Tête d’homme | 1924

Ossip Zadkine (1888 -1967)

Tête d’homme, 1924
Alabaster
38 x 22 x 20 cm | 14 ^15/16 x 8 ^5/8 x 7 ^13/16 inch

Carved directly from alabaster, the sculpture allows the stone to express itself through rounded forms that follow the natural shape of the raw material, further accentuated by the hair, engraved in regular, curved striations.

The duality of the face—engraved on one side and drawn on the other—also evokes the inversion of volumes characteristic of Cubism. Though Zadkine engaged with the movement only briefly, between 1921 and 1923, he left a lasting mark, creating some of his greatest masterpieces during that time.

Enriched by this remarkably modern sculptural approach, Tête d’homme simultaneously embodies the artist’s return to the singular lyricism that permeates his work, freed from the angularity of the Cubist style. With its powerful expressiveness, this historic piece holds an exceptional place in his body of work and in art history as a whole.

As Ossip Zadkine arrived in Paris in 1910, he discovered the Parisian art scene and was soon to become a key figure of the École de Paris.

He met Modigliani, and the two quickly became close friends, sharing in their early years both the hardships of a young artist’s life and an aesthetic shaped by common sources of inspiration and a shared admiration for the beauty and nobility of archaic forms.

The elongation of the face in Tête d’homme, the extended neck, and the closely set, almond-shaped eyes inevitably recall the figures of the Italian painter. This characteristic stylisation reveals the deep artistic connection between the two.

Breaking away from Rodin’s influence, Zadkine followed in the footsteps of Brancusi and became one of the leading figures of the avant-garde in the first half of the 20^th century, introducing new forms of representation.

Brancusi’s influence is particularly evident in Le Baiser, made about the same time as Tête d’homme and carved directly from a single block of stone, where geometry and simplicity of line merge. Both modern and primitive, the artist evokes a new plastic reality rooted in the very essence of form.

This creative impulse, which permeates Zadkine’s work, can also be seen in Picasso’s portraits and the features of his faces. As Sylvain Lecombre notes, “For Zadkine […], direct carving is the technique best suited to inscribing his work within the great movement of primitivism or archaism initiated by Gauguin.”

Nearly all of Zadkine’s sculptures from the 1920s now belong to major private and public collections.

They are housed in renowned institutions such as the Centre Pompidou and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the MoMA in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, among others.

Tête d’homme (1924), in turn, attests to an exceptional provenance. As Zadkine’s critical and commercial success grew in France and across Europe, the sculpture caught the attention of Helena Rubinstein, the greatest collector of her time and a devoted patron of the arts. She acquired the piece in 1927, incorporating it into her prestigious collection, where it remained until the end of her life.