Love letter to Belgium: Antwerp’s fine arts museum reveals Belarus-born Ossip Zadkine’s Belgian story

World-renowned Belarus-born sculptor and artist Ossip Zadkine (1888-1967), whose works have graced famous buildings and squares all over Europe, would not have enjoyed his success without the contribution of ‘le plat pays’.

That is the message of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KSMKA) in its new exhibition, Ossip Zadkine and Belgium, which is taglined “A love letter to the country where it all began.”

Running from 31 October until 18 April, it features more than 100 sculptures, works on paper, and archive documents including museum catalogues, photographs and letters that for the first time highlight the role Belgium played in the career of this visionary artist.

 “Belgians were my first admirers,” said Zadkine, recalling that without the support of the country’s  galleries and patrons in the early 1920s, his career would not have taken off.

The key avant-garde figure known for beautiful, graceful sculptures in wood, metal, stone or ceramics, including Job and his Friends (pictured above), To Valentine, La Sainte-Famille, and Musical Trio, first enjoyed critical and commercial success in Brussels and Antwerp. Le Centaure gallery in the capital, critics like André de Ridder and fellow artists such as Constant Permeke and Frits van den Berghe were among his early supporters.

For the museum’s chair Luk Lemmens, “Zadkine’s story shows how encounters and collaboration can lead to innovation. The fact that he found a creative network in Antwerp which helped establish the foundations for his international breakthrough underlines our city’s role as a breeding ground for ideas and talent.”

Zadkine himself, in a 1962 Gazet van Antwerpen interview, praised Belgian’s port hub, saying: “When Americans ask me where they can find the best training in Europe, and the most engaging atmosphere, I say: ‘go to Antwerp’.”

The major centre for art welcomed not only many Zadkine exhibitions but also boasts his monumental Messenger sculpture in its harbour.

Moreover, following a summer 1950 open air exhibition in nearby Middelheim park that featured the artist, Zadkine told mayor Lode Craeybeckx: “How sad you will feel when all this beauty has left you.” His comment was to sow the seeds for the founding of Europe’s first open-air sculpture museum. Opening in 1952, Zadkine and Henry Moore were appointed as advisers of the Middelheim must-see.

Zadkine’s works abound all over Belgium. Notable examples are monumental reliefs for Brussels’ Métropole cinema, Charleroi’s Palais des Beaux-Arts and the Poet sculpture for Knokke casino garden. Smaller reliefs for private apartments and houses were created for la Monnaie director Joseph Rogatchewsky (at Résidence de l’Orée) and architect Adrien Blomme’s home on Avenue Franklin Roosevelt in Brussels, among others.

As a child, Zadkine discovered his passion for sculpture while playing with clay soil from his native Vitebsk with Marc Chagall, who attended the same primary school from 1900-1902. He learned wood carving from his uncle in the UK, before moving to Paris where he encountered Modigliani and Picasso. In the French capital he met, and married in 1920, Algerian-born Valentine Prax. A talented painter, she supported him financially through sales of her own work that are also displayed in the exhibition (pictured above), until his own work found success.

Throughout her life, Prax took charge of the financial and logistical aspects of their artistic careers. During the war she remained in France to safeguard Zadkine’s work. Despite several affairs from his time in the US, even resulting in the birth of a child, Zadkine remained with his wife. He once declared: “Henry Moore and my wife Valentine are today’s best artists. Had she not been a woman, she’d have gone much further.” Prax was equally devoted to her husband as demonstrated in her book Zadkine and I that lacks any mention of her own name in the title.

For this exhibition, the fine arts museum brought together no fewer than 130 works, 20 from its own collection, 50 from the Musée Zadkine in Paris, and a further 60 from other museums and private collections in Belgium and abroad.

Visitors will discover other artists that shaped his work, including the Belgians Gustave de Smet, Rik Wouters and Constant Permeke, along with major names such as Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz and his friend ‘Modi’ – Amedeo Modigliani. The two sketched together when poor painters in Paris, and ‘Modi’ is the title of one pencil drawing in the exhibition.

KMSKA is simultaneously showing the works of Antwerp-born artist Philip Aguirre y Otegui (1961) this autumn. It is his largest retrospective exhibition – featuring more than 100 of his sculptures, intimate figures, drawing and prints from the 1980s to today.

Like Zadkine, Otegui also “sought to capture the human condition in a changing world”. For example, his moving Man Against Wall cement sculpture shows a man facing Breendonk detention camp before being admitted to the centre.

For Otegui, who still lives in Antwerp and visited KMSKA as a child: “Art is not going to save the world, but it may touch an individual, make them think or bring them joy.”

Ossip Zadkine and Belgium
31 October to 18 April
KSMKA
Leopold de Waelplaats 1
Antwerp

Photos: (main image) Exhibition view Ossip Zadkine in Belgium ©Fille Roelants; © SABAM Belgium 2026, Ossip Zadkine, Kaïn en Abel, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen - Collectie Vlaamse Gemeenschap; SABAM Belgium 2026, Ossip Zadkine, Job en zijn vrienden, photo ©Dominique Provost, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen - Collectie Vlaamse Gemeenschap; Exhibition view Ossip Zadkine in Belgium ©Fille Roelants; ©SABAM Belgium 2026, Valentine Prax, Aandenken aan Griekenland, photo ©Hugo Maertens, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen - Collectie Vlaamse Gemeenschap; Ossip Zadkine in zijn atelier, leunend op ‘Formes Féminines’, Paris Musées  musée Zadkine ©ADAGP, Paris 2026