William Zorach
1887
–1966
BirthplaceEurburg, Lithuania
Death placeBath, Maine, United States of America
BiographyPainter, printmaker, educator, and sculptor William Zorach is best known as the creator of visually weighty, powerfully modeled figural sculptures. Born to a large Jewish family in Lithuania, the artist was brought to Ohio as a child and grew up in Cleveland. A teacher in elementary school assigned him the name “William," telling him it was more American than “Zorach," his birth name. He later adopted Zorach as his last name. From 1903 to 1906, he took evening classes at the Cleveland School of Art while working for a lithographic publisher. After two years of further study at the National Academy of Design in New York City, he went to Paris in 1910 and enrolled at the progressive La Palette academy, studying under portrait painter Jacques-Émile Blanche (1861-1942) and John Duncan Fergusson (1874-1961), a Scottish painter then experimenting with the strong color, bold brushwork, and decorative emphasis of post-impressionism.
In 1912 Zorach married Marguerite Thompson (1887-1968), a California native and fellow student at La Palette. His work shifted definitively after their return to the United States. Marguerite's use of the expressive color associated with the movement known as fauvism and the faceted geometry of so-called cubism, absorbed in Paris, had a profound impact on her husband's approach. Settling in New York, the Zorachs both participated in the landmark 1913 exhibition known as the Armory Show, which first introduced the American public to radical modernist art. The Zorachs circulated among the artistic avant-garde in New York and in various summer retreats. In the modernist art colony at Provincetown, Massachusetts, William thrived as a printmaker and became involved in the theatrical activities of the Provincetown Players. With the encouragement of Max Weber, whom he met in 1915, Zorach began to look to African art for inspiration. He made his first sculpture in 1917 and by 1922 had abandoned painting to concentrate on direct carving in wood and stone. Often the subjects and style of William's sculpture complemented Marguerite's figurative paintings. The couple's two children were one focus of their art, an apt expression of their remarkably symbiotic artistic relationship.
Beginning in 1929, William taught at the Art Students League in New York, and from 1946 until his death the Zorachs were visiting artists at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Both were represented at the Downtown Gallery and their works were shown in other venues, notably the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago in 1933. In 1937, William's statue of Benjamin Franklin, commissioned as part of depression-era federal artists' relief programs, was installed in a Washington, D.C. post office. In the 1940s, Zorach remerged as a painter, now in the medium of watercolor. A retrospective of his work at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art in 1959 acknowledged his place among twentieth-century America's most important sculptors.
In 1912 Zorach married Marguerite Thompson (1887-1968), a California native and fellow student at La Palette. His work shifted definitively after their return to the United States. Marguerite's use of the expressive color associated with the movement known as fauvism and the faceted geometry of so-called cubism, absorbed in Paris, had a profound impact on her husband's approach. Settling in New York, the Zorachs both participated in the landmark 1913 exhibition known as the Armory Show, which first introduced the American public to radical modernist art. The Zorachs circulated among the artistic avant-garde in New York and in various summer retreats. In the modernist art colony at Provincetown, Massachusetts, William thrived as a printmaker and became involved in the theatrical activities of the Provincetown Players. With the encouragement of Max Weber, whom he met in 1915, Zorach began to look to African art for inspiration. He made his first sculpture in 1917 and by 1922 had abandoned painting to concentrate on direct carving in wood and stone. Often the subjects and style of William's sculpture complemented Marguerite's figurative paintings. The couple's two children were one focus of their art, an apt expression of their remarkably symbiotic artistic relationship.
Beginning in 1929, William taught at the Art Students League in New York, and from 1946 until his death the Zorachs were visiting artists at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Both were represented at the Downtown Gallery and their works were shown in other venues, notably the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago in 1933. In 1937, William's statue of Benjamin Franklin, commissioned as part of depression-era federal artists' relief programs, was installed in a Washington, D.C. post office. In the 1940s, Zorach remerged as a painter, now in the medium of watercolor. A retrospective of his work at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art in 1959 acknowledged his place among twentieth-century America's most important sculptors.