Figurine

Figurine of 1944 is a unique and striking example of Ossip Zadkine’s mastery of carving, demonstrating the sculptor’s ability at infusing this inanimate material with a potent sense of expression. Renowned for his practice of direct carving, Zadkine had an inherent understanding and appreciation of the innate qualities and features of various media, including stone, wood and marble. In the present work, he has harnessed the natural features of ebony to accentuate the soft forms, outlines, and undulating curves of the female figure. Blending a cubist idiom with the classical motif of a standing nude woman, Figurine encapsulates the principle characteristics of Zadkine’s oeuvre.

Born in Vitebsk in 1890, Zadkine travelled to Paris in 1910 to pursue a career as an artist. Following a short stint as a student at the celebrated Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Zadkine lived and worked at La Ruche, an old three-story circular structure which housed cheap artists’ studios and residences in Montparnasse. It is there that Zadkine befriended other expatriates and School of Paris artists including Amedeo Modigliani, Moïse Kisling and Chaïm Soutine, as well as the sculptors Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Jacques Lipchitz. Through the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, Zadkine met Pablo Picasso, and quickly became acquainted with Cubism. He incorporated the Cubist tenets into his work, exploring the representation of volume in sculpture using concave surfaces and hollows, and marrying these formal qualities with more expressionist overtones. Zadkine’s interest in the balance between the simplification and the accentuation of representational forms in his sculpture preoccupied him throughout the course of his career.

Fleeing war-torn Europe in 1941, Zadkine moved to New York, where he found himself as one of a number of artists who had also left France, including Fernand Léger, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, and others. In 1942, he participated in Pierre Matisse’s seminal ‘Artists in Exile’ show, and he also worked as a teacher for a time at The Art Students League. During his exile, Zadkine continued to sculpt in a variety of media, and created a number of works which directly related to his life in exile and the tragedies befalling France, including La Prisonnière and Phénix (Lecombre, nos. 370 and 373). In addition to Figurine, in the same year, he carved two closely related works in ebony, both titled Torse de femme (Lecombre, nos. 382 and 383), a clear reflection of his interest at this time in the aesthetic potentials of this medium in the portrayal of the female form. Indeed, the present work is particularly rare in this regard; it was difficult to find pieces of ebony large enough to carve a full length figure, which is why many works in this medium are truncated torsos.

Figurine was formerly in the collection of John and Ruth Stephan, whom Zadkine had met during his time in New York. Writer, poet, editor, and translator, Ruth Stephan was the daughter of Charles Walgreen, the founder of the eponymous American pharmacy. Together with her husband, John, an artist, in 1947 she founded the influential arts magazine, the Tiger’s Eye, which served as an essential forum for contemporary art and writing, with a particular focus on Abstract Expressionism. This work has remained in the same private collection for almost twenty years, and has never been offered at auction before.