Seeing Modern: Marguerite Zorach’s “Bathers”
American Gems: Small Artworks, Enduring Impact: Marguerite Thompson Zorach (1887–1968)
By Glenn Tomlinson, William Randolph Hearst Curator of Education, Norton Museum of Art
This series features short essays on artworks in the American collection that visitors may have missed simply because of their intimate scale. Despite their size, these works and the artists who made them provide important insights into the expanding field of American art. It is our pleasure to explore these gems with you.
The waterfall that cascades through the center of this painting comes into view at the top of the canvas as a white pathway bounded by black, angular cliffs. As the torrent falls, the white shape is inflected with brushstrokes of grey-blue pigment that suggest rushing waters. At the very center of the painting, this waterfall becomes a beautiful chute of pale green, blue, and violet tones, flanked on either side by grey-green ledges. A nude woman raises her hand to catch the water as she bathes in the stream below. To her right, a second nude reclines by the banks of the stream. Her hand touches the earth, her fingers merging with the pink tone of the ground. The shape of her hip repeats the round forms of the stream’s bank that build up toward trees and verdant hills that ascend to a darkening sky at the upper right. In contrast, an active figure who stretches her arms and arches her back as if gesturing to the waterfall’s source dominates the left side of the painting. She too resonates with the landscape; her red hair matches the color of the tree above her. Her arched chest and abdomen echo contours of what may be the dark trunk and limbs of another tree, or the craggy edges of cliffs upon the ridge. Observing the entire scene from the lower left corner of the painting, a fourth nude rests on her elbow, her back to the viewer. She appears to look at the figure in the stream, suggesting traditional perspective and pictorial space, yet the forms of her body deny correct proportions or modeling. Finally, one cannot help but notice that the landscape to the right of the waterfall, legible as a verdant, receding mountainside, stands in dramatic contrast to the left half of the painting, where purple, pink and green blade-like planes flatten space, perhaps evoking dynamic and often unseen forces of nature.
Painted in the early nineteen teens by a young artist named Marguerite Zorach, Bathers translates a classical Mediterranean subject into an American idiom. Since the Renaissance, European artists had depicted arcadian landscapes, portraying allegorical figures communing with nature. Modern artists, such as Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse, revisited this subject to explore how more abstract approaches to line, color, and shape could unify their subjects and their settings in newly expressive ways. Zorach used the mode they had invented to explore new settings. The young California native located her red-headed nymphs is a landscape that evokes real waterfalls of Yosemite or the Sierra Nevada, locations she loved, as well as images of waterfalls in American art dating back to the Hudson River School.
Marguerite Zorach, whose maiden name was Thompson, was a precocious and determined artist. She was raised in a prosperous family in Fresno. Her parents made sure both of their daughters received a good education and training in the arts. Just months after Marguerite had entered Stanford University in 1908, her aunt, a practicing artist, invited her to study art in Paris. While her aunt envisioned a traditional artistic training for her niece, Marguerite found herself at the Salon d’Automne on her first day in Paris, where she saw exuberant, colorful paintings by Matisse and his fauvist colleagues. Already inspired by the vitality of impressionist paintings she had seen in the United States, this experience solidified her desire to become a modernist painter. She met fellow Californians Leo and Gertrude Stein, among the greatest collectors of modern art at the time, and at their apartment, she met artists such as Pablo Picasso who was just exploring new forms of painting that would become Cubism.
After her studies in Europe, Marguerite continued east, traveling through Egypt, Palestine, India, China, and Japan before returning to California. During these travels she seemed to be particularly interested in the Islamic and Indian traditions of miniature painting; the abstracted form and space, as well as the jewel-like colors in Bathers may have been inspired by sources such as this.
As an art student in Paris, Marguerite met a fellow American named William Finkelstein in 1911. Though they were only in Paris for a short time together, they maintained a steady correspondence, and fell in love. William confirmed that she had a tremendous influence on his development as an artist, and in turn, he became an enduring advocate for Marguerite’s work. They were married the day they met again in New York on December 24, 1912, and they took his middle name as their surname. The couple quickly established themselves in the New York avant-garde, showing in major exhibitions and participating in a lively discourse among their fellow artists and writers. However, as vital as their lives in Greenwich Village were, they resolved to spend their summers in the country. Both artists felt a deep connection to nature as a source for their creativity. Indeed, Bathers is thought to have been painted in the summer of 1913 or 1914, both years when the young couple retreated to the small town of Chappaqua in the Hudson River Valley to paint and garden.
