Memorial of lamentation

In the center of the Dutch city of Rotterdam’s bustling port district, in an otherwise empty plaza near the maritime museum, there is a monumental bronze statue: Ossip Zadkine’s The Destroyed City, a memorial to the bombing of the city center by a Nazi air attack on March 14, 1940. Zadkine, a Parisian artist working in a Cubist idiom, visited the city in 1946 during the rebuilding effort following the war and was struck by the absolute devastation he saw. Inspired, he created this statue, which was first publicly displayed in its current location in 1953.

The 21-foot-tall statue depicts a contorted human figure half-leaning on a broken tree stump and raising its hands in the air in a gesture of enraged grief, as if pleading with God to provide solace. The center of the human figure, where the heart ought to be, is a void—referencing the destruction left by the bombing and the loss felt by the city’s residents.

The distinctive and visually arresting form of the statue contrasts with the busy downtown of Holland’s second-­largest city. This is as it should be —it’s likely that modern-day residents of Rotterdam spend little time pondering their city’s destruction by the Nazis during World War II, and if they do, those thoughts are in jarring contrast to the environment of the city today.

At the time of the bombing, nothing could have contrasted more with the civic pride and self-image of the people of Rotterdam than the smoldering ruins their hometown had become. The statue conveys the depths of their grief in a manner similar to the lamentations of the prophet Jeremiah, which he penned after seeing his home city of Jerusalem in ruins. Like Jeremiah’s elegiac poem, Zadkine’s statue does not express despair. Its agonizing sorrow is mingled with anger, with a sense of offended justice, aware of evil and recognizing it for what it is. The statue thus borrows from a Christian sense of morality that is often absent in the avant-garde art of the 20th century.

As a focal point for the city’s collective memory, Zadkine’s sculpture invites passersby to stop their scurrying and recall the events of their city’s past—­terrible events, to be sure, but worthy of remembrance.

Ossip Zadkine in 1957 Brandstaetter Images / Imagno / Getty Images

The Old Testament is full of monuments and memorials to important events: Joshua’s pile of stones on the bank of the Jordan, Samuel’s rock of Ebenezer, Jacob’s pillar at Bethel. Physical manifestations of a people’s collective memory are necessary parts of a culture’s heritage. The Destroyed City is an excellent example of the form—direct, expressive, clear, and concise.

So much for the content of Zadkine’s sculpture; what about the form? The event memorialized by the sculpture really happened; why, then, is a more realistic style not deployed? Why this distorted jumble of contradictory elements?

A realistic presentation of an actual human model would have exhibited the artist’s technical skill, but to do so would have robbed the statue of much of its expressive power—it would have become a statue of one specific, particular person, and not of humanity in general. It would have missed the chance to be universal, broadly applicable in its symbolism. By reducing the human figure to generalities—universals—the abstraction of Zadkine’s sculpture serves to make it more expressive, not less.

Debate continues to rage in Christian circles regarding the appropriateness of abstract art and the entirety of the 20th-century avant-garde’s approach. Some people propose that Christian artists abandon the innovations of the past hundred-odd years in favor of a renewed commitment to rigorous realism. But an important point for Christian artists to remember is that different styles of art have different expressive abilities.

The Destroyed City is a masterpiece of expression, and it would not have been possible for Zadkine to convey the depth of emotion, the communion of grief, and the universality of an absolute moral standard if he were to deploy a more traditional approach in his war memorial. The shockingly innovative form—which, at the time, was difficult for the citizens of Rotterdam to accept—allows Zadkine’s statue to rank as one of the most poignant monuments of recent history.