Nuit des Musées 2024 is the not-to-be-missed event of the year forart-lovers and museum-goers! For one evening, you can wander freely through the region's many museums and monuments, discovering their permanent collections, temporary exhibitions and special events.
For this 20th edition, the Musée Zadkine welcomes us this Saturday, May 18, 2024. Located in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, this museum is dedicated to the memory and work of Russian-born sculptor Ossip Zadkine (1890-1967), who lived and worked in this house and its workshops. The Musée Zadkine presents some one hundred sculptures, tapestries and other works created by Zadkine, and bequeathed by his wife!
Musée Zadkine: l'Atelier - Museum near the Jardin du Luxembourg
On the outskirts of the Jardin du Luxembourg, the Musée Zadkine in Paris opens its doors free of charge to its permanent collection, all year round, in the heart of a green setting populated by sculptures. Nestled at 100 bis rue d'Assas, the museum is the former home of iconic sculptor Ossip Zadkine, who lived there from 1928 to 1967. [Read more]
Every year, for the Nuit des Musées 2024, the Musée Zadkine goes to great lengths to offer us a poetic, timeless evening, one-to-one with the artist and his works. Discover the program for this new edition.
Zadkine. Le Corps en jeu(x)
This year, to coincide with the Olympic Games, a special tour, entitled "le corps en jeu(x)", has been set up in rooms 2 and 3 of the tour, as well as in the garden studio that closes the visit. Zadkine was not a sportsman, but like many sculptors, he was interested in the theme of the body in motion. From the 1920s onwards, he drew and sculpted acrobats, jugglers and dancers, all subjects he associated with joie de vivre and celebration. During the Second World War, the theme of the body in motion took on a darker meaning. The joyful acrobats become fierce fighters whose dislocated limbs seem to foreshadow the tortured bodies of La Ville détruite, Zadkine's great work inaugurated in Rotterdam in 1953.
Le corps en jeu(x)
The years 1920-1930 were decisive in Zadkine's career. From 1920, when he held his first solo exhibition in his rue Rousselet studio, to 1933, when he held his first retrospective at the Palais des Beaux-arts in Brussels, Zadkine gradually gained the recognition of important critics and collectors. In the early 1920s, influenced by Cubism, he created sculptures whose geometric forms tended towards abstraction, such as L'Accordéoniste. However, he soon moved away from this trend, which he felt restricted his own lyrical, expressive artistic temperament.
Although Zadkine never abandoned direct carving, his new practice of modeling plaster and clay enabled him to introduce movement and flexibility into his creations. Animated by a joyful life, the bodies dance, run and spread out freely in space. The three exceptional groups of Ménades, Joueuses à la balle and Jeux de Grâces illustrate this new direction. While the artist borrowed figures and draperies from Antiquity to underline the vivacity of his gestures, he also drew on the circus repertoire: acrobats and jugglers populated large, brightly-colored gouaches from the 1920s onwards. A sculptor of abundant invention, Zadkine was also a constant practitioner of drawing. In the 1950s and 1960s, he returned to his favorite themes: acrobats drawn with a clear line, dancers or women running in vibrantly colored compositions.
Les Travaux d'Hercule
During the Second World War, Zadkine was forced into exile because of his Jewish origins. He left France for the United States in June 1941. Settling in New York, he rented a studio in Greenwich Village and went back to work. Worried and short of money, Zadkine sculpted less during this period, but read a lot. He rediscovered the myth of Hercules, which he interpreted in the light of the tragic events of the time, and which inspired a series of drawings. "I began to draw the "Labors of Hercules", during the evenings of 1943-1944, amid the howls and desperate cries coming from the East. Really, all I could think about was what was happening 'over there'," he writes in his memoirs. Executed in pen and black ink, the series was published in lithography in 1960, from which the plates presented here are taken. Whether slaying the Hydra of Lerna or the Lion of Nemea, the Greek hero is captured in a lively hand-to-hand combat. The graphic treatment highlights his muscularity, rendered with vigorous hatching and magnified by powerful chiaroscuro, reminiscent of Goya's Disasters of War. Les Travaux d'Hercule (The Labors of Hercules) in no way offers a heroic image of the struggle. Rather, it is the horror and violence of men that Zadkine represents: "my drawings were like a kind of narration of the fury of killing, a fury that set the whole earth ablaze, enveloping it in a shroud pierced by the hail of blood and suffering."
