Domesticated Beast

The artist's right to change his mind never got a better demonstration than the one given by Painter William Zorach. "The modern movement," he said in 1922, when he was 35, "has freed art from the idea of reproducing nature, an idea which has been persistently followed since the Greeks and which has been suddenly found to have nothing to do with art. The essential contribution of modern art to esthetics is the broadening and developing of purely abstract forms and colors." That same year, Zorach gave up professional painting in favor of sculpture, and the work he has produced since (see color) is just about as close to nature and as far from abstraction as art can be.

Some critics say that the "modern movement" has left William Zorach far be hind; others say it is just the other way around.

This month Zorach will receive the gold medal for sculpture from the National Institute of Arts and Letters--an award that should prompt a fresh look at a man whose perennial appeal is that he has dared to seem passe. While other sculptors have taken to the welding torch or to bolting together abstract constructions out of objects found in city dumps, Zorach's work remains warm and whole some. He has at times teetered precariously close to sentimentality but has never given way to corn.

Escape to "Little Italy." The son of a poor Lithuanian bargemaster, Zorach was taken to America when he was four, eventually settled in the "little Italy" district of Cleveland. While his father peddled junk, young William peddled newspapers, quit school at 13, became an apprentice lithographer. He saved his money, got to New York and finally to Paris, where he fell under the spell of the Fauvists (the Wild Beasts) and the cubists. He placed a painting in New York's history-making 1913 Armory Show ("We were modern, wildly modern"), but he quickly came to realize that his brand of cubism was derivative. One day he picked up a panel of butternut wood from a broken-down bureau, used it to carve a block for a print, thus learned the fascination of sculpture.

While his paintings had been all angles --"A cubistic mother feeding a geometric baby out of a trigonometric bottle," one critic sneered--his sculptures have always been round and soft as flesh. Occasionally he turns out a Biblical head that is as fierce and formidable as the Old Testament itself, but his favorite subjects have always been the living creatures around him. There are cats and dogs, embracing lovers, naked children and young madonnas; they emerge out of their prison blocks of stone and wood as naturally as if they had been there all along just waiting to be rescued.

A Touch of the Heart. Zorach is still guided by the shapes of nature--the swirl of a grain, the contour of a stone--but his art is as emotional as it is visual. The Wild Beast has been domesticated, but with such an ever fresh simplicity that he cannot fail to touch the heart. "My children, my wife, the animals I know, the people who enter my life," says he, "things that are deeply a part of me and in which I see a relationship to life through movement and form and inner spirit--these are my material."

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