By Jann Haynes Gilmore, PhD, AWA Board Member

Greetings this holiday season! It is a delight to write about a marriage of two artists who enjoyed a true working partnership, Marguerite and William Zorach (1889-1966); and to focus on Marguerite (1887-1968) who ably managed both her active family and art career. 

Marguerite Thompson, born in Santa Rosa, CA, married William Zorach, born in Lithuania, in 1912.  They had met in Paris where both were studying and he “couldn’t believe such a nice girl could paint such wild pictures.” ¹ Marguerite had spent four years beginning in 1908 traveling in Europe, the Near East and Asia where she was greatly transformed by global cultural patterns. Her Parisian art study focused on modernism at the atelier Académie Moderne which favored Cezanne, Cubism and Fauvism over traditional classical training.

Returning to America married, the Zorachs settled in 1912 in Greenwich Village on West 10th Street in the heart of artistic activity and later in Brooklyn.  The couple became firmly rooted in modernism among the radicals and early on, they spent summers in theater and fine arts circles in the Provincetown, MA art colony. By 1923 the couple had bought a summer home/farm in coastal Maine which attracted their modernist friends/artists including Marsden Hartley, Gaston Lachaise, John Marin and many others. ² 

Marguerite managed her dual role in the couple’s studio/apartment after two talented children were born.  As a result of her growing family, in 1917 she exhibited a new kind of medium—embroidered tapestry work—that she could create while tending to her son Tessim (1915-1995) and daughter Dahlov (1917-2017). Tessim became a collector of Pre-Columbian art and eventual overseer of repositories of his parents works to American institutions.  Dahlov Ipcar became a beloved artist and children’s book author and illustrator. ³  

The Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, ME examined Marguerite’s “singular skills and self-fulfilment” in an impressive 2017 exhibition and catalogue. The catalogue sold out immediately and the show became an instant success.  In the catalogue the museum’s director and associate curator summed up Marguerite’s oeuvre and it’s importance to American art: “Versatile as a painter, textile artist, writer, and designer,” she carried out her art career as she oversaw her growing family. She exhibited at the famed Armory Show in 1913 and held solo shows at the aspirational Daniel, Montross, Knoedler, Kraushaar and Downtown Galleries in New York City.

Her work was among the first women’s work shown in 1916 at the Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters in New York.  Her work continued to demonstrate Fauvist tenets. Georgia O’Keeffe, Anne Goldthwaite (Alabama artist) and Zorach were among the first women to show their work at the Society of Independent Artists, founded in 1916 to advance avant-garde art in a non-juried arena.  Marguerite became a board member of the Society from 1922-1924. During the 1930s she created three public murals for the New Deal in Tennessee, Iowa, and New Hampshire.  In Maine she was a visiting faculty member at the Showhegan School of Art, founded in 1946, as a learning retreat for emerging artists. In the depression years Zorach taught watercolor at the New School for Social Research in New York. ⁴ Given her vast cultural experiences it was natural that Marguerite designed fabric, her own and her children’s clothing and accessories such as hats and handbags.⁵ 

To examine Marguerite’s work is to understand her talent and range. In Paris she painted landscapes with heavy delineation, rhythmic compositions, and bright colors favored by the Fauvists, a style which she carried back to New York. While these are much-revered works, her embroideries in which she applied the same Fauvist and Cubist principles stand out. She explained that her interest in embroidery began when she first discovered the color range of woolen yarns. One of her most famous tapestries was commissioned (1920-1932) by Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. to capture the essence of the Rockefeller’s summer home in Seal Harbor, near Bar Harbor, ME and the family’s vision for future generations by saving the beauty of Mount Desert Island. Marguerite could work on a single tapestry for three years and it has been written that she executed more than a million stitches on this wool on linen work.  Much of the Zorachs’ early income came from her tapestries and William often worked beside her on the stitchery as she inspired many of his sculptural works. ⁶ While illustrated here, this majestically large (54″ x 64″) work is difficult to capture in reproduction; one needs to admire it in person. 

William Zorach, in looking back at his life’s journey somewhat amusingly and truthfully summed up the couple’s rare symbiotic marriage. “There is a tendency among men to transform the loved one into a mother image, or at least to seek to identify the two.  I had that tendency but Marguerite would have none of it. She was not going to be any man’s mother.  To her marriage was a partnership; share alike, the good, the bad, the difficult, the joys—all of life and living.  If one partner possessed a particular quality or ability, he should use it for the common good.  Work, ideas, accomplishments were to be shared. She was happy to do the cooking, to make her clothes and the children’s …. But she felt that the care of the house and the children were the responsibility of both of us.” ⁷ 

I encourage you to admire Marguerite Zorach’s talent, tenacity, accomplishments and legacy family while enjoying her handmade and colored seasonal greeting of 1961. The inscription reads: “Dear Margo – This is wishing you a very Merry Christmas and a Very Happy New Year. With love as always, Bill & Marguerite.” 

Endnotes:

1. Swinth, Kirsten, Painting Professionals: Women Artists & The Development of Modern American Art, 1870-1930, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001, Endnote 44, page 173. 
2. Goodyear, Goodyear II, Komanecky, At First Light: Two Centuries of Maine Artists, Their Homes and Studios, Rizzoli Electa, 2021, pages 100-109 [Zorachs]. 
3. Dahlov Ipcar, en.m.wikipedia.org. Ipcar remembered: “My mother said, ‘All artists have interesting houses!’” [Marguerite Zorach, An Art Filled Life] 
4. Christopher Brownawell and Jane Bianco, Marguerite Zorach: An Art-Filled Life [catalogue] Rockland, ME: Farnsworth Art Museum, 2017, pages 9 and 11. 
5. Swinth, p. 191, and Marguerite T. Zorach, Columbia University Reid Hall, Home, globalcenters.columbia.edu. 
6. Marguerite T. Zorach, globalcenters.columbia.edu. 
7. William Zorach, Art is My Life: An Autobiography by Zorach, New York: The World Publishing Company, 1967, p 189.