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Zorach, William American, 1887- 1966 Born in Yurbarkas, Lithuania, Zorach immigrated with his family to Cleveland, Ohio in 1983, and soon began courses at the Cleveland Institute of Fine Art.He attended the National Academy of Design in New York between 1907 and 1908, then went on to Paris where he studied under Jacques-Emile Blanche at Academie de la Palette. While there, he exhibited his early conservative paintings in the influential 1911 Salon de Automne, and met Marguerite Thompson, the gifted California painter who later became his wife. William Zorach was among the early painters whom Charles Daniel represented in his New York gallery, along with Charles Demuth. The two painters probably met on Cape Cod, where they were among those who founded the Provincetown Players there in 1914. Back in New York, Zorach designed sets for the company and even appeared in one of Eugene O’Neills early plays. 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 full, decorative compositions and was therefore reluctant to abandon it completely.However, he was impelled toward sculpting, and in 1922, he painted his last oil. Zorach found his sculptural direction by instinct, but was not unaware of what other sculptors were doing, both in the United States and abroad.He soon allied himself with a growing number of modern sculptors who believed in the aesthetic 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. Zorach’s paintings and sculptures were included in major exhibitions across North America in the 1920’s and 1930’s and he was honoured with a retrospective exhibition in 1959 at Whitney Museum of American Art in NewYork.Today his work can be found in such prestigious museums as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Boston Museum of Fine Art, the Los Angeles Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art. |
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