Carolina Quotes
Firstly for the design I decided that the two joined figures should be depicted upright [in Zadkine's first attempt the two brothers were sitting shoulder to shoulder].. ..two or three days later I was able to send him a photo of my new attempt, in which the two brothers are not only standing, but where the bond – the main idea is projected onto the statue in a hollow, in the heart of the composition the viewer can see a knot of hands, a symbol of the double inspiration.

Ossip Zadkine Connected to the Carolinas

Source

pp. 67-69

work
'Les frères Van Gogh, origine et justification', c. 1955
year
1955
locator
pp. 67-69

Cite this record

“Firstly for the design I decided that the two joined figures…” Ossip Zadkine. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-DCB1194980. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/dcb1194980

More from Ossip Zadkine

..I write you from the French front where I'am serving as a soldier in the Russian ambulance Corps. How are you feeling and what are you doing? How are your friends, Lissitsky, Libakov [also former students of Pen], Mazel, Mekler, and Chagall? Please, for God's sake, answer me. I would be so glad to hear how everyone is. I'm in fine health, but tired of it all – it's utterly disgraceful, makes the soul turn cold. If only it [the war] would just end. What are you working on, what are you doing? Please write me. – Yours Zadkine.
Quote in a letter of Zadkine (in France) to his former art-teacher Yuri Moiseevich Pen in Vitebsk, Russia, 16 Nov. 1916 (transl. into Belorussian E.M. Kichina); as quoted in Vitebsk: The Life of Art, by Aleksandra Semenovna Shatskikh; Yale University Press, 2007, p. 19
The sculptors of the cathedral porches of the Middle Ages already knew that we can identify many legendary figures by their attributes, not their physical appearance. How is one to recognize Orpheus without his lyre, or Saint Lawrence without his grid? At the same time it seems a bit absurd, In an art that claims to be realistic, to have Orpheus always carrying his lyre, like a German businessman his briefcase. There must have been moments when Orpheus and Saint Lawrence left their lyre or their grid at the checkroom, for instance.. [c. 1960, in France]
Dialogues – conversations with.., quotes, c. 1960, p. 153
A cry of horror against the inhuman brutality of this act of tyranny.
c. 1953; as cited by M.G. Schenk, in Ossip Zadkine', Amsterdam 1967; as quoted in Sculpture International Rotterdam - 'The Destroyed City' — According to Zadkine the idea for his sculpture 'The Destroyed City' was born when he arrived by train in the devastated city of Rotterdam in 1946/47, and saw the destroyed heart of the city because of the bombings by the German air-force, 14 May 1940

All Ossip Zadkine quotations