The Misery of Job at The Fine Arts Museum in Ghent, Belgium

myminifactory

Ossip Zadkine was born on July 4, 1890, as Yossel Aronovich Tsadkin in Vitsebsk, a city within the Russian Empire. He later moved to London and attended art school before settling in Paris in 1910, where he studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts for six months. In 1911, Zadkine lived and worked in La Ruche, and during this time, he joined the Cubist movement, working in a Cubist style from 1914 to 1925. He then developed his own unique style, heavily influenced by African and Greek art. In 1921, Zadkine obtained French citizenship. During World War I, he served as a stretcher-bearer in the French Army, where he was wounded in action. Zadkine spent World War II in the United States. Zadkine's best-known work is probably The Destroyed City, a sculpture created between 1951 and 1953 that represents a man without a heart, commemorating the destruction of Rotterdam's city center by the German Luftwaffe in 1940. In August 1920, Zadkine married Valentine Prax, an Algerian-born painter with Sicilian and French Catalan ancestry. They had no children. Zadkine was close friends with writer Henry Miller and appeared as character Borowski in Miller's novel Tropic of Cancer. The artist's only child, Nicolas Hasle, was born out of his relationship with Danish woman Annelise Hasle in 1960. 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 involved in a lawsuit with the City of Paris to claim his inheritance from Zadkine's estate. Zadkine passed away on November 25, 1967, at the age of 77 after undergoing abdominal surgery. He was buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse. Today, the artist's former home and studio is now a museum known as the Musée Zadkine, which features an enormous Christ on the Cross and Pieta carved by Zadkine himself while he lived in Les Arques, a village in the Midi-Pyrénées region. The Christ on the Cross and Pieta are displayed in the 12th-century church opposite the museum.