Zadkine Art Déco

In 2025, the Zadkine Museum will celebrate the centenary of Art Deco with an exhibition that revisits Ossip Zadkine’s links with the decorative arts in the 1920s and 1930s.

In 2025, the Musée Zadkine will mark the centenary of Art Deco with an exhibition curated by Cécilie Champy-Vinas, Chief Curator and Director of the Musée Zadkine, and Emmanuel Bréon, Honorary Chief Curator and President of Art Deco France, with the collaboration of Anne-Cécile Moheng, Associate Curator at the museum. Together, they shed light on the relationships Ossip Zadkine developed with the decorative arts during the 1920s and 1930s.

Featuring more than ninety works—including sculptures, objects, and furniture—the exhibition explores for the first time Zadkine’s connections with some of the leading Art Deco designers of his time, such as Eileen Gray, Marc du Plantier, and André Groult, while also highlighting the shared sources of inspiration that linked their creations. Thanks to important loans from both private collections and prestigious institutions—including the Museum of Fine Arts of Antwerp, the Sèvres Manufacture, the Mobilier National, and the Musée des Années 30 in Boulogne—the exhibition demonstrates the full extent of Zadkine’s mastery, his versatility, and his fascination with materials and craftsmanship.

As he recalled in his memoirs, Zadkine aspired to work “like an artisan of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, guided only by instinct.” True to this ethos, he consistently drew upon traditional techniques. In the early 1920s, having moved away from Cubism, he experimented with color, gilding, and lacquer on his sculptures, producing key works such as The Golden Bird (a plaster covered in gold leaf) and The Torso of a Hermaphrodite, lacquered in collaboration with André Groult. His exceptional skill in direct carving also earned him a place at the 1925 International Exhibition of Decorative Arts, where, alongside sculptors like Pompon and the Martel brothers, he contributed to the Pergola de la Douce France—a monumental structure erected on the Esplanade des Invalides, intended to revive the authenticity of direct stone carving over modeling.

Organized into five sections, the exhibition begins with Zadkine’s “decorative turn” in the 1920s, when he explored color and experimented with surface treatments such as gilding and lacquer. A second section examines the sculptures he created for architectural projects in both Paris and Brussels. The third and fourth sections focus on his participation in the great exhibitions of 1925 and 1937, with particular emphasis on the 1925 Exposition and the Pergola de la Douce France—one of the few surviving monuments from that landmark event. Reconstructed in 1935 in Étampes, the Pergola is still standing today, and at the Musée Zadkine it will be evoked through a model, sketches, and archival documents.

The final section highlights Zadkine’s relationships with three major decorators—Eileen Gray, Marc du Plantier, and André Groult—showcasing furniture and objects displayed in dialogue with Zadkine’s sculptures, much as they were once integrated into Art Deco interiors designed by these renowned figures who recognized his talent.