Zorach, William

Zorach, William (b Eurburg [now Yurbarkas], 1889; d Bath, Me., 15 Nov. 1966).
Lithuanian-born American sculptor. Initially Zorach worked as a painter in a vivid Fauvist style, but he took up sculpture in 1917 and abandoned painting (apart from watercolours) about five years later. His sculpture is figurative and its salient characteristics are firm contours, blocklike bulk, and suppression of details: ‘I owe most’, he said, ‘to the great periods of primitive carving in the past—not to the modern or the classical Greeks, but to the Africans, the Persians, the Mesopotamians, the archaic Greeks and of course to the Egyptians.’ He was a pioneer in America of the revival of direct carving in stone and wood and in this as well as in his formal austerity he exercised a powerful influence on modern American sculpture. He had numerous major commissions, including relief carvings for the Municipal Court Building, New York (1958). His most famous work is not a carving, however, but the aluminium Spirit of the Dance (1932) for Radio City Music Hall, New York—a heroic female figure that was banished for a time because of its nudity but reinstated by public pressure. Zorach taught at the Art Students League from 1929 to 1966. His wife Marguerite Thompson Zorach (1887–1968) was one of America's leading modernist painters in the years immediately before and immediately after the Armory Show (1913), in which both she and her husband exhibited. At this time she painted in a style influenced by Fauvism and Expressionism. In her later career, however, much of her time was spent selflessly helping her husband with his sculptural commissions, producing many of the preliminary drawings for his work.