OSSIP ZADKINE

(1890-1967)

Ephebus

Footnotes

Provenance
Jean Mayen Collection, Paris (acquired directly from the artist in 1924); possibly his sale, Sotheby's, London, 25 June 1986, lot 154.
Galerie Maurice Keitelman, Brussels.
Private collection, Belgium (acquired from the above circa late 1980s).

Exhibited
Paris, Atelier Zadkine, rue de Rousselet, 16 May - 2 June 1920, no. 10 (titled 'L'Adolescent').
Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Zadkine, January 1933, no. 9.
Arles, Musée Réattu, Zadkine, bois et pierres, 7 March - 14 June 1992, no. 5 (later travelled to Paris).
The Hague, Museum Beelden aan Zee, Zadkine aan Zee. Retrospectief Ossip Zadkine (1888 - 1967), 6 October 2018 - 3 March 2019, no. 4.

Literature
The artist's handlist.
Album Van der Wal, no. 47 (illustrated).
M. Raynal, 'Ossip Zadkine', in Valori Plastici, Rome, 1921, pl. 27 (titled 'Tête d'adolescent' & dated '1916').
Le Figaro-Magazine Méditerranée, 7 March 1992.
I. Jianou, Zadkine, Paris, 1979, no. 45 (pp. 63 & 94).
S. Lecombre, Ossip Zadkine, L'oeuvre sculpté, Paris, 1994, no. 49a (illustrated p. 97).
S. Carrayrou et al., Ossip Zadkine, L'instinct de la matière, exh. cat., Paris, 2018 (illustrated pp. 99 & 102).

'I think that the sculptors of my generation such as Gaudier-Brzeska, Villon, Archipenko, Brâncuși, Lipschitz and myself can be considered as upholders of the ancient tradition of those stone and wood sculptors, who having left the forest, gave free rein to their dreams of fantastical birds and large tree trunks.' Ossip Zadkine

Alongside Constantin Brâncuși, Amedeo Modigliani and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Ossip Zadkine stands as a pioneer of the sculptural revitalisation in the early twentieth century. In the years following the First World War, Zadkine's sculptures expressed an overwhelming desire to revive the human spirit and to restore order, peace and beauty to a fractured world. Realised in 1918, shortly after Zadkine's return to Paris after being wounded in action, Ephebus stands as a masterful embodiment of this aspiration and remains an exquisite and rare example of the aesthetics and technique which defined Modern Sculpture.

Zadkine's work was nourished from a young age by a deep affinity for natural materials - stone, wood and clay - elements which recalled the pine forests and rocky banks of the Dvina river near his childhood town of Vitebsk in Belarus. His formative artistic talents and intrinsic desire to work with wood were developed in England where he attended art school and worked as a carpenter's apprentice, yet Paris' reputation for artistic experimentation, cosmopolitan living and the exceptional Salons proved irresistible for the young artist. Arriving in the capital in 1909 at the age of nineteen, Zadkine was immediately immersed in the cocktail of nationalities and influences which characterised the bohemian quarters of the city in the early years of the twentieth century. He initially enrolled at the École des Beaux Arts and was quick to seek inspiration in the wealth of galleries and museums, including the anthropological collections of the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro as well as the treasures of the Louvre. These visits and the myriad of objects which heralded from antiquity and across the globe captured the imagination of Zadkine and his fellow students and proved to be far more educational than the stultified academicism of the École:

'We talked about sculptures that we had been to see at the Louvre.' Zadkine would later recount, 'With the limited number of French words that I had learned in my studies, I spoke about Egyptian sculptures. During this time, we discovered things that completely overwhelmed us. One morning, one of us presented a photograph of a Romanesque head. The simplicity of the forms, their dimensions, and the emotions captured within the eyes of this head made us ashamed of the feeble imitations that we were modelling at school. Strangely, we felt that it was in this kind of ancient production that the key to sculpture was hidden' (Zadkine quoted in S. Lecombre, Ossip Zadkine: L'œuvre Sculpté, Paris, 1994, p. 24).

This desire to mine inspiration from archaic and non-Western sources chimed with the prevailing taste of the Parisian avant-garde and was concurrent with a new intention amongst artists to return to a more authentic and immediate means of sculpting. This new generation, largely comprised of émigré artists, including Brâncuși, Modigliani and Archipenko, perceived a decline in the sculptural medium, notably under the dominance of Auguste Rodin. Zadkine professed that 'even Rodin did not convince [him] entirely' and that 'his trickery with the human body created a void between him and some of the young artists [he] was with' (Zadkine quoted in M. Moutashar, S. Lecombre, A. Charron & P. Elliot, Zadkine, Bois et Pierres, exh. cat., Arles, 1992, p. 19). Meanwhile, Modigliani complained to Cubist sculptor Jacques Lipchitz in 1912 'that sculpture was sick, that it had fallen into decay due to Rodin and his influence. We practiced too much modelling in clay, there was too much mud' (J. Lipchitz quoted in M. Moutashar, S. Lecombre, A. Charron & P. Elliot, ibid., p. 21).

