Ossip Zadkine — sculptor with roots in the Russian Empire
Ossip Zadkine was born Yossel Aronovich Tsadkin in the Russian Empire. His birth date and place are disputed: Wikipedia and the Zadkine Research Center give 28 January 1888 in Vitebsk, now in Belarus, while Britannica and his New York Times obituary give 14 July 1890 in Smolensk. His father, Aron, a baptised Jew, taught classical languages; Zadkine claimed that his mother, Zippa-Dvoyra, was of Scottish descent. He grew up in Vitebsk, where he attended the city school and the drawing school of Yehuda Pen.
Around 1905 his father sent him to a relative in Sunderland, in the north of England, to learn English and a trade. He moved to London in 1906, worked as a joiner and woodcarver and took evening classes at the Regent Street Polytechnic. In 1909 or 1910 he settled in Paris, spent a short time at the École des Beaux-Arts and took a studio at La Ruche, the artists' colony in Montparnasse; he exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d'Automne in 1911. Over the next decade he worked in a Cubist idiom, carving directly in wood and stone.
In the First World War he served in the French army as a stretcher-bearer, was gassed and was discharged in 1917. He became a French citizen in 1921 and from 1928 lived and worked at 100 bis rue d'Assas, near the Luxembourg Gardens. The City of Paris bought his Orpheus in 1935. He spent the Second World War in the United States, and after his return in 1945 taught sculpture at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.
In 1950 he won the sculpture prize at the Venice Biennale. His best-known work, The Destroyed City was unveiled in Rotterdam on 15 May 1953 as a memorial to the German bombing of the city centre in May 1940; it is now a national monument. He received the Grand Prix National des Arts in 1960 or 1961.
He died in Paris on 25 November 1967 and is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery. His widow, the painter Valentine Prax, bequeathed his house and studio to the City of Paris, which opened the Musée Zadkine there in 1982.
Tracing the roots — Vitebsk (now Belarus) — or Smolensk (Russia); raised in Vitebsk
Born in 1888 in Vitebsk (or, by other accounts, in 1890 in Smolensk), in the Russian Empire, he grew up in Vitebsk and studied at Yehuda Pen's drawing school there before being sent to England as a teenager.
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Vitebsk (now Belarus) — or Smolensk (Russia); raised in Vitebsk. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.