Spring in Central Park by William Zorach in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, March 2008

William Zorach. American 1889-1966.
Spring in Central Park, 1914
Oil on canvas

Accession # 1979.223a,b

William Zorach returned to New York in late 1912, having spent two years studying painting in Paris. There, he had seen the work of the Fauves, notably Henri Matisse and Andre Derain, whose bold colors and undulating outlines influenced his own. As he wrote, his paintings of New York City's Central Park were "painted at home from imagination... in all wild colors, peopled with exotic nudes." With his wife Marguerite, an avant-garde painter herself, they associated with many of America's earliest modernists in New York in the 1910s, including Max Weber, Marsden Hartley, and John Marin. In 1913 both Zorachs exhibited at the prestigious International Exhibition of Modern Art, also known as the "Armory Show." Zorach later became a sculptor.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art label.