Ossip Zadkine Quotes

In every human being, there are dormant memories which suddenly rise to the surface of the conscious mind. Niobe, for instance, developed out of one of my most remote childhood recollections. A cholera epidemic had broken out in the Smolensk area, and there were many casualties. One day, on the top of a hill, I saw a giant of a peasant with arms raised toward the sky crying out his grief at having lost his children. From this image, which emerged from my subconscious mind many years later, came the statue of Niobe.

.My materials often dictate my change of aims, and I choose to work in a different material much as a man may suddenly feel an appetite for a change of diet. After a steady diet of moulding plaster models for bronzes, I enjoy returning to a discipline of carving stone or wood, and the wood or the stone Inevitably suggests to me a shift of principles or of aims.

We lived in a large wooden house, with one room succeeding another [Zadkine, recalling in this quote his childhood's days in Smolensk, Russia]. The house was at the end of a blind alley. On one side were a beautiful garden and an orchard. In the summer there was an atmosphere of fragrance and peace. A large room with three windows looked out into the courtyard. Bookshelves along the walls with books and more books; a black table and six ugly Viennese chairs, also black, and in the center of the bare, inhospitable table, a sort of vase in coloured plaster representing a hand holding a goblet. It was the only piece of sculpture in the house!

Firstly for the design I decided that the two joined figures should be depicted upright [in Zadkine's first attempt the two brothers were sitting shoulder to shoulder].. ..two or three days later I was able to send him a photo of my new attempt, in which the two brothers are not only standing, but where the bond – the main idea is projected onto the statue in a hollow, in the heart of the composition the viewer can see a knot of hands, a symbol of the double inspiration.

This exchange – mainly in the form of letters [between the brothers van Gogh] – was not only about painting and art, but covered everything to do with one's existence and the philosophical or religious colouring, in a word: for the reader of the letters written by Vincent to his brother a total of human behaviour is revealed that of the dual being of van Gogh. This is how my first wish and then obsession was started, to build a monument for the two van Gogh brothers.

..the bond is then shown to be a sort of identity of thought, of reaction to the endless small changes, taking place in one brother and immediately passed on to the other, because feeding an idea was always a double barrel, and was eventually enforced after the echo had passed between the two [brothers Van Gogh].

I repeatedly told myself that the life of Vincent van Gogh and his colossal oeuvre – are not an individual outburst but a special and rare occurrence based on the special bond between the two brothers, only broken by Vincent's suicide.

Arms, hands [of the two van Gogh brothers, Vincent and Theo], like rifles, thrust out like non-stop ideas thoughts. Enormous thick veins like the ropes of a ship through which flow thoughts and inspirational excitement. They join the two brothers like nerve connections that pass from one body to the other, channeling the waves and opening up both in a magnetic ring of work and passion.

How should one approach the person of van Gogh in order to be able to build a statue of him? How can one place him outside of himself, separate him from the tragic character of his life? How can one build a statue in the open air which simultaneously evokes the rare and the new person who was van Gogh, as also the enormity of the new aspect of the current and future art of painting?

In October 1945 I returned from America, where I had stayed during the war. I arrived in Le Havre, full of ruins, a carcass of a city. It took one night to reach Paris on a train with no windows. That night I got the idea for the monument. I sketched it on paper and forgot about it, until I visited Rotterdam for the first time in 1947. I saw a city without a heart. I saw a crater in the body of a city. And I remembered that night, the sketches. I made a small terracotta model and sent it to an exhibition of French art in Germany.

A cry of horror against the inhuman brutality of this act of tyranny.

I do not believe that art must develop on national lines, but I am convinced that there never was and never will be an international art. There is and was French, German, Italian, and Flemish art. But I deny those specific definitions so fashionable with adepts of fascism which make of every country an hermetic cell from which all foreign artists are excluded. [shortly after the end of the German occupation]

In my own researches and findings I have always insisted on plastic and sculptural values, and also on what I call a poetic climate. The object, whether it is a book, a bottle, or a human body, once it is visualized and expressed by means of clay, stone, or wood, ceases to be a document and becomes an animated object in stone, wood, or bronze and lives its independent life..

Whatever the apparent aim of the artist, he is called upon first to move the spectator, after having been himself struck by a design or color composition which may or may not have a relation to natural objects. His predilections, his preferences, crystallize afterwards in the choice of means to interpret those natural objects; these means are always, obligingly, of imaginary essence.

At heart, I have always been a carpenter, who, instead of making a table or a door, was led to carve images in wood.