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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.

— Ossip Zadkine

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More quotes by Ossip Zadkine

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]

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Ossip Zadkine (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.