February 26, 1974
An exhibition of early paintings, drawings and prints by Marguerite Zorach (1887-1968) will open at The Brooklyn Museum March 13, and will remain on view through April 21,
Centered around a group of re-discovered canvasses painted in the Orient and in California’s Sierra Mountains in 1911-2, the exhibition reveals the artist as an innovator, arid one very au courant with avante garde European paInting. These early works have not been seen in almost 60 years. After two showings of her paintings in 1912, they were rolled up and stored. Roberta K. Tarbell, a Smithsonian pre-Doctoral Fellow from the University of Delaware, uncovered them in 1970 while doing research on the artist’s sculptor-husband William Zorach. This, in turn, prompted the National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, to organize the present exhibition of 40 works.
The early student paintings of Marguerite Zorach done in France from 1908 to 1911, those done in the Orient and in California in 1911 and 1912, and the later works done in New York and New England through 1920 reflect her contact with and her receptiveness to first Fauvism, and later Cubism and the works of the Blaue Reiter artists.
The exhibition places particular emphasis on the 1911-12 canvasses because the artist’s freedom of expression and her understanding of avante garde European paintings is most evident in these works.
Marguerite Zorach and her husband were considered artists of comparable stature from the time of their marriage in 1912 until 1916. In the years that followed, her reputation was gradually overshadowed by that of her husband. The current exhibition helps to place her works in perspective, and to provoke an upward re-evaluation of her overall artistic achievements.
Writing in the fully illustrated catalogue which accompanies the exhibition, Joshua Taylor, Director of the National Collection, notes that “Marguerite Zorach made a spirited contribution to the discovery of new paths in art in America in that sensitive period before the first World War, and is worthy of much more attention than she has heretofore been accorded.”
Brooklyn Museum Archives. Records of the Department of Public Information. Press releases, 1971 - 1988. 1974, 016-17. View Original
