William Zorach
American, born Lithuania, 1887 - 1966Spirit of the Dance, 1932
Not on view
Bronze
Dimensions76 × 31 × 48 in. (193 × 78.7 × 121.9 cm)
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Stewart Mott, 1965.10
This sculpture of a dancing female was a result of drawings Zorach submitted for a Radio City Music Hall commission. This is the third version, cast in bronze, out of five total versions. The edition at Radio City Music Hall is cast in aluminum. Related to other sculptures Zorach produced in the 1930s, this work in particular captured the monumental female figurative subject he was notable for.
Born in Lithuania in 1877, he immigrated with his family to the United States at the age of four. At fifteen he was apprenticed to a lithographer and studied at the Cleveland School of Art. He later moved to New York to study at the National Academy of Design. Zorach’s first American exhibition was the Armory Show, held in 1913 in New York City. The Armory Show was an art exhibition designed to expose America to the modernism movement of art. His personal style was notable for its solidity and sense of monumentality. He was one of the first artists in the U.S. to employ direct carving, cutting directly into stone and wood and preserving the harmony between those materials and the resulting sculpted forms.
