Profile of a Woman's Head

n.d.

Like many modernists, William Zorach embraced a reductive approach to representation, distilling a motif to its essential forms and eliminating unnecessary details. In portraiture, this approach emphasizes the most distinctive aspects of a sitter’s appearance but also reduces the amount of available visual information. This drawing wavers between these competing effects of individualization and generalization. Using assured strokes of the pencil, Zorach delineated the head in a single-line contour—a style that he adopted in the late 1910s and one that emphasizes the two-dimensionality of the image and the picture plane.