Ossip Zadkine
Ossip Zadkine (; 28 January 1888 – 25 November 1967) was a Belarusian-born French naturalized artist. He is primarily known as a sculptor, but also produced paintings and lithographs. Early years and education. Zadkine was born on 28 January 1888 as Yossel Aronovich Tsadkin () in the city of Vitsebsk, part of the Russian Empire (now Belarus). He was born to a baptized Jewish father and a mother named Zippa-Dvoyra, who he claimed to be of Scottish origin. Ossip had 5 siblings: sisters Mira, Roza and Fania and brothers Mark and Moses. At the age of fifteen, Zadkine was  sent by his father to Sunderland to learn English and ‘good manners’. He then moved to London and attended lessons at the Regent Street Polytechnic where he considered the teachers to be too conservative. Zadkine settled in Paris in 1910. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts for six months. In 1911 he lived and worked in La Ruche. While in Paris he joined the Cubist movement, working in a Cubist idiom from 1914 to 1925. He later developed his own style, one that was strongly influenced by African and Greek art. Career. In 1921 he obtained French citizenship . Zadkine served as a stretcher-bearer in the French Army during World War I, and was wounded in action. He spent World War II in the US. His best-known work is probably the sculpture "The Destroyed City" (1951-1953), representing a man without a heart, a memorial to the destruction of the center of the Dutch city of Rotterdam in 1940 by the Nazi-German Luftwaffe. He taught sculpture classes at Académie de la Grande Chaumière until 1958, students of his included artists Geula Dagan (1925–2008) and Genevieve Pezet. Death and legacy. Zadkine died in Paris in 1967 at  the age of 79 after undergoing abdominal surgery and was interred in the Cimetière du Montparnasse. Museums. His former home and studio in Montparnasse is now the Musée Zadkine. When his former wife Prax died, she donated the house and art studio to the City of Paris for the formation of Musée Zadkine. There is also a Musée Zadkine in the village of Les Arques in the Midi-Pyrénées region of France. Zadkine lived in Les Arques for a number of years, and while there, carved an enormous Christ on the Cross and Pieta that are featured in the 12th -century church which stands opposite the museum. Personal life. In August 1920, Zadkine married Valentine Prax (1897–1981), an Algerian-born painter of Sicilian and French-Catalan descent. Prax and Zadkine had no children. Zadkine was a neighbor in Montparnasse and a friend of Henry Miller and he was represented by the character "Borowski" in Miller's novel, "Tropic of Cancer" (1934). His other neighbors there included Chaïm Soutine, and Tsuguharu Foujita. While living in exile during wartime in Manhattan from 1942 to 1945, Zadkine had a relationship with American artist Carol Janeway and he created several portraits of her. The  artist's only child, Nicolas Hasle (born 1960), was the result of his affair with a Danish woman, Annelise Hasle. Since 2009, Hasle, a psychiatrist, who had been acknowledged by the artist and had his parentage legally established in France in the 1980s, has been party to a lawsuit with the City of Paris to establish his claim to his father's estate. Public collections. Among the public collections holding works by Ossip Zadkine are: