Interpretive text from Exploring American Art: An Online Resource for the American Collections

Although William Zorach is perhaps best known as a sculptor, he began his career as a pioneering modernist painter.  Born in Lithuania, he came to the United States at a young age and eventually settled with his family in Cleveland, Ohio.  He began to study painting and printmaking, and by 1907 he was taking his first courses at the National Academy of Design in New York City.  Study in Paris followed, and there, in 1910, Zorach met his future wife, Marguerite Thompson (1887-1968).  Both shared an interest in avant-garde art, and after their marriage in late 1912, the Zorachs lived and worked in New York.  William painted actively through the 1910s and early 1920s, but by 1922 he had turned to sculpture as his primary means of expression.

As a sculptor, Zorach almost single-handedly revived the technique of direct carving from stone and wood.  Critics admired the massive simplicity of his human and animal figures, and the distinctiveness of his work marked him as a leader in a new generation of American sculptors.  Although Zorach's subjects and style changed little over the years, the artist enjoyed success throughout his career.  In addition to his sculpture, Zorach was a longtime teacher at the Art Students League of New York as well as the author of a book on sculpture and an autobiography, Art Is My Life.  Zorach died in 1966.

The late 1910s were an especially fruitful period in the careers of William and Marguerite Zorach.  During summers spent in New Hampshire (1915, 1917-18) and Provincetown, Massachusetts (1916), the Zorachs absorbed Expressionist and Cubist styles, blending these with the Fauvism that they had developed while studying art together in France.  With intuitive skill, both artists were able to combine the different movements, reformulating them into personal idioms characterized by bold forms and surprising lyricism.  Despite their careful study of abstract and Expressionist modes, however, William and Marguerite remained strongly informed by their surroundings.  Seldom straying from real subjects, their vision represents a unique confluence of avant-garde style and the New England scene.

Painted in 1917, William Zorach's Plowing the Fields depicts the mountainous terrain in the vicinity of the artists' summer residence at "Echo Farm" near Plainfield, New Hampshire.  Just below the center of the canvas, two figures plow a field with the aid of horses, cutting undulating pink furrows in the green turf.  A herd of black-and-white farm animals grazes underneath pine trees in the lower right, while a dead tree and several wildflowers draw attention to the foreground.  In the background, rolling hills and distant forests give way to purple mountains.

Although there is a hint of Cubism in the layered, collagelike quality of the landscape elements, the arbitrary color and poetic feeling of Zorach's composition point more directly to the work of Henri Matisse (1869-1954).  A leader of the so-called Fauves (wild beasts), Matisse took prevailing Neoimpressionist modes a step further, generating a new style based on striking juxtapositions of color and stylized delineation of forms.  Nonetheless, Matisse's subjects were often intimate or idyllic in nature, belying the "wildness" of his technique.  Looking to classical imagery of bathers, dancers, and musicians,  Matisse's best-known works were in effect modern pastorales, celebrating the vitality of the earth and the joy of youth.

Plowing the Fields parallels Matisse's works in its use of bright pinks, greens, and purples.  Placed in close proximity to one another, the colors make a strong impact and vie with the composition itself for the viewer's attention.  The sketchlike, almost calligraphic rendering of figures, trees, and mountains also recalls Matisse.  In addition, Zorach's basic themes, the fertility of the land and its cycles of death and rebirth, resonate with Matisse's own arcadian outlook.  

Matisse, however, was only a starting point for Zorach.  In general, Plowing the Fields is less formal than the French artist's work.  There is more detail and the sense of the subject's basis in reality is more convincing.  Whereas Matisse and other European avant-garde artists sought primarily to respond to previous movements in art, Zorach and his fellow Americans tended to use the outward trappings of modern style to express their personal responses to a given subject.  To a certain extent, this explains the ease with which Zorach was able to synthesize Fauvism, Expressionism, and Cubism.  For Zorach, modernist styles helped him to realize his own goals as an artist, which he explained in a statement printed on the occasion of his inclusion in the important Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters, held in New York in 1916:

It is the inner spirit of things that I seek to express, the essential relation of forms and colors to universal things.  Each form and color has a spiritual significance to me, and I try to combine those forms and colors within my space to express that inner feeling which something in nature or life has given me.  The moment I place one line or color upon my canvas, that moment I feel the need of other lines and colors to express the inner rhythm.  I am organizing a new world in which each form and color exists and lives only in so far as it has meaning in relation to every other form and color in that space.(1)

Plowing the Fields was originally owned by William and Arlene Kent, early patrons of the Zorachs.  The painting entered the Currier collection in 1987 and is today one of the Museum's premier examples of American modernism.  

VSD

NOTE

1.  William Zorach quoted in Marilyn Friedman Hoffman, Marguerite and William Zorach:  The Cubist Years:  1915-1918 (ex. cat. Currier Gallery of Art, 1987), p. 19.

REFERENCES

Marilyn Friedman Hoffman, Marguerite and William Zorach:  The Cubist Years:  1915-1918.  Ex. cat. Currier Gallery of Art, 1987.

Donelson F. Hoopes. William Zorach:  Paintings, Watercolors and Drawings, 1911-1922.  Ex. cat. Brooklyn Museum, 1968.