Marguerite Zorach

1887 - 1968

            Like many of their contemporaries, Marguerite Thompson and William Zorach were drawn to the city for artistic community yet desired to work close to nature. Accordingly, they agreed early in their marriage to spend summers away from New York. From the teens through the early twenties, the two artists stayed in New Hampshire, Cape Cod, and Maine, before buying a farmhouse in Robinhood Cove, near Georgetown, Maine, in 1923. This connection to New England shaped Marguerite Zorach’s Land and Development of New England.

            By the 1930s Zorach had settled on the descriptive, modernist-derived style evident in this painting. The two-dimensional, densely packed surface with a high horizon and schematic landscape are witness to the influence of both European modernism and American folk art, while the chiseled figures recall William Zorach’s sculpture as well as cubist and primitive art. In this mural-sized canvas, Zorach also combines figures and motifs from her own earlier works—tree hieroglyphs from Autumn Woods (1917, collection of Charles Ipcar), mill and steam from The Deserted Mill (1917, collection of Rober Foley), horse and father and child from A New England Family (1917-18 oil, private collection, and linoleum cut, Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire), and background architecture along with the mother and child from the wall hanging The Family of Ralph Jonas (1926-27, collection of the Jonas family). Land and Development of New England reworks this earlier tapestry with its family group set against a New England coastal community. This work with its multiple themes—family, regional history, the folk—had a private face that related to the artist’s domestic life and a public face that intersected with the cultural needs of the 1930s.

            Struggling with managing home and children while still making her art, Zorach picked up techniques such as embroidery so that she could work in short intervals between household tasks. This domestic world figured into her imagery. In Land and Development of New England, four figures—father holding infant, mother tending to toddler—form a family unit paralleling Zorach’s own family in 1917-18 (William, Marguerite, and Tessim and Dahlov as young children). The identity of the standing female is more puzzling: she could be another daughter or, perhaps, an allegory of New England. By portraying the family as a New England family, Zorach fashioned an identity as a regional and American painter. Living in Maine was a homecoming of sorts, because her family’s family claimed a New England ancestry back to the Massachusetts settlers—an ancestry minded by contemporary critics. Zorach’s paintings of domestic life were associated with her American-ness; when they were shown in 1934 at the Downtown Gallery, one reviewer characterized them as “the ‘American Scene and the American People,’ for [Zorach] has chosen those subjects which are close to her daily life, the people of New England, her family, and the Maine landscape.”

            Land and Development of New England relates not only to Zorach’s personal history but also to broader cultural concerns with family and regional history. In the 1930s artists, writers, and filmmakers reconstructed history, legends, myths, and heroes as part of a widespread effort to mold national identity in this unstable time. The federal government took an active role in this reconstruction. The Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture morals dealt with recurrent themes—family, pioneer, common man, farmer, work—that build community and a shared past. For 1930s audiences, this past related to the present: murals of local history and economic activity “affirmed the importance of ‘the people,’ a sense of renewal, and the continuity of prosperity.”

            Although not a Section mural, Land and Development of New England shares subjects commonly found in these projects. Zorach not only presents the patriarch as a pioneer cultivating nature but describes this land as a rich resource. She paints and idealized rural New England at the same time that inadequate technology, poor management, and the Depression were eroding agriculture, especially in Maine, and that the region’s textile, shoes, and paper industries were on the decline. This image offered an alternative to present conditions—a well-ordered, productive region, full of resources. In addition, like many Section murals, Land and Development of New England emphasis the “fruits of family labor.” As cultural historian Barbara Melosh as pointed out, numerous Section murals depicted the farm family, with husband and wife as partners working together—an icon of an ideal community.

            Regional folk, in particular, represented traditional gender identities. As historians have argued, early-twentieth-century social changes from the sexual revolution to the feminization of service jobs challenged established notions of gender, and the Depression depended this “gender crisis” by disempowering the male breadwinner. In this context, region was mythologized as a masculine domain and a place were traditional gender identities could be recovered. The regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton announced in a 1935 interview that he was moving to Missouri because New York had “lost its masculinity.” He portrayed the Midwest as a “man’s world”: males populate his murals as the movers and shakers in politics, industry, agriculture, and history, while women are largely left to domestic chores, as in A Social History of Missouri (1936, Missouri State Museum, Jefferson City). Similarly, Land and Development of New England maps out gender specific spaces. The region’s settlement is presented as a masculine endeavor in which only men clear forests, plow the land, and dam the rivers. Family relations evoke an imagined nineteenth-century rural society. Dressed in L.L. Bean hunting boots and a flannel shirt, the patriarch proclaims through his gestures—one hand supporting the infant, the other petting the hound—his role as protector and provider. With his broad chest and erect posture, he dominates the landscape as well as the mother and child. The mother, in contrast, plays the role of family nurturer and is excluded from the background landscape and its activities. While Zorach herself was able to negotiate between public and private in her own life and career, she marked out clear boundaries between genders for her viewers just as many of her contemporaries did.

Reference:

Belanger, Pamela J., Maine in America: American Art at The Farnsworth Art Museum, The Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME, Distributed by University Press of New England, 2000, p. 136.

Transcribed by Lindsay Taylor and Claire Horne.

Artwork:

Marguerite Zorach, Land and Development of New England, 1935, 1991.17