William Zorach was a Lithuanian-born American sculptor, painter, printmaker, and writer.
Background
Zorach was born on February 28, 1889 in Jurbarkas, Lithuania, the son of Orchick Samovich, a barge keeper on the Nieman River, and Toba Getal. Zorach's father immigrated to the United States in 1892 and became a peddler in Port Clinton, Ohio. Zorach, his mother, and five siblings joined his father the next year. In 1896 the family settled in Cleveland and subsisted on his father's earnings as a junk dealer. Zorach grew up in a slum amid other immigrants; his parents could neither read nor write, although they spoke five languages.
Education
Shy and serious, Zorach regarded public school as a mystery. In the first grade he reported his name, Zorach, to his teacher, who decided to call him Willie - hence the name William Zorach. In the third grade he began selling newspapers and shining shoes to supplement the family income. At the end of the seventh grade he left school to become an apprentice lithographer for the W. J. Morgan Lithography Company, where he was employed from 1902 to 1912. Zorach enjoyed woodcarving and took drawing classes at the Educational Alliance in Cleveland. Encouraged by a colleague at the lithography company, he enrolled in night classes at the Cleveland School of Art, where he studied from 1905 to 1908. Resolving to become a "real" artist, Zorach spent the winters of 1908-1910 in New York City, studying painting and drawing at the National Academy of Design. He became a competent draftsman and in 1910 decided to continue his studies in Paris. Since Zorach did not speak French, he enrolled in Jacques Émile Blanche's La Palette, where criticism was given in English. There he was impressed by the Scottish artist John Duncan Fergusson's painting classes and by an American student, Marguerite Thompson, who introduced Zorach to Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and Pablo Picasso.
Career
Zorach returned to Cleveland in the summers of 1908-1910 to work as a lithographer. He was naturalized as an American citizen before 1910. Zorach and Thompson took in exhibitions of fauvist, cubist, and Postimpressionist painting. Exhausting his funds, he returned to his lithography job in Cleveland late in 1911. After saving for a year he moved to New York City. Both artists exhibited in the 1913 Armory Show and participated in a variety of activities associated with the fledgling New York avant-garde. From 1913 to 1919 they experimented with modernist painting styles derived from Henri Matisse and fauvism, and then cubism. Zorach's most sophisticated and satisfying accomplishments as a painter, exuberant watercolor studies of Yosemite Valley, were created during a visit to California in 1920-1921. The Zorachs spent winters in New York and summers in New England. In 1915 they met John Reed, Louise Bryant, and Eugene O'Neill in Provincetown, Massachussets, where Zorach made sets for O'Neill's Bound East for Cardiff. Zorach's family summered in New Hampshire in 1917. There he began a series of woodblock prints. Incising a butternut panel, he became intrigued with the carving process and developed the panel into a sculptural relief, Waterfall. Although not formally trained as a sculptor, Zorach executed several wooden panels between 1917 and 1922. He undertook his first stone carvings in 1921, teaching himself the requisite techniques. His initial efforts reflect an enthusiasm for African, Aztec, and Mayan forms, but he quickly settled upon a more naturalistic figurative style not unrelated to that of his friend Gaston Lachaise. Traditional sculptors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries modeled their designs in clay; these models were then enlarged and copied in stone by professional cutters. Zorach was one of the first American sculptors to advocate direct carving, realization of form by the artist himself. Among Zorach's preferred materials were the granite boulders of Maine, where he bought a summer home in 1923. Zorach advanced quickly and intuitively as a sculptor. In 1927 he began one of his most well-known compositions, Mother and Child, carved from a three-ton block of rose marble. Zorach regarded this rhythmic complex of simplified anatomical forms as his finest sculpture, not only on formal grounds but also because the figures express maternal tenderness and family unity, universal themes that came to represent for Zorach the raison d'être of art. Traditional subject matter and direct carving were the cornerstones of his mature oeuvre and of his instruction at New York's Art Students League, where he taught from 1929 to 1960. Zorach's reputation as a sculptor grew in the 1930's, and he received several major commissions. For private patrons he carved animal figures, family groups, sensuous female torsos, and visionary heads, many of which call to mind the contemporaneous work of Jacob Epstein. Zorach was known for his peasantlike bluntness, straightforward approach to aesthetic problems, and lack of guile, a quality sometimes disadvantageous in executing public commissions. Zorach encountered the first of several public controversies in 1932, when he created a nude female figure symbolizing the dance for Radio City Music Hall. The sculpture was refused on the ground that its nudity rendered it unfit for public exhibition. Art organizations protested, and the work was eventually installed. Zorach's most painful contretemps began in 1956, when a nearly completed monumental relief commissioned by the Second National Bank of Houston, Texas, was suddenly rejected because of a rumor that Zorach was a Communist sympathizer. Zorach denied the allegation, but the controversy followed him for more than a decade. Zorach died in Bath, Maine on November 15, 1966.
Achievements
Zorach was a traditionalist sculptor of simple, figurative subjects who was a leading figure in the early 20th-century revival of direct carving, whereby the sculptor seeks an image directly from the material to be carved, relying on neither the inspiration of models nor the aid of mechanical devices. Zorach’s mature work is monumental in form and makes skillful use of the natural colour, veining, and textures of the materials used - usually stone and wood. Often he left the marks of the sculptor’s tools to enrich the surface. He is notable for being at the forefront of American Artists embracing cubism, as well as for his sculpture.
Works
book
book
Membership
Member of the Provincetown Printers art colony
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
On the occasion of his major retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1959, the curator John Baur described Zorach as one of those who rescued American sculpture "from the neo-classical inanities and illustrative modeling which dominated it at the end of the century. Zorach probably did the most to establish here the practice of direct carving and the aesthetic concepts which grew out of it, just as he had the greatest influence, by teaching and example, on a following generation. "
Connections
On December 24, 1912, Zorach married Marguerite Thompson and moved into a small studio that they decorated with murals and a red floor. They had two children.
Father:
Orchick Samovich
Mother:
Toba Getal
Spouse:
Marguerite Thompson
She was an American Fauvist painter, textile artist, and graphic designer, and was an early exponent of modernism in America.
Daughter:
Dahlov Ipcar
She was an American painter, illustrator and author.
Son:
Tessim Zorach
Friend:
Henry Fitch Taylor
He was an American painter who was to become the oldest among the generation of American artists who responded to and explored Cubism.
