The respectful installation at the Brooklyn Museum of William Zorach’s pictorial achievement traces his steps from Lithuania, to Cleveland, to New York and to Paris. Allowing Curator Donelson Hoopes to speak for the earliest years in his commendable catalog essay, perhaps the best place to join Zorach is in 1907, when, after a brief stay at the National Academy of Design in New York, he travels to Paris and then throughout France, and eventually to Switzerland and Germany. This continental sojourn, which ended in 1912, leads to an Edenic and animalistic imagery much in the debt of Rodin, even though Zorach is still a decade away from his resolve to become a sculptor.
After a brief flirtation with Divisionism in 1911, Zorach then turns to the healthy eroticism epitomized by Rodin’s The Kiss which he updates with the chromatic saturations and the linear freedom he saw firsthand in the campaigns of the German and French Expressionists, most particularly in the work of Matisse. Zorach’s powerful style anchors its rhythmic impulse not only to Expressionist color precepts but to attitudes still linked to the Art Nouveau. While such postulates would appear novel in America—if not downright anarchic—Zorach’s earliest mature pictorial aims can only generously be viewed as decorative even as they are derivative. Apparently the same attitude may be expressed with regard to the work of Zorach’s wife, Marguerite. A photograph, taken of her in their New York studio during the First World War, presents her nuzzling their earth child, Dahlov, before an Art Nouveau batik of a pattern explored in French and German design a full quarter century earlier.
Zorach’s German tour of 1911 seems striking as it leads one to entertain the notion that Zorach’s newfound Rodinish persona, Matissian jauntiness and decorative eurhythmy may have been partially modeled by exposure to the theoretical and catalytic Expressionism of Franz Marc. Several versions of Spring, of 1912 through 1914, emphasize Zorach’s Matissian pietism despite Zorach’s disclaimers to the contrary. By the end of 1913, Zorach’s elementarist knock-off of Matisse’s Joie de Vivre begins to suffer from the antipodal repulsions of an art which on one hand aspires to be emotionally saturated, spontaneous and blatantly sentimentalized and, on the other, which is bound to the formalistic desiderata of Cubism. In this connection, the German trip of 1911 seems even more attractive to speculate on as Franz Marc of the Blue Rider was, at the moment, the only artist to convincingly carry off this meeting of oil and water. It is telling that the difficult reductive problems of the analytical phase of Cubism, 1907–1910, were foreign to Zorach’s effusive sensibility. Rather, he was captive to the decorative potentials of Analytical Cubism (the same charge can be made to all but the most elect figures of the Cubist movement) which are visible in his work from the end of 1914 on.
At this juncture Zorach turns his back even on his bold Rousseauistic version of the terrestrial paradise. From 1915 on, painting in isolation from the Parisian mainstream by an ocean and a world war, Zorach will undertake to grindingly apply the many diverse problems he first carried home with him. But in isolation they lead to, for the most part, an oeuvre of accomplished curiosa and awkward provincialism. Curator Hoopes is himself perplexed by this development. Despair over the war is projected as an explanation, but “whatever the cause, form in Zorach’s painting lost its sinuous, organic quality and suddenly acquired hard edges.” This in no way argues that Zorach’s American work did not coincide with vanguardist views. It most certainly did. It must always be remembered that both the Zorachs contributed works (regrettably lost) to the epochal Armory Exhibition and that this fact alone suffices to satisfy at least national demands on Zorach’s immortality. In the period following the First World War, Zorach’s proficiency with Cubist syntax led him into a rather tight and hieratic anecdotalism. Still impelled by his attachment to Gaia, Zorach attempted a large body of landscapes—in fact, his most remarkable Cubist efforts—which, though labored, are grandly empathic in their intentions. His views of the trees, falls and gulleys of the Yosemite are Zorach’s most intellectually stringent Cubist works. In them, if one reads them generously, one sees the motival and symbolic distillations central, for example, to Futuristic doctrine, and they adumbrate similar symbolic intentions in the Precisionist renderings of plant motifs in the work of Georgia O’Keeffe. Yet, in Zorach’s pictures, there is too often a hapless conflict between theme and mechanic. This dilemma—Zorach may have regarded it as a dead end—was of course cured by turning from painting to sculpture. The results of this decision may be measured in the resumé of Zorach’s sculptural career at the Danenberg Galleries.
My own view is that the decision was regrettable. Zorach’s sculptural contribution seems uninteresting to me, except as a measure of the continuing provincialism of American art establishment throughout the 1930s.
Instead of turning for guidance to Brancusi, with whom he superficially shares a similar childhood—one in Rumania, the other in Lithuania—Zorach atavistically turns to his first love, Rodin, and atrophies, at the same stroke, the lessons of Maillol, transforming these great sculptural contributions into petty family groups misread as archaic allegories. Rather than retrace the sculptural oeuvre, which for all its great period charm is so slight, we need only to compare the dreadful posing of Zorach’s vast and static Embrace of 1933 against Rodin’s vital The Kiss of the 1890s. Zorach’s adoption of sculpture marks, in my view of him, a renunciation of Cubism, or ratherof Cubism’s problems. That he began to attack them in the Yosemite is undeniable. Yet to leave them unresolved and abandoned suggests that Zorach was insufficiently equipped intellectually to grapple with them. In the short view, Zorach’s contribution to the American sculptural parade of the 1930s will always be remembered as considerable, taking note of the battery of pseudo Greeks and circus cyclists that were carved out of some spurious notion of truth to materials and integrity. In the long view, however, despite Zorach’s obvious cosmic intentions, or all conciliating universal embrace, and admitting the sheer difficulty of the carving, all this accounted for and granted, what is left still only measures once more the provincial views of established American masters during this same decade.
—Robert Pincus-Witten
