William ZorachThis exhibition of William Zorach shows work from the tumultuous and prolific period in his life when he was making the transference from painting to sculpture. That it was a time of upheaval in American art, when the European influence was making its first tidal waves, shows in the range of debts evident. Zorach moved to New York City in 1908 while still a teenager and studied for two years at the National Academy of Design. He'd already been working for several years in Cleveland as a lithographer and taking art classes at night. While in New York City, he would most likely have seen a Matisse exhibition at Alfred Stieglitz's "291" Gallery and the famous exhibition of The Eight (the "Ashcan" artists) at William Macbeth's gallery. In 1910 he went to where the action was, Paris, and in his two exciting years there he studied, painted, and absorbed. He saw Cezanne's paintings but "couldn't understand cubism." He made it to Gertrude Stein's salon. He met his future wife, Marguerite Thompson, also a painter. He had four paintings selected for a salon show (1911). Returning to the states, he and wife found, unhappily, that the public was less than enthusiastic for new painting and he returned to his work as a lithographer. Two of his paintings were selected by jury for the 1913 Armory show (along with Zorach, uninvited artists who'd submitted work for jury selection and been accepted included Stuart Davis, Edward Hopper, Joseph Stella and his wife, among others). In 1916, eight of his paintings were included in the important Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters at the Anderson Galleries for which he made this statement: "It is the inner spirit of things I seek to express." This current exhibition covers the decade from 1917–1927 and it reveals a good deal of experimentation. We can see Zorach passing through the influences of Cezanne, Picasso, Delauney, and the Cubists. There's nothing in his paintings or drawings that we haven't already seen in works by painters now better known than him and more acclaimed for their originality. But as a synthesizer and appropriator of ideas of the time, his accomplishments are very fine. The paintings, if not entirely original, are still terrific. In all of them the figures and their environment merge as the components of each, broken down into blocks of color and design, are treated as equal. It is as if we were looking past the surface of things to a point where we see that everything is comprised of the same basic elements with shape being merely a manifestation of slightly different arrangements of the elements. Heralding more the artistic than the scientific however, he makes of this investigation a bold new vision. So though a table is charged with the same kinetic brush strokes as the arm resting on it, it is just that relationship—figure (human), table (prop) and painterly arrangement (process)—that Zorach concerns himself with. His paintings though, are not as clean as those of his contemporaries. In the outer edges, especially, of his paintings the colors get muddied and the blocks and forms are not as deftly handled. His sense of colors blending in patchwork is just not as staid or spectacular as that of say, Delauney, Picasso or Braque. His have the look of having been done too quickly with little regard for the fine delineation and firm pronouncement that this new way of looking, breaking up the picture plane, called for. His pull toward the abstraction of arrangement ends up at a point a little short of say, Marin, for this reason. Without at starker contrast between elements, each doesn't stand out as boldly. His wash effects and blurring of blocks causes more of a neutral/pause effect than a harsh trumpet blast of location and delineation. We're fortunate in this show to be able to see hanging side by side a drawing and painting of the same subject: "Pelican Cage-Central Park," both of the 1917-8 period. The drawing is the far more interesting of the two since it is more carefully worked out. In both, he fuses the decorative with the scene—the view is moving before our eyes into a new structure where lines and spatial arrangement assume a new dimension in which the potential energy of matter is given visual interpretation. In the drawing, the individual forms—birds, cars, people—are drawn with a loving attention to the transference from real to objective form. The draftsmanship is precise, shading contrasts against outlined figures, and the entire composition is united by arc lines which enclose and unify the details. In the painting, the people are gone and the composition becomes more decorative. The paint is handled sketchily and the dark colors make it difficult to distinguish the ingredients. Three drawings done at Yosemite in 1920 are outstanding for their sensualness, delicacy and sense of the vibrant energy contained in nature. The two waterfall views are very erotic as they resemble female genitalia and a view of cliffs, like a Chinese brush drawing, imbues the permanence of the jagged mountain side with a sense of the softness of sympathetic motion we bring to it. Once he turned to sculpture in 1917, he found the new language more suited to his needs. It's readily evident that with sculpture he's on firmer ground. In granite, wood or bronze, the pieces (portraits mostly) stand erect, firm and proud. With sculpture he's able to soften features and extend surfaces to a hint of synthesis without the distraction of having to blend them in with a background surface. With two relief panels from 1927, Family Group, and a smaller panel from 1917, Waterfall, he's at the height of his power to instill vibrancy and the touch of figures moving into another worldliness that pays tribute to them as ideal beings. Though he'd use watercolors for sketching, he'd never touch oils after 1922 (he died in 1966). (Arts, March 1986) |