William Zorach (1889-1966) Lived/Active; Ohio, New York, Maine

Bay Point, Maine
Signed (l.r.): Zorach
Watercolor on paper
20” x 27” (sheet), 33” x 39” (frame).
Over-all in great condition, minor toning along edges. Mat replaced, housed in original frame.
Provenance: The Downtown Gallery, New York, 1948; Collection of Laurence S. Rockefeller; Sotheby’s, New York, 2005; The Collection of Sanford Smith.

William Zorach immigrated to Ohio from Lithuania with his family in 1891. He went on to study drawing and painting at the Cleveland School of Art while training in lithography. He moved to New York in 1907 to study painting at the National Academy of Design and in 1910 went to Paris to enroll at the progressive La Palette Academy. While there, he met his future wife, (American artist) Marguerite Thompson, who introduced him to avant-garde painting, igniting his fascination with Fauvism and Cubism.
Zorach and Thompson returned to New York where he exhibited at the Armory Show of 1913, then at the Whitney Studio Club and the Society of Independent Artists.
In 1917, Zorach began carving wood. Without any formal training, he transitioned to sculpture, practicing “direct carving,” definitively giving up painting by 1922.
Beginning in 1929, Zorach taught at the progressive Art Students League in New York, and from 1946 until his death he and his wife were Visiting Artists at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Both were represented at The Downtown Gallery in New York.
In the 1940s, Zorach remerged as a painter, now in the medium of watercolor. A retrospective of his work at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art in 1959 acknowledged his place among twentieth-century America’s most important artists.
Zorach’s works reside in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Fine Art, Boston; and the Art Institute of Chicago.
His daughter, Dahlov Ipcar, also became a celebrated artist.