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William Zorach (1887-1966)
 Half Dome, Yosemite, 1920

watercolor and pencil on paper
13 1/2" x 18 3/4" sheet size
13 1/4" x 18" sight size 
15 1/4" x 13 1/4" sheet size
14 1/2" x 12 3/4" sight size Odalisk (view 1), 1961
yellow marble
10 5/8" x 23" x 3", signed and dated Marguerite Zorach and William Zorach

June 4 – August 13, 2010 American Modernism on Paper

March 17 – May 3, 2006 The New Frontier: Early American Moderns

November 13, 1997 – January 17, 1998 Counterpoints: American Art, 1930-1945

April 7 – June 4, 1994

 ARTNews, September 2010

by Cynthia Nadelman
 
April 7 - June 4, 1994


One of the first artists in the United States to employ the sculptural technique of direct carving, William Zorach was born Zorach Samovich in Eurberick (now Jurbarkas), Lithuania in 1889. When he was a child, his family emigrated to the United States, settling in 1891 in Cleveland and changing the family name to Finkelstein. In grammar school, Zorach’s name underwent a second transformation when his teacher dubbed him William. Zorach’s parents struggled to feed their ten children, and when he was a teenager, Zorach dropped out of school to work for a commercial lithography firm, while taking night classes at the Cleveland Art School. In 1908, Zorach left Cleveland for New York City and enrolled in courses at the National Academy of Design. Two years later, he traveled to Paris, where he studied at the cutting-edge Académie de la Palette with John Duncan Fergusson and Jacques-Emile Blanche and met Marguerite Thompson, an American artist who had been in Paris since 1908. Zorach was a talented painter, but his style remained academic; Thompson helped him to find his own artistic vision. In 1911, Zorach participated in the Salon d’Automne, and the following year, the couple moved back to the United States and married. They settled in New York’s Greenwich Village, where, because neither artist had gallery representation, they held exhibitions in their home, which they dubbed the “Zorach Studio.”(1) In 1913, he exhibited two works in The Armory Show.

In addition to creating art, Zorach wrote, lectured, and participated in public debates. A proponent of what he called “national art,” Zorach believed that a work of art should express its immediate cultural context, even if over time it eventually acquired a universal quality.(2) Possibly as part of this belief, Zorach created several public murals in United States Post Offices and site specific sculptural commissions, including Spirit of the Dance (1932) for Radio City Music Hall in Rockefeller Center, his bronze Olympic Runner in Kiener Plaza in St. Louis, and Man-Made Power, a teakwood bas-relief for the Courthouse in Greenville, Tennessee.

(1) Jessica Nicoll, “To Be Modern: The Origins of Marguerite and William Zorach's Creative Partnership, 1911-1922,” Portland Museum of Art. http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/3aa/3aa85.htm. Accessed May 2010.
(2) Mariquita Villard, “William Zorach and His Sculpture,” Parnassus, v.6 no.5 (October 1934), 3-6.