William Zorach Art
American, 1887-1966
Born in 1887, by 1930, he was one of America’s premier 20th century sculptors and was honored with multiple commissions and exhibitions including at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Dallas Museum of Fine Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and numerous others.
He studied in New York City at the National Academy of Design and also in Paris under the mentoring of Jacques-Emile Blanche. It was in Paris in the first decade of the 20th century where Zorach’s path crossed with Marguerite, his soon to be wife. Both Marguerite and William were both represented in the landmark Armory Show of 1913.
William continued to paint for the next two decades, but increasingly experimenting with sculpture. By the mid 20’s he was carving significant works in marble and stone. By the early 30’s, he abandoned painting entirely in favor of a new art form, sculpture. I t was in sculpture that Zorach found his true voice as an artist and achieved considerable success. “Sculpture, direct carving, was an expanding universe, a liberation and a natural form of expression to me.” Zorach stated.
Museum Collections:
Amon Carter Museum of American Art
Arizona State University Art Museum
Boca Raton Museum of Art
Butler Institute of American Art
Cleveland Artists Foundation
Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center
Cornish Colony Museum
Dallas Museum of Art
Delaware Art Museum
Edwin a Ulrich Museum of Art
Farnsworth Art Museum
Flint Institute of Arts
Frederick R Weisman Art Museum
Georgia Museum of Art
Herbert F Johnson Museum of Art
Jack S Blanton Museum of Art
LaSalle University Art Museum
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Lowe Art Museum
Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum
Memorial Art Gallery
Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC
Middlebury College Museum of Art
Minneapolis Institute of Arts
Mobile Museum of Art
Museum of Fine Art-Boston
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Portland Museum of Art
Smithsonian Museum of Art
The Brooklyn Museum of Art
The Canton Museum of Art
The Columbus Museum of Art-Ohio
The Columbus Museum-Georgia
The Cummer Museum Of Art & Gardens
The Currier Museum of Art
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
The Newark Museum
The Phillips Collection
The Phillips Museum of Art
The University of Michigan Museum of Art
Whitney Museum of American Art
Worcester Art Museum
Yosemite Museum
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Artist: William Zorach
"Pioneer Family" WPA American Modernism Plaster Maquette Realism 20th Century
By William Zorach
Located in New York, NY
"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...
Category
1920s American Modern William Zorach Art
Materials
Plaster
Watercolor Painting by William Zorach, Titled "Redwoods, Yosemite Valley", 1920
By William Zorach
Located in New York, NY
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...
Category
1920s William Zorach Art
Materials
Watercolor, Pencil
Quebec City, Fauve Landscape
By William Zorach
Located in Miami, FL
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...
Category
Early 20th Century Expressionist William Zorach Art
Materials
Watercolor
First Steps, Early 20th Century Bronze Sculpture, Cleveland School
By William Zorach
Located in Beachwood, OH
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...
Category
1910s William Zorach Art
Materials
Bronze
Woodlands (Double-sided), Impressionist Watercolor on Paper by William Zorach
By William Zorach
Located in Long Island City, NY
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 ...
Category
1910s Impressionist William Zorach Art
Materials
Watercolor
William Zorach Oil on Canvas Painting Titled "Kiddie Kar", Dated 1920
By William Zorach
Located in New York, NY
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...
Category
1920s William Zorach Art
Materials
Oil
Hen, Gilded Hen in Polished Bronze
By William Zorach
Located in Brookville, NY
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...
Category
1940s American Modern William Zorach Art
Materials
Bronze
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William Zorach Watercolor Painting, Forest Landscape
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Artist/Designer; Manufacturer: William Zorach (American, 1887-1966)
Marking(s); notes: signed, marking(s); 1942
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PORTRAIT OF NATHANIEL KAZ
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Zorach, William (American 1887-1966). PORTRAIT OF NATHANIEL KAZ. Pencil on paper, 1956. Inscribed and signed by Zorach as follows: "Nat Kaz / William Zorach / Sept 19 1920 / Feb 19, ...
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Girl with Clasped Hands
By William Zorach
Located in Fairlawn, OH
Girl with Clasped Hands
Watercolor on paper, 1913
Signed and dated lower right (see photo)
Provenance: Gift of the Artist
Felix ...
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1910s American Modern William Zorach Art
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TEN TREES ON A HILL
By William Zorach
Located in Portland, ME
Zorach, William (American, 1887-1966). LANDSCAPE WITH CLOUDS. Watercolor and pencil on paper, not dated, but circa 1913. Unsigned, but inscribed verso "By William Zorach/(Tessim Zorach)." Tessim Zorach, (1915-1995) was the eldest of the children of William and Marguerite Zorach. 8 x 11 1/2 inches, the full sheet. Provenance, Tessim Zorach, Zabriskie Gallery...
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1910s William Zorach Art
Materials
Watercolor
LANDSCAPE WITH CLOUDS
By William Zorach
Located in Portland, ME
Zorach, William (American, 1887-1966). LANDSCAPE WITH CLOUDS. Watercolor on paper, 1913. Signed and dated in pencil, lower right. 9 1/2 x 11 inches, the full sheet. Provenance, The a...
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1910s William Zorach Art
Materials
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"Beach Day"
By William Zorach
Located in Southampton, NY
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"Study of a Hand, 1934"
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Located in Southampton, NY
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1930s American Modern William Zorach Art
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Graphite
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By William Zorach
Located in Wiscasset, ME
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Bibliography:
Henry Adams, Out of the Kok...
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William Zorach Art
William Zorach art for sale on 1stDibs.
Find a wide variety of authentic William Zorach art available for sale on 1stDibs. You can also browse by medium to find art by William Zorach in paint, watercolor, oil paint and more. Much of the original work by this artist or collective was created during the 20th century and is mostly associated with the modern style. Not every interior allows for large William Zorach art, so small editions measuring 7 inches across are available. Customers who are interested in this artist might also find the work of Walter Beach Humphrey, Stuart Davis, and Jan Matulka. William Zorach art prices can differ depending upon medium, time period and other attributes. On 1stDibs, the price for these items starts at $1,875 and tops out at $45,000, while the average work can sell for $18,000.