MARGUERITE ZORACH: A Life in Art
Gerald Peters Gallery

Why are Marguerite Zorach’s paintings still so underappreciated? One explanation may be her mid-career concentration on textile art. Another could be that she, like her husband, William, pursued French-derived styles long after the ascendancy of Abstract Expressionism. Yet another reason is, well, William, whose career to this day overshadows hers. Gerald Peters’s retrospective of about three dozen of Marguerite’s paintings, however, proves that she was no less accomplished an artist.

Moving to Paris in 1908, Zorach (1887–1968) was one of the first Americans to experience Fauvism and Cubism firsthand. (Indeed, it was Marguerite who converted the reluctant William to Modernism.) The earliest works at Gerald Peters show that she grasped not just the Fauves’ boisterous style, but also their pictorial discipline. Her “Landscape, Southern France” (1910) keenly measures the pressures of green fields, spreading back to distant bands of pink and orange, and the buoyant line of clouds chugging above.

Zorach perpetually experimented. One gallery wall features three small works from the following years, each compellingly different. Brisk hues and strokes in a 1910 canvas neatly capture a street in a mountain town in India; the fanciful arabesque of figures and trees in a 1913 painting on silk seems equal parts Persian and Polynesian; an urbane but playful watercolor from 1924 records an elevated subway train passing before lively, crowding skyscrapers.

After returning to America in 1912, the artist sometimes turned to the faceted planes of the Cubists. A close inspection of the complex, layered grays and subdued greens and reds in “Awakening” (c. 1915) shows a man poignantly embracing a statuesque child. In later paintings of people, animals, and landscapes, the artist’s colors brighten and spaces deepen. These works, too, are suffused by a quirky, down-to-earth romanticism.

To be sure, in some of the more complicated compositions, the quirks begin to seem like habits; “Shore in Autumn” (1964) feels less than the sum of its busily rendered details. But later works also include extraordinary paintings, such as “The Evening Star” (c. 1945), which reflects her unique mix of perspicacity, determination, and whimsy. From a hilltop, we share with several trees a vast panoramic view of pink, purple, and gray-blue fields receding beneath a crescent moon. The trees — variously compact, grappling, and barren — are as individualized as people. In their hieratic presence, we sense something rare: a direct and mysterious collaboration between artist and nature, and perfect fluency in a connecting language.

Until June 8 (24 E. 78th St., between Fifth and Madison avenues, 212-628-9760).