Landscape (recto)

Marguerite Thompson Zorach was one of the first Americans to embrace abstract art, and she displayed her vividly colored canvases at some of the most important early exhibitions of modern art, including the 1913 Armory Show. Thompson spent three years (1908–11) studying in Paris, where she began painting in a Fauvist idiom and met her future husband, artist William Zorach. Although the location in this painting is unknown, Thompson might have made the brilliantly hued canvas while traveling back to the United States from Paris; her adventurous seven-month trip took her through Egypt, Palestine, India, Burma, Malaysia, Indonesia, China, Korea, and Japan. The wedges of color in the painting suggest the contours of a hill, yet their interlocking forms illustrate Thompson’s desire to create compositions that were “perfectly flat, no planes, distance, perspective, or anything.”