Marguerite Thompson Zorach

Family of the artist

Kraushaar Galleries, New York

Acquired from the above by the present owner

While studying in Paris at La Palette, works by Matisse, Van Gogh and Derain inspired Marguerite Thompson Zorach’s early Fauvist paintings. Zorach was one of the early Americans to adopt Cubist practices, although she was less interested in using fragmented forms to create objects in multiple angles. Instead she valued the style’s ability to create rhythmic patterns (Elizabeth Thompson Colleary, "Marguerite Thompson Zorach: Some Newly Discovered Works, 1910 - 1913," Woman’s Art Journal, vol. 23, issue 1, 2002, p. 27). Zorach expressed her Cubist vision in a 1912 letter to her husband, the artist William Zorach: “Perfectly flat, no planes, distance, perspective anything” (quoted in Roberta K. Tarbell, Marguerite Zorach: The Early Years, 1908-1920, D.C., 1973, p. 20). Zorach and her husband were early adopters of a Post-Impressionist style which was not yet as popularized in America as in Europe. Their participation in the 1913 Armory show pushed their careers to the forefront of American art, especially for Marguerite.

In the summer of 1916 the Zorachs spent the summer in Provincetown, Cape Cod where they became involved with the Provincetown Players. Here, their work was closely related to that of Arthur Dove and the Sychromist movement in which rhythmic and harmonious colors are used in abstract shapes. The recto of the present work depicts a colorful and playful landscape, with bright orange shrubbery, actively swaying multi-colored trees and rolling sunset-colored hills. Zorach employs flat, colored shapes to create a three-dimensional, receding landscape. The verso presents a portrait of a man, possibly Zorach’s father, in front of a geometric background. The man has his eyes closed and his face is painted with a visible palette of pastels and whites. This side reveals Zorach’s Cubist influences while the coloration of the work as a whole is emblematic of Fauvism, explosive and bright. The Zorach’s saw painting on both sides of the canvas as an economic opportunity. According to William Zorach, “We survived these years by never spending a cent on anything that was non essential…when desperate we painted on both sides of the canvas” (quoted in Art is My Life, New York 1967, p. 35). Marguerite Zorach’s incredible double-sided work is emblematic of the Post-Impressionist style that dominated her early career.