Nude and Flowers

Image Courtesy of Debra Force Fine Art, New York.

Textiles

1922

Marguerite Zorach (American, 1887–1968)

In Nude and Flowers, Marguerite Thompson Zorach foregrounded both aesthetic and sensory experiences by using textiles as her medium. The looped or hooked fabric strips (cut from well-loved garments), which have been pulled through and held in place by the woven ground, emphasize an approach to artmaking that is as much about touch and the manipulation of materials as it is about their visual arrangement. Zorach carried this sensory engagement further with the large, stylized flowers, foliage, and shells that surround the nude figure; their lushness and scale suggest a potent olfactory and tactile experience.

Status: Currently Off View
Department: Textiles

Artist: Marguerite Zorach
Title: Nude and Flowers
Place: United States (Object made in)
Date: Made 1922
Medium: Linen, plain weave; cotton, wool and silk, plain and twill weaves, velvet and knitted strips forming “hooked” pile; edges with wool, single crochet
Inscriptions: Signed “MZ,” lower left, “1922,” lower right
Dimensions: 121.9 × 78.7 cm (48 1/2 × 31 in.)
Credit Line: Director's Discretionary Acquisition Fund; Pauline Seipp Armstrong, and Christa C. Mayer Thurman Textile endowment funds
Reference Number: 2021.137

Ann Wiseman, Rug Hooking & Rag Tapestries (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company), 36 and 81 [published as “Eve”].
Roberta K. Tarbell, William and Marguerite Zorach: The Maine Years (Rockland, ME: William A. Farnsworth Library and Art Museum, 1979), 15 (ill.).
Mildred Cole Peladeau, Rug Hooking in Maine 1838-1940 (Schiffer Publishing, 2008), 139.
Jane Bianco, “Marguerite Zorach: Modernism and the Craft of Hooked Rugs” in Magazine Antiques (2011).

Art Institute of Chicago, American Art, Gallery 272, Sept. 21, 2021-Mar. 16, 2022.

The artist (died 1968); by descent to her daughter, Dahlov Ipcar (born Zorach) [Wiseman, 1969, 81]; by descent to Charles Ipcar, Maine [this and the following according to correspondence from B. Dobson, Mar. 9, 2021, copy in curatorial object file, Department of Textiles; Tarbell 1979, 15; Peladeau 2008, 139e]; consigned to the Debra Force Fine Art, New York; sold to the Art Institute of Chicago, 2021.

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