This debate reached its peak shortly after the death of Rodin in 1917, in which the sculptural system (inherited from the Renaissance) was subjected to public scrutiny following a court case against one of Rodin's technicians. It emerged that Rodin was a modeller in clay who then entrusted his maquettes to foundries and artisans responsible for enlarging and translating them into marble or bronze. Sculptors it transpired, were neither trained, nor generally desired to work as carvers, and 'there remained a clear division between the invention of work in the soft material (the privilege of the artist) and its execution of the work in a hard material, stone or wood, (the preserve of the craftsman)' (M. Moutashar, S. Lecombre, A. Charron & P. Elliot, ibid., p. 20). It was also revealed that from one model Rodin would usually order multiple copies to be made and, in the context of a booming art market, contemporary collectors were perturbed by the questions of 'authenticity' raised over role of the artist and the uniqueness of the artwork.

It was against this background that direct carving by the artist from a single block of stone or wood came to represent technical honesty, and was established as a modernist rebuttal to the collaborative systems of the Academy. As Brâncuși declared in one of his most celebrated aphorisms of 1925, 'direct cutting is the true road to sculpture'. By 1910 Brâncuși had already submitted a work to the Salon des Indépendants simply labelled 'pierre sculpté', and in 1912 Modigliani showed seven stone heads at the Salon d'Automne. Zadkine was to meet Modigliani the following year and they instantly struck up a dynamic and enduring friendship. 'I can see him now' Zadkine would later recall of their first meeting, 'he looked like a young god disguised in his Sunday best. He talked to me immediately about sculpture and the advantages of direct carving in stone, and he invited me to come to his place to see some of his early pieces, with which he said he was not satisfied' (Zadkine quoted in A. Kruszynski, Amedeo Modigliani. Portraits and Nudes, Munich, 2000, p. 36).

In Ephebus, Zadkine hews the block of wood in direct accordance with the modernist method of the day. Wood was a material that Zadkine returned to throughout his career, though few early works in this medium remain outside of museum collections. Carved sculptures in wood from this period can be been seen in museums including Tate London, the Hirshhorne Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. In these works, the immediacy of the artist's touch and gesture is keenly preserved through the directness of the cut in which no retouching or revisionist processes can take place. From the delicately carved curlicues of the hair to the masterful grooves and undulations which animate the figure's face, Ephebus is testament to the free-hand virtuosity of the artist and his intrinsic sense of the object already existing within the material.

In contrast to Brâncuși who was known to make a very limited number of preparatory drawings, Zadkine preferred to make no preparatory sketches for his carved works. Instead, he conceived of the process as a form of inspiration in which the latent spirit of the work would reveal itself through a profound receptivity to the material: 'In my heart...was the cabinet maker, the man who liked to animate wood.' Zadkine explained 'I did not choose [...], before working with wood a technical prerequisite from an aesthetic. A kind of confident half-conscience guided me not by leading my hand but by installing in me a logic, which, in short, put me at the service of the wood' (Zadkine quoted in M. Moutashar, S. Lecombre, A. Charron & P. Elliot, op. cit., p. 21).

Sculpted in honey-coloured elmwood, the present work is emblematic of Zadkine's deep respect for the integrity and natural properties of the material. Working with the grains of the wood, Zadkine discovers the form of his subject; the inclination and oval formation of the head, for example, is underscored and dictated by the direction and curvature of the rings, which also help to shape the chin of the figure, while the verticality of the bust is emphasised by the linear striations and absence of the right shoulder. Through a contrast in smooth modelling, rough chiseling to the verso and by leaving the right edge of the bust completely exposed and untamed by tools or polish, Zadkine further foregrounds the varying qualities of the wood and prompts an evocation of the tree itself. The process of creation is no longer to impose the vitality on an inert material but rather to reveal the life and spirit from within: 'If a sculptor makes a bird' Zadkine elucidated, 'he works the stone that contains the bird; if he wants to create Daphne, he works the tree which IS Daphne: the life of the tree and the stone which will represent these two 'objects' must never be sacrificed to the sole illustration of these objects because the presence of this singular life of matter derives the essential meaning of sculpture' (Zadkine quoted in M. Moutashar, S. Lecombre, A. Charron & P. Elliot, op. cit., p. 23).

