Art coupling

The Zorachs at the PMA

By Jenna Russell

Harmonies and Contrasts shows at the Portland Museum of Art through Jan. 27, 2002. Call (207) 775-6148.

BATHING GIRL: Borneo mahogany, 1930, by William Zorach.

The story of Marguerite and William Zorach’s first meeting, at art school in Paris in 1911, contains in two sentences everything we need to know about the time, the place, and the main characters. Boy met girl; girl was painting a nude in pink, blue, and yellow. Boy “couldn’t understand why such a nice girl would paint such wild pictures.” There’s no indication he meant it ironically, as would doubtless be the case a century later.

Retold in the catalog for “Harmonies and Contrasts,” the new Zorach show at the Portland Museum of Art, the story suggests an out-of-touch older man hitting on a hip young woman. In fact, both artists were in their early 20s, and would marry the following year. Marguerite was two years older than William, and incalculably more sophisticated. The product of a genteel California home, she was invited to Paris by an unmarried artist aunt, a longtime Gertrude Stein acquaintance. Enthralled with the new wave of expressionist French painters known as the “Fauves,” or wild beasts, Marguerite was already channeling her inner Matisse. A major early influence on her future husband’s work, she successfully urged him to abandon his Impressionist impulses in favor of something bolder and less conservative.

William would follow her lead, but had some catching up to do first. Born in Lithuania, he had immigrated to Ohio with his parents as a small boy, and left school after eighth grade for an apprenticeship in a lithography shop. He learned to paint by copying Rembrandts in New York museums, and he would find it harder to break loose from realism and embrace the radical new ideas in art, to indulge in exuberant line and extravagant color. The couple would live and work in close partnership, mostly in New York and Maine, until their deaths two years apart in the 1960s, and their styles and ideas overlapped and diverged as they developed. Neither ever settled into a single approach or ceased to evolve.

Try this game at the Portland show, but don’t expect to win: First, study the Zorachs’ youthful work, just inside the gallery. Marguerite paints electric, cherry-colored redwood trees with persimmon boughs, while William heaps pink, Hartleyesque mountains, soft as cream or bosoms, in “Plowing the Fields” (1917). Now, head for the rest of the show (and the rest of their lives) and try to guess which artist did what. In general, things grow darker, and Cubist impulses break the world up, but their separate directions aren’t strictly predictable. Marguerite’s forms become blunter, and her “Portrait of Bill” (1925) describes a bulky lumberjack; William’s best paintings are sharp and darkly delicate, like “Mirage — Ships at Night” (1919), where layered triangles look like bats’ wings or knives of shattered glass. In some ways they defy gender expectations, with William fixating on family themes as often as she did.

This isn’t a show about gender, but gender is certainly relevant. In a 1913 watercolor sketch by Marguerite, she sits holding a pen or brush, and William towers behind her with his hands on her shoulders. Married a year, they had no children, so Marguerite hadn’t yet had to divide her time between art and infants. The placement of William’s hands is probably meant to suggest him drawing support from her; it’s unlikely she meant to portray him as “keeping her down.” Still, Marguerite’s career was affected when she assumed her motherly duties, and the catalog essays describe how recognition from critics and curators increasingly focused on William.

William came into his own as a sculptor in the 1920s, and as family life drew Marguerite away from her own art, he was freer to describe the new dynamics of their home in his work. He was known for “direct carving,” based on the idea of “discovering” forms inherent in found logs or stones, and his buoyant “Floating Figure” (1922) is a highlight of the show. “Bathing Girl” (1930) is a glossy, cocoa-colored piece, also in mahogany, cut by deep shadows the color of coffee grounds and defined by supple elegance despite a raised right arm that looks like a tacked-on afterthought. It’s 20 years and several stylistic steps away from “New Horizons,” the massive mid-century bronze that sits adjacent. Here, a mother with a broad Picasso face is sprawled squarely in a kind of birthing position, leaning back on her hands, knees apart, a child in her lap.

William’s carvings of children show as much variation. In “Kiddie Kar” (1923), the mahogany toddler resembles a folk-art George Washington, right down to the dour look and heavy, wig-like curls. A decade later, in marble, he calls upon classical ideals in the graceful and moving “Affection.” A girl sits on a dog, her arms around his neck; his head is thrown back against her cheek in appreciation. The space between her chest and his back makes a tear-shaped opening at the sculpture’s center. The figures are fused in non-verbal communication that echoes the wordless appeal of art itself.

Marguerite, meanwhile, made fewer paintings and more embroidered wool tapestries, which could be “picked up or put down at will,” unlike painting, for which, she wrote, “you must sustain a mood.” Collectors loved them, and commissioned private projects. Marguerite also made them for family, the way some mothers make sweaters or Sunday dinner. An elaborate 1944 piece shows her grown son, Tessim, and his young family in Brooklyn.

The Zorachs’ two children were raised unconventionally, with maximum creative freedom, and their daughter, Dahlov Ipcar, became an artist. Now a Mainer in her 80s, she’s the subject of a second show upstairs at the museum. Ipcar can be seen as another of the Zorachs’ creative contributions — one in which Marguerite didn’t have to play second fiddle.

Jenna Russell can be reached at russelljenna@hotmail.com