Dahlov; Figure of a Child with Clenched Fists, William Zorach

Greater love hath no man than to lay down his brush for his wife. William Zorach did just that in 1922. Married to the gifted artist Marguerite Thompson Zorach, he abandoned painting, leaving that field to her, and turned instead to sculpture, an interest he had developed over the preceding few years. This figure of a child with clenched fists comes from that seminal period when Zorach began to employ the technique of direct carving. Small works like this were carved mostly with a penknife; larger sculptures were chiseled from blocks of stone or wood. In both cases the process was subtractive, releasing the image by process of elimination, rather than the additive process of modeling in clay or plaster. Zorach’s figure, modeled after the artist’s young daughter Dahlov, suggests the influence of African carvings, a subject of keen interest at the time. This figure of Dahlov has been acclaimed for “the vigor and strength of [Zorach’s] carving, and the vitality and expressiveness which result.” He carved it while visiting the artists’ colony at Provincetown, Massachusetts. From that summer came this and two other small figures that have been hailed as crucial for an understanding of the artist’s later and larger direct carvings, the imposing works by which he is remembered today. CCE