House museums #8: Ossip Zadkine

A visit offers the double pleasure of discovering the couple’s work and experiencing a place of concentrated creativity, calm and luminosity. On entering the walled garden of this former convent outbuilding, you are met by a population of Zadkine’s tall sun-dappled bronzes, echoed by the slender trees around them.

The museum’s polished wooden floors and white walls emphasise the shadows cast by the looming sculptures, while a series of dark booths display smaller pieces. Zadkine’s beautiful full-length figures, wrought in wood, stone or plaster — such as “Hermaphrodite Torso” (lacquered acacia wood) and “Hermaphrodite” (bronze) — illustrate classical references pushed to the point of abstraction by his fluid forms.

“Zadkine was a craftsman trained in carpentry and his ability to carve directly into the material was exceptional,” says the museum’s director Cécile Champy-Vinas. “At the same time, he wanted his sculptures to move the viewer. He was an expressionist artist.”

The house exudes settled prosperity now but Zadkine’s life was by no means easy. In 1910, he left home in Vitebsk (in present-day Belarus) to attend the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, leaving after just six months to join Chagall and Modigliani at La Ruche, an avant-garde enclave in Montparnasse. For many years he lived penniless, making sculptures from salvaged wood and stone.

Later, the Nazi invasion forced Zadkine, who was half Jewish, to flee to the US, where he remained until 1945. When he returned to France he found his home had been commandeered during the occupation. After a court case, he and Prax were finally able to move back in 1956.

In the garden studio, Zadkine’s tools are lined up alongside a fragment of firewood shaped like an X, displayed on a base. In his memoirs, Zadkine likened this to a vegetal muse. Finding inspiration in salvaged materials aligns him with contemporary practice, as does his interest in the effects of time and nature on his work.

“He liked to see them evolve in contact with natural elements like the rain,” says Champy-Vinas. “He writes in his memoir how the ants ate the wood of one sculpture [‘Les Deux Soeurs’]”. But Zadkine didn’t seem to mind; the ants too, were sculptors, he wrote.