Raised in poverty, Zorach was apprenticed to a Cleveland, Ohio, lithographic workshop when he was about twelve. By the age of twenty, in 1907, he had not only learned his craft but saved enough to study at the National Academy of Design in New York and, later, at Jacques-Emile Blanche’s atelier in Paris. While there, he exhibited his early conservative paintings in the influential 1911 Salon de Automne, and he met Marguerite Thompson, the gifted California painter who later became his wife. Both Zorachs were eventually influenced in their work by the paintings they had seen at 27 rue de Fleurus, in Gertrudeand Leo Stein’s impressive collection of Post-Impressionist, Fauvist, and Cubist canvases. Subsequently, the Zorachs were then represented in the legendary Sixty-Ninth Regimental Armory Show in 1913 that forever changed American ideas about art. William Zorach was among the early painters whom Charles Daniel represented in his New York gallery, along with Charles Demuth. The two painters probably met on Cape Cod, where they were among those who founded the Provincetown Players there in 1914. Back in New York, Zorach designed sets for the company and even appeared in one of Eugene O’Neills early plays. Like Demuth, Zorach soon grew disenchanted with Charles Daniel’s bookkeeping and questionable payments for work sold at his gallery. After four years with Daniel, Zorach broke away to exhibit his and his wife’s work in their Greenwich Village studio. Not long afterward, he abandoned painting entirely in favor of sculpture, a medium in which he achieved considerable success during a long career. I always feel that my picture is a thing that must live by itself and not the representation of some little corner of nature,” he said to art critic Henry McBride in 1917. “In each one I organize a little world that I hope will strike in the heart of the spectator similar emotions to those that events in my own life have struck within me. Life to me is full of wonder and fancy and the mystery of a strange subconscious beyond, that we can only grasp fragments of, when our senses are keyed up to their highest emotional receptivity.”