Zadkine and monumental sculpture
From 1914 onwards, Zadkine created monumental works. Like the later Prometheus presented in this room, these were mostly figures sculpted directly from colossal trunks, whose shape and material inspired the artist. After the Second World War, as urban reconstruction renewed "the vocation of sculpture to take its place in public space", Zadkine took on several commissions for monuments. Some of these, like the monument to Jarry, were conceived in the late 1930s. The most famous is La Ville détruite, a six-metre-high bronze figure inaugurated in Rotterdam in 1953. Sometimes dubbed "the Guernica of sculpture", this work commemorates the bombings that wiped out the port city, and denounces the horror and absurdity of war. Until the end of his career, the question of monumentality continued to interest the artist, who adapted some of his abstract works to monumental format, such as La Forêt humaine, commissioned in 1960 for the headquarters of a foundation in Jerusalem, or La Demeure, inaugurated in Amsterdam in 1963.
The body in struggle
Upon his return to France in 1945, Zadkine did not forget the works he had created during his exile in the United States. They served as a matrix for the renewal of his work, which evolved towards more abstract forms, often inspired by the plant world. The theme of the struggling body, extensively explored in Les Travaux d'Hercule, continues to occupy the artist. The figure in La Ville Détruite, a sort of disjointed, disenchanted Harlequin, owes much to the wrestlers of the 1940s, as shown in the magnificent preparatory drawings for the monument. In the 1950s-1960s, Zadkine returned to the theme of combat, but in an abstract, symbolic and almost totally disembodied mode. In the sculpture Combat, dating from 1960, only two hands are represented, the intertwining of fingers alone recalling the entanglement of bodies and the violence of the struggle.
www.zadkine.paris.fr
Free admission subject to capacity
7pm to 11pm last admission 10.30pm
Concert by the Topaze Trio
To mark European Museum Night, the Topaze Trio (flute, viola and harp) will offer the public a musical program in resonance with the life of Ossip Zadkine. Musicians Lucie Humbert, Alexandra Morand and Claire Rousset will perform pieces by the Group of Six. Zadkine, who worked closely with these composers, valued their music, recalling: "Their musical compositions were perfectly suited to my sculpture: equivalent atmosphere, parallelism of our intentions and our search for the new in the spirit of forms and sounds".
To enable the public to associate the musical worlds of these composers with Zadkine's works in the museum, the three musicians of the Trio Topaze have chosen to adapt short pieces by Francis Poulenc, Arthur Honegger, Germaine Tailleferre and Georges Auric to their group. They will also play the Trio for flute, viola and harp by Leo Smit, a Dutch composer who settled in Paris in the 1920s and was strongly influenced by Darius Milhaud. Of Jewish origin, like Zadkine, Leo Smit was deported to the Sobibór extermination camp, where he was murdered in 1943. Zadkine took refuge in the United States during the Second World War.
Concerts at 7:30, 8:30 and 9:30 pm
Duration: approx. 20 minutes
Free, no reservation required, subject to availability
Night opening of the Zadkine Museum from 7 pm to 11 pm
PROGRAM
Francis Poulenc: Andante du Trio pour hautbois, basson et piano* (1926)
Arthur Honegger: Petite Suite pour deux instruments et piano* (1934)
Leo Smit: Trio for flute, viola and harp (1926)
Germaine Tailleferre: Forlane for flute and piano* (1972)
Georges Auric: Waltz from the film "Moulin Rouge "* (1952)
*transcription for flute, viola and harp by Trio Topaze
Nuit des Musées is a chance to discover Parisian museums you're less familiar with, and to rediscover those you already love! In any case, there's always a good reason to visit the Musée Zadkine during this exceptional nocturne.
Dates and Opening Time
On May 18th, 2024
Location
Musée Zadkine
100 bis rue d'Assas
75006 Paris 6
Prices
Free
Recommended age
For all
Official website
www.zadkine.paris.fr
Musée Zadkine: l'Atelier - Museum near the Jardin du Luxembourg
