This 1930 work on paper by modern artist Ossip Zadkine is from the collection of Marie-Claude Dane, former curator of the Musée Zadkine in Paris. Depicting a group of bathers at rest, "Les Baigneuses" is executed with both sinuous lines and volumetric shapes, illustrating Zadkine's career-long concern with interpreting the human form in new ways.

Ossip Zadkine (1890-1967) was a Paris-based Russian sculptor, painter, draughtsman, and printmaker. Born in Belarus, Zadkine studied art in London before settling in Paris in 1909. During his early career, Zadkine made highly stylized figurative sculptures with elongated limbs and features. His many works on paper from this period also reflect this approach to figuration. Eventually, influenced by his exposure to Cubist art, he began to infuse his sculptures with more geometrical qualities and greater multidimensionality. In 1951, Zadkine completed his best-known sculpture, “The Destroyed City,” which memorialized the effects of German bombing on the city of Rotterdam during World War II. He received the grand prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale in 1950.

Selected Public Collections:
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC
Museo Nacional de Arte Decorativo, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna, Austria
Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp, Belgium
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux, France
Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France
Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France
Musée du Petit Palais, Geneva, Switzerland
Musée Zadkine, Paris, France
Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
Pushkin Museum, Moscow, Russia
Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Scotland
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Tate Gallery, London, England