World War led many artists to turn away from the cold, dehumanising austerity of Cubism in favour of a classical ideal. Inspired by archaic and non-Western sources, Zadkine also returned to a more authentic and direct form of sculpture. With the death of the dominant sculptor Auguste Rodin in 1917 and the ensuing question of how directly an artist should and must influence a work of art, sculpture also changed. The direct carving from a single block of stone or wood became the epitome of technical honesty and established itself as a modernist alternative to the co-operative systems of the academy.

This sculpture was carved directly from a single piece of wood, Zadkine seems to have literally liberated himself from the rigour of the academic cubist style, which in the artist's view did not leave enough room for human emotion. By working the wood directly, Zadkine lends his sculptures a peculiar purity and clarity. He deliberately worked with the grain of the wood and literally peeled the figure out of the naturally grown wood. He himself said that the figure was already contained in the wood.
He also created several coloured figures. Cathy Corbett wrote in her dissertation on Zadkine's wooden works, published in 2022, that colour was also used in some of them to emphasise certain areas, in reference to religious and secular wooden figures from Russia. In others, he painted the sculptures in a single colour over a primer, and in at least three of them, including the present one, even in gold paint. Corbett assumes that the artist wanted to imitate expensive ebony with this painting, which he favoured for his works later in his career.

The figure here bears the title "Maternité" (Motherhood), a theme that appears several times in Zadkine's oeuvre. In 1919, Zadkine met his future wife, the artist Valentine Henriette Prax. Perhaps this is why he took up the family theme so prominently that year. 

A woman is depicted with a child. The mother's left hand rests on her stomach and supports the child, her right arm is draped over her left shoulder. The pose is reminiscent of a religious statue. The artist has skilfully created a balanced and deeply lyrical sculpture with two figures through the compositional asymmetry and the contrasting sculptural effects. The overall impression is one of deep serenity and, as the art critic Maurice Raynal described Zadkine's works in 1921, of 'plastic tenderness'.