Carved and painted in 1918, Ephebus marks a resumption in Zadkine's sculptural work following the war. Touches of Cubism can be detected in the simplification of form and geometrising of the facial features – a movement Zadkine had engaged with prior to 1914, yet this work marks a certain departure from the cold austerity of Cubism which Zadkine felt to be too dehumanising in the post-war context. During the First World War, Zadkine enlisted voluntarily and was posted to the Russian ambulance corps in Champagne in 1916. As a stretcher bearer, he experienced the horrors of war first-hand transporting the maimed soldiers from the trenches and was himself later gassed at the front. After a period of convalescence, Zadkine returned to Paris in 1917 in poor health and disillusioned with the state of humanity. His return to the capital however was to prompt a period of creative and spiritual rejuvenation for the young artist, and to inform his approach to the sculptural medium for the rest of his career.

On his return to Paris, Zadkine renewed his friendship with Modigliani and they decided to share an atelier. Their mutual interests and influences are keenly felt in the tilted posture of the head, elongated limbs and empty, almond eyes of Ephebus, characteristics which bear a striking resemblance to the simplified features of Modigliani's stone Têtes and the slender, stylised figures of his contemporary painting. Both artists were drawn to Egyptian, Khmer and African art as well as antique sources and revelled in the 'spirit of synthesis' which would come to define the group later known as the École de Paris.

Ephebus – the Greek term for a male adolescent engaged in military service - makes a direct reference to Hellenistic antiquity and was a source to which Zadkine would frequently return to draw his subjects and titles. In the aftermath of the Great War however, Zadkine's turn towards classicism acquired a poignant significance and was in accordance with a general 'Rappel à l'ordre' enacted by many former avant-garde artists, who mined the art of antiquity to abjure the cruel reality of their own day. Zadkine's recasting of the Ephebe in the present work deliberately eschews any resemblance to that of a young Greek hero; rather, the subject – feminised and serene - retains the bearing of a religious statue and offers a redemptive, contemplative counterpoint to a traditional homage to war. Writing to his friend the Swiss painter Gustave Buchet just a few months after his return from the front, Zadkine stated 'I only know [...] that, I think, we are forced to understand our path of suffering as the only way possible and to love it because it is strewn with suffering. It means to love suffering too. And to create beautiful things. Is it not? My dear friend, work and do not make concessions and compromises. This, I believe, is my artistic religion' (Zadkine quoted in February 1918 in S. Lecombre, op. cit., p. 37).

In Ephebus, Zadkine skilfully realises a balanced and deeply lyrical sculpture, through a juxtaposition of compositional asymmetry and opposing sculptural effects. Working with the curve of the polished grain to accentuate the gently inclined head and rounded left shoulder of his young subject, Zadkine is able to offset the craggy, natural contour of the right shoulder and the roughly hewn surface to the back of the sculpture. At the same time, the diagonal of the bowed head is complimented by the opposing oblique of the raised hand which gently caresses the neck. The overall impression of the sculpture is one of deep serenity and, in the words employed by art critic Maurice Raynal in 1921, 'plastic tenderness'. Discussing his work a few years later, Zadkine emphasised that 'it was not a question of primitive art or ignorance, but of emotion expressed in sober language, scorning all pompous and academic tradition, radiating instead the poignancy and tragedy of human life' (Zadkine quoted in 1928 in S. Carrayou et al., Ossip Zadkine, L'instinct de la matière, exh. cat., Paris, 2018, p. 110).

Ephebus has resided in the same private collection for over thirty years and was formerly in the collection of wealthy French collector and important patron, Jean Mayen. The sculpture was acquired by the collector in 1924 for his property in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin and remained in his collection until at least 1979. Just prior to its purchase by Mayen, Ephebus was selected by Zadkine to be a key part of his first solo exhibition held at his studio on rue Rousselet in 1920. The exhibition was largely comprised of sculptures showcasing the direct carving method and received a glowing review from the influential French critic André Salmon. Writing in the magazine L'Europe nouvelle on the 13th June 1920, Salmon exclaimed, 'Zadkine is one of the strongest, liveliest and most sensational (in the absolute sense of the word) expressions of this European Art which we have seen flourishing in Paris for ten years and more [...] The large figures he exhibits are flowers of the spirit, blooming on a very solid terrestrial foundation [...] Today I only wish to encourage art lovers, too deprived of an important part of the plastic arts, to run to the workshop of this wonderful young man, driven by a primitive artisan consciousness.'