From the 1920s onward, Franco-Russian artist Ossip Zadkine took an interest in themes such as bodies in motion, a classic motif in Western art, which he explored through drawings and gouaches featuring acrobats.
In the 1940s, during the sculptor's exile, this theme took on a darker meaning, echoing the conflicts that were tearing the world apart. It then became a pretext for depicting dislocated and dismembered bodies, foreshadowing the figure in The Destroyed City, Zadkine's great monument inaugurated in Rotterdam in 1953.
The Zadkine Museum: a museum-workshop
The sculptor Ossip Zadkine and the painter Valentine Prax spent almost forty years together in the house, studios and garden at 100 bis, rue d'Assas, from 1928 to 1967. This place, a peaceful haven in the heart of Montparnasse quarter, became the Musée Zadkine in 1982. This was thanks to a bequest made to the City of Paris by Valentine Prax. The sculptor's wife wished to preserve the atmosphere of the studios where the two artists had lived and created a large part of their respective works. As a result, the Musée Zadkine is one of a few art studios still open to the public, bearing witness to the heyday of Montparnasse. The exhibition, which is renewed each year, presents the sculptor's emblematic works in chronological order, tracing his career from his beginnings in the cosmopolitan Paris of the avant-garde to his international acclaim in the 1950s and 1960s. A room in the exhibition is also devoted to Valentine Prax's paintings.
This year, to coincide with the Olympic Games, a special tour, entitled "le corps en jeu(x)", has been set up in parts of the tour, as well as in the garden workshop that closes the visit. Zadkine was not a sportsman, but like many sculptors, he was interested in the theme of the body in motion. From the 1920s onward, he drew and sculpted acrobats, jugglers and dancers, all subjects he associated with joie de vivre and celebration. During the Second World War, the theme of the body in motion took on a darker meaning. The joyful acrobats became fierce fighters whose dislocated limbs seem to foreshadow the tortured bodies of The Destroyed City, Zadkine's great work that was inaugurated in Rotterdam in 1953.
