In the United-States

The Art Students League, New York

In September 1943, during his exile in New York, Zadkine obtained a post as a teacher (he was given the title of "instructor") in a well-known art school, The Art Students League. Founded "by artists for artists" in 1875, this school had trained a number of artists who had become famous: Alexander Calder, Barnett Newmann, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly… In the diary which he kept in those years, Zadkine declared that he was happy to have found this work to help him live, the sale of his works not proving to be sufficient.

Black Mountain College

Before his return to France in 1945, Zadkine taught for a few months at Black Mountain College, in North Carolina. He had previously refused the offer of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy to teach at the Institute of Design in Chicago. On its foundation in 1933, this experimental university had entrusted the direction of artistic teaching to the artist Josef Albers and his wife Anni Albers, who had just settled in the United States after leaving Germany where both had been teachers at the Bauhaus. Black Mountain College then became a centre where the teaching of the Bauhaus was passed on. In the 1950s, on the instigation of the poet Charles Olson who created the magazine "Black Mountain Review", summer seminars were headed by John Cage for music, Merce Cunningham for dance, and Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell for painting. Black Mountain College closed its doors in 1957.