Description

Ossip Zadkine ‘Sans Titre’ (Card Players) Hand Signed Gouache Study 1920

Exceptional Estate Owned Art
Private collection of authentic originals

Ossip Zadkine

✓ Original gouache study 1920
✓ Sans Titre (card players)
✓ Hand signed on 1920’s paper
✓ Measuring approx 36 cm x 25,5 cm
✓ Preliminary study for his 1920 aquarelle painting measuring 70 x 52cm

This item was bought in 1996 at an official Auction in the US and comes with details on provenance. A copy of the original invoice issued by the auction center will be delivered to the new buyer.

Provenance: Edward Totah Gallery London 1985

Info on Ossip Zadkine

Ossip Zadkine (28 January 1888 – 25 November 1967) was a Russian-born French naturalized artist. He is primarily known as a sculptor, but also produced paintings and lithographs.
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 Ecole 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. 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 German Luftwaffe. In August 1920, Zadkine married Valentine Prax (1899—1991), an Algerian-born painter of Sicilian and French Catalan descent. They had no children. Zadkine had a wartime relationship with American artist Carol Janeway while living in exile in Manhattan 1942–1945. He created several portraits of her.

Ossip Zadkine was a friend of Henry Miller and was represented by the character Borowski in Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. 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 was 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.

Zadkine died in Paris in 1967 at the age of 79 after undergoing abdominal surgery and was interred in the Cimetière du Montparnasse. His former home and studio is now the Musée Zadkine.
There is also a Musée Zadkine in the village of Les Arques in the Midi-Pyrénées region. 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.

An absolute collector’s item