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DESCRIPTION:
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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 Cleveland School of Art. In 1910, Zorach traveled to Paris to study at 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.
Together with his wife Marguerite, William Zorach produced a number of Cubist-style paintings for the Armory Show of 1913 and the Forum Exhibition held in New York in 1916. The art of both William and Marguerite was very close in style through much of the decade; it was not until 1918 that their aesthetic directions diverged. By 1922, William Zorach abandoned the canvas and committed himself solely to the creation of sculpture.
During the summers between 1913 and 1922, husband and wife painted mostly in the country and found great inspiration in the landscape while vacationing in the mountains of New Hampshire, Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Yosemite National Park. They used these excursions to collaborate and experiment with new mediums.
Zorach’s watercolors of Yosemite National Park, where he and Marguerite camped for six months during the summer of 1920, are thought to be some of his finest works. Of his watercolors, Zorach has said, “there are things one does for the pure love of form and color, in the easy abandonment to the moods and the fancies of the moment. These are my watercolors.” This was his first visit to the American West and Zorach was overwhelmed by the majesty of the park’s scenery.
Bridal Veil Falls, Yosemite, depicts one of the many beautiful waterfalls found in the park. With a 620 foot drop, it is not the tallest but one of the more scenic falls because of the arcing rock formation over which the water cascades. Zorach delighted in the colors of this scene: the deep blue pool at the center bordered by the varying greens and blues of the surrounding trees. He forms the rocks with the white of the paper, adding highlights in blues and greens to indicate outcroppings. Mirroring the pool of water is a curve of sky which Zorach depicts in an array of blue tones.
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