William Zorach, study for "Expanding Universe"

About William Zorach (1889 - 1966)

William Zorach was a Lithuanian-born American artist whose parents immigrated to the United States when Zorach was a few years old. Having settled in Cleveland, OH, Zorach dropped out of school at the age of thirteen to help support his family by working in a lithographer’s studio.  While continuing to work, Zorach studied painting in Cleveland and eventually moved to New York City at the age of nineteen to study painting at the National Academy of Design.

 

In 1910, Zorach travelled to Paris where he planned on studying academic painting. At the Académie de La Palette he met his future wife and collaborator, Marguerite Thompson, who introduced him to the avant-garde painters of the day, influence the direction that his work would eventually follow.

 

Both Zorach and Thompson were proponents of the prevalent movements of the time in Paris, absorbing the Cubist and Fauvist idioms which they brought back to New York, where they would be among the first artists to introduce such artistic styles to the U.S. The couple married and settled in New York, and in 1913, they both exhibited their works in the famous Armory Show.

 

By the late teens and early ‘20’s, Zorach began experimenting with sculpture, eventually abandoning painting altogether to focuse on sculpture. By 1929, Zorach became a sculpture instructor at the Art Students League, espousing a “direct-carving” approach and eschewing the more academic approach of creating a clay model first. His early works in sculpture were influenced by Cubism, as well as by the primitive and African art to which he was drawn. 

 

Zorach continued to teach at the Art Students League up until 1960, all the while exhibiting his work and carrying out public commissions and spending his final years in Bath, Maine where he died in 1966. His works can be found in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art, The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.