The image of the city and the obliterated streets of Rotterdam haunted me. When I returned to Paris, I made a draft model for a statue in clay which attempted to express the combination of confusion and horror.. ..to stimulate emotion in the onlooker, to exude something which captivates the spectator, which opens up to them an unsuspected pathway in their own soul.
Ossip Zadkine Connected to the Carolinas
Source
'Memoirs', 1967; as cited in 'Torso of the Destroyed City', Musée Zadkine — Zadkine recounts the violence of the impressions which he felt then; the first draft for a monument to the 'Destroyed City', was broken in transport. A new version of a 'projected monument for a bombed city' was produced in 1947
- year
- 1947
Cite this record
“The image of the city and the obliterated streets of Rotterd…” Ossip Zadkine. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-A5B85D5718. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/a5b85d5718
More from Ossip Zadkine
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.
How should one approach the person of van Gogh in order to be able to build a statue of him? How can one place him outside of himself, separate him from the tragic character of his life? How can one build a statue in the open air which simultaneously evokes the rare and the new person who was van Gogh, as also the enormity of the new aspect of the current and future art of painting?
.My materials often dictate my change of aims, and I choose to work in a different material much as a man may suddenly feel an appetite for a change of diet. After a steady diet of moulding plaster models for bronzes, I enjoy returning to a discipline of carving stone or wood, and the wood or the stone Inevitably suggests to me a shift of principles or of aims.