Arnold Zadikow

Passions

Vocation

Lifestyle

German-Jewish modernist sculptor and medallist who worked in Germany and France. Zadikow studied under the neoclassical sculptor Heinrich Waderé and mainly worked on portrait busts, gravestones and plaques. He was a soldier on the Western Front during the Great War and sustained combat injuries in 1917 before being taken to a British prisoner of war camp. After the war, he dwelt mainly in Munich and Rome, but briefly worked in Paris in 1932. Zadikow liked to work with biblical motifs, and his sculpture of the young David was displayed in the entrance of the Berlin Jewish Museum in 1933. Considered his most important work, the statue was lost (destroyed by the Nazis?) during the Second World War. In 1933, sensing trouble for Germany's Jewish population, Zadikow moved to Prague with his wife Hilda and their daughter Marianka. He was later joined by other German artists such as Oskar Kokoschka, John Heartfield and Thomas Theodor Heine. In the wake of the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939, Jews in the country faced increasing persecution, and finally on 15 May 1942, the Zadikows were rounded up and ordered to board a train to Theresienstadt concentration camp, where Arnold was to pass away, on 8 March 1943, aged 58. Hilda and Marianka were transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau the following year, but managed to survive long enough to be liberated in 1945. Throughout his working life, Zadikow designed decorative gravestones, including that of the German physician and pioneering sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld. Whilst in Paris, he was also commissioned by Albert Einstein to produce a headstone for a family member. Link to Wikipedia biography