Landscape (recto)

Marguerite ZorachWW-1911-014275

1911·Oil on canvas·59.1 × 48.9 cm (23 1/4 × 19 1/4 in.)

<p>Marguerite Thompson Zorach was one of the first Americans to embrace abstract art, and she displayed her vividly colored canvases at some of the most important early exhibitions of modern art, including the 1913 Armory Show. Thompson spent three years (1908–11) studying in Paris, where she began painting in a Fauvist idiom and met her future husband, artist William Zorach. Although the location in this painting is unknown, Thompson might have made the brilliantly hued canvas while traveling back to the United States from Paris; her adventurous seven-month trip took her through Egypt, Palestine, India, Burma, Malaysia, Indonesia, China, Korea, and Japan. The wedges of color in the painting suggest the contours of a hill, yet their interlocking forms illustrate Thompson’s desire to create compositions that were “perfectly flat, no planes, distance, perspective, or anything.”</p>

Catalogue

Year: 1911
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 59.1 × 48.9 cm (23 1/4 × 19 1/4 in.)
Collection: Art Institute of Chicago
Artist: Marguerite Zorach

Artist

Marguerite Zorach

Painting

Marguerite Zorach was an American modernist painter and textile artist active in the early twentieth century. Working across oil painting, watercolor, and hand-dyed fabrics, she developed a bold, gestural approach to abstraction that engaged with Cubist and Fauvist principles. Her career spanned several decades of artistic innovation in both fine art and decorative practice, establishing her as a significant figure in American modernism.

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