About the work

A highly important work from William Zorach’s well-documented five-month sojourn to Yosemite in 1920. The painting is accompanied by a 1964 handwritten letter [PDF] from the artist where he discusses a visit to Tucson to appear at an exhibition of his watercolors at the University of Arizona art gallery, and in which he briefly reflects on his experiences at Yosemite in 1920.

Zorach created a good many watercolors during his 1920 visit, but few approach the quality and refinement of the watercolor offered. Of his exceptional Yosemite works, one resides in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and another at the Brooklyn Museum. (Others may exist in private collections or simply escaped our attention.) Graphite drawings from the same series of noteworthy quality are held by the Whitney Museum of American Art, Addison Gallery of American Art, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. The Smithsonian American Art Museum held a retrospective exhibition of Zorach’s works in 1967, not long after his passing.

While the painting represents Zorach’s crossing from a world of ensconced artistic tradition into one of shocking aesthetic innovation, it is also important for promoting the value and history of the country’s national parks and is itself a significant piece of Yosemite’s legacy.

A special issue of the journal of the California Historical Society published in 1993 referred to Zorach as one of the three most celebrated artists of the twentieth century who painted Yosemite landscapes. The other two artists mentioned were Georgia O’Keeffe and Wayne Thiebaud.

About the artist…

William Zorach (1887-1966) and his wife Marguerite (1887-1968) were part of a community of artists—including Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Arthur Dove—who began experimenting with abstraction in the 1910s. The avant-garde ideas now accepted as art-historical facts were, at that time, radical and unprecedented. In the 1930s, Zorach explained the implications of their break with tradition when he observed, “Modern art to my generation was a spiritual awakening, a freeing of art from the idea of copying nature. We entered into a whole new world of form and color that opened up before us.” This context helps explain why in the second decade of the 1900s, when a series of important exhibitions sought to put before the American public the very best examples of modern American art, the artists were called “wild young men.” (Important female artists were also shown, including Katherine Dreier and Marguerite Zorach.)

Though these painters did not exhibit the revolutionary fervor of the Europeans, we should not overlook the significance of their accomplishments. Rejecting the security of the known and embracing the pursuit of something completely new inspired both excitement and trepidation. Artists whose works were exhibited included Dove, Demuth, Dreier, Marin, Schamberg, Sheeler, Frost, Maurer, Hartley, Stella, Man Ray, Walkowitz, Weber, and the Zorachs, among others. Collectors soon appeared who took a special interest in early American modernism.

Leading up to his Yosemite visit, Zorach’s works demonstrated integration of his academic training with modernist influences. In his depiction of Yosemite Valley, he abandoned angularities of Cubism in favor of looseness and fluidity; he simplified forms and minimized or completely eliminated details. Smaller forms meant to be in the distance appear as sharply described as those in the foreground, effectively flattening the image. Hints of bold color playfully hark back to Fauvist and Expressionist influences, revealing feelings and inner reactions to the subject, while the largeness of the perspective pays appropriate tribute to the grandeur of the scenery.

Thus the significance of this work is not for emulating a particular modernist style or school, but rather Zorach’s own modernist interpretation of the subject. It represents a milestone moment in the maturation of his work in watercolor and his evolution into a true American modernist painter.

Zorach’s brush with death in Yosemite

An interesting side story to his visit occurred when young Ansel Adams invited Zorach to join him climbing Grizzly Peak. The ascent took all day, more than 2000 feet up from the valley floor. All went well until the pair elected to take a shortcut down LeConte Gully, instead of risking the longer path in darkness. Zorach had strayed off the safer north side of the gully when he slipped on the polished shelf of granite leading down to a near-vertical drop of several hundred feet. His sketches flew up in the air and drifted away. He slid toward the edge while Ansel could only watch in horror. At the last instant Zorach caught hold of a small tree. Ansel removed his shoes and socks and made his way to the artist. They used their belts to form a lifeline and moved barefoot away from the edge. They made it down the mountain, bloody, bruised, and without their shoes.

Primary sources used: “Early American Modernist Painting 1910-1935,” Abraham A. Davidson, Harper & Row Publishers, NY, 1981; “Art is My Life, Autobiography of William Zorach,” World Publishing Company, Cleveland and NY, 1967; “Zorach, Harmonies and Contrasts,” Portland Museum of Art, catalogue published in conjunction with exhibition of the same name, 2001; Sierra Magazine, January/February 2002, “Molded by Mountains,” by Stephen Fox; “Yosemite and Sequoia: A Century of California National Parks,” University of California Press, June, 1993.

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