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Ossip Zadkine Quotes
1890–1967 Russia
Ossip Zadkine (July 4, 1890 – November 25, 1967) was a Russian-born sculptor-artist who lived mainly in France where he was at first working in a Cubist idiom from 1914 to 1925. Later Zadkine developed his characteristic style, strongly influenced by African and Greek art.
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9 quotes
A cry of horror against the inhuman brutality of this act of tyranny.
At heart, I have always been a carpenter, who, instead of making a table or a door, was led to carve images in wood.
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.
..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].
Because the scope of the sculptor's subject remains so limited, we must be careful to concentrate as much meaning or emotion as possible in the few forms that remain at our disposal. [c. 1960]
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.
.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.
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?