William Zorach Art

William Zorach, 1887-1966 Redwoods, Yosemite Valley, 1920 Watercolor and pencil 15 ¾ x 13 ⅜ inches Signed (at lower right): William Zorach WZorach-7 Provenance: Estate of William Zorach Exhibited: William Zorach, 1887-1996, Sculpture, Drawings and Watercolors, Zabriskie Gallery, New York; Feb. 10 – March 14, 1998. William Zorach was born in Lithuania in 1889, and immigrated to the United States with his family in 1893. Settling in Cleveland with his parents, he worked as a lithographer from 1902- 1908, making enough money to study painting with Henry G. Keller at the School of Art. In 1910, Zorach traveled to Paris to study in La Palette, where he was encouraged to develop his own unique style rather than adhere to traditional teachings. Zorach once said, “I began to be conscious of the various modern influences that were invading the art world…I was disturbed and confused, and yet I felt that I was a very young man entering a new age. The forces creating modern art seemed more alive to me than anything I had known or anything being done in America.” 1 Together with his wife Marguerite, William Zorach produced a number of Cubist- style paintings for the American Armory Show of 1913, and the Forum Exhibition in New York in 1916. Around 1917, Zorach followed the lead of cubist artist Pablo Picasso and began experimenting with wood and stone carvings. By 1922, he devoted himself entirely to sculpture, and like Picasso, became fascinated in “primitive art”—the ritual objects and sculpture pieces of Oceanic, Native American and African tribes. Zorach’s work developed in its use of block-like forms with progressive suppression of detail—drawing elements from sources as disparate as the contemporary cubist and modernist movements, and combining them with forms seen in early African sculpture. Though the forms of his sculpture were often abstract, Zorach primarily focused upon a traditional subject matter, producing such well-known sculptures as Young Girl, now in the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Mother and Child, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Today, William Zorach is known as one of the earliest and most influential American artists dedicated to direct carving. Zorach also made an impression as a teacher and writer, facilitating a major change in the aesthetic philosophy and technique of sculpture in the United States. During the summers from 1913 to 1922, Zorach and his wife Marguerite painted...

"Pioneer Family," 23 1/2 x 16 1/4 x 10 3/4 inPlaster. c. 1927. Unsigned. Realism The Smithsonian has a cast of this sculpture in its collection. Pictured on the cover of “The Sculpt...

Wonderful Fauve Landscape with blocky areas of punchy bold reds and yellows. This was done the same year of the Armory Show in which both William Zor...

William Zorach (American 1891-1966) First Steps, 1918 Bronze 8.5 x 5 x 4 inches, including base Born in 1887 in Lithuania, William Zorach immigrated with his family to the United States when he was just four years old, settling in Cleveland, Ohio. Zorach displayed an exceptional artistic talent at a young age and, at the recommendation of his seventh-grade teacher, began studying lithography at night at the Cleveland School of Art. It was not long before he was apprenticing at a lithography company in Cleveland. It was there that he realized he wanted to become an artist - to escape the commercial end of the field in which he was suddenly immersed. In 1907, Zorach saved enough money to move to New York and study art at the National Academy of Design, where he received several awards for his paintings and drawings. He continued his studies in Paris in 1910 at La Palette. This year abroad would turn out to be quite fruitful because in Paris he was greatly influenced by the Cubist and Fauvist movements and had several paintings exhibited at the Salon d'Automme. This influence and subsequent success fueled his career back in the states where he was honored with his first one-man exhibition. Due to this new-found stability, he married a young woman he met at school in Paris, and they moved to New York and set up a studio. Shortly after, their work was accepted into the famous 1913 Armory Show. For the next nine years, Zorach continued to think of himself as a painter, although he had already begun to experiment in sculpting. He was experiencing modest success with his painting and was therefore reluctant to abandon it completely. However, he was impelled toward sculpting, and in 1922, he painted his last oil. Zorach's involvement with sculpture began largely be accident. While he was working on a series of wood-block prints, Zorach suddenly became more interested in the butternut panel than the print and turned the panel into a carved relief. With no formal training as a sculptor, Zorach's first sculptures were of wood and his carving tools were primitive, such as a jack-knife. I n fact, his early works have a certain stylized look, suggesting the influence of various primitive arts such as African and American folk. Zorach found his sculptural direction by instinct, but was not unaware of what other sculptors were doing, both here and abroad. He soon allied himself with a growing number of modern sculptors who believed in the esthetic necessity of carving their own designs directly in the block of stone or wood rather than modeling them in clay. From the beginning he found a deep satisfaction in the slow and patient process of freeing the image from its imprisoning block, watching the forms emerge and appear. "The actual resistance of tough material is a wonderful guide," Zorach said in a lecture on direct sculpture in 1930. The sculptor "cannot make changes easily, there is no putting back tomorrow what was cut away today. His senses are constantly alert. If something goes wrong there is the struggle to right the rhythm. And slowly the vision grows as the work progresses." Zorach also found that the material itself had a constantly modifying effect on the artist's vision. The grain of the wood, the markings in the stone, the shape of the log or boulder all set limits and suggested possibilities. He was always sensitive to the characteristic qualities of his material and occasionally let them play a major role in determining his forms. In works such as these, the feel of the original material is preserved in the finished piece and is often heightened by leaving parts of the original surface untouched and other areas roughly marked by the sculptors tools...

William Zorach, Lithuanian (1887 - 1966) - Woodlands (Double-sided), Year: 1913, Medium: Watercolor on Paper, signed and dated in pencil, with Graphite Drawing on verso, Size: 8.5 ...

Beautifully sculpted and realized in bronze with a warm, deep brown patina, this relief panel by William Zorach depicts a father directly facing the viewer, embracing his son and daughter who are both engrossed in the care of a long-tailed bird. Zorach was renowned for his sculptures of the American family in different configurations, and he also loved depicting the house cat in different poses, all of which gave evidence of his love of domestic life in the 1930s. The artist was born in Lithuania, grew up in Cleveland, and spent much of his life in New England with his wife, Marguerite Zorach, an important artist in her own right. Although Zorach was a painter as well as a sculptor, he may be best known for a large female nude...

Cast stone Sculpture of Nude with Cat by William Zorach Incised signature near base '©WZ Zorach William Zorach' with publisher's mark. This work is from the edition published by Robi...

Kiddie Kar exemplifies the integration of the primitive aesthetic and the depiction of family in William’s work. The primitive aspect of this particular painting is apparent in its d...

This Sculpture "Hen" by William Zorach in polished bronze is numbered 3/6 although according to the artist son, only 4 were ever cast. Executed in 1946, signed on the reverse and nu...