"That October day, at four o'clock in the afternoon, Antonia appeared to me in her blue dress on a path all golden with autumn leaves: that was how our love began".
1900-1967
A restless spirit and eclectic artist, painter, sculptor and musician, Jacques Zwobada won the gold medal of the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in 1925 and the Legion of Honour in 1963. Some of his works can be found at the Centre Pompidou. His art was initially academic, particularly the gigantic equestrian monument erected in honour of Simon Bolivar in Quito, the capital of Ecuador.
Falling in love with his closest friend's wife upset him so much that he broke down all social censure and rewrote a new, intense, dazzling artistic life. After the1940s, he freed his work from any reference to reality, allowing it to become lyrical and sensual. His sculptures from this period consist of tangled bodies: all curves and leaps, the painful spasms and abstract tensions of all-encompassing embraces.
When Antonia died prematurely in 1956, he was overwhelmed with grief; the eleven years that separated his death from hers became a long, agonising period of survival. "I feel like a dead man," he confided to his sister Simone. From then on, he committed his art and life to the celebration of their love to make it eternal, continuing to draw Antonia in pencil and charcoal, forging her half-bust and building her funeral monument at the Mentana cemetery to fulfil her last wish: to be buried far from the big city, amidst the sun, silence, and greenery of the Roman countryside.