William Boyce Thompson

William Boyce Thompson 1869-1930, American financier, b. Virginia City, Mont. He operated silver and copper mines in Montana and Arizona before moving to New York City. He was (1914-19) a director of the Federal Reserve bank of New York and was twice (1916, 1920) a delegate to the Republican national convention. In World War I, he helped finance and accompanied (1917-18) a Red Cross mission to Russia. He contributed money to the government of Aleksandr Kerensky and, after the Bolsheviks seized power, advocated U.S. recognition of the Soviet government. In 1919, he founded the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research in Yonkers, N.Y.

Zorach, William (b Eurburg [now Yurbarkas], 1889; d Bath, Me., 15 Nov. 1966). Lithuanian-born American sculptor. Initially Zorach worked as a painter in a vivid Fauvist style, but he took up sculpture in 1917 and abandoned painting (apart from watercolours) about five years later. His sculpture is figurative and its salient characteristics are firm contours, blocklike bulk, and suppression of details: ‘I owe most’, he said, ‘to the great periods of primitive carving in the past—not to the modern or the classical Greeks, but to the Africans, the Persians, the Mesopotamians, the archaic Greeks and of course to the Egyptians.’ He was a pioneer in America of the revival of direct carving in stone and wood and in this as well as in his formal austerity he exercised a powerful influence on modern American sculpture. He had numerous major commissions, including relief carvings for the Municipal Court Building, New York (1958). His most famous work is not a carving, however, but the aluminium Spirit of the Dance (1932) for Radio City Music Hall, New York—a heroic female figure that was banished for a time because of its nudity but reinstated by public pressure. Zorach taught at the Art Students League from 1929 to 1966. His wife Marguerite Thompson Zorach (1887–1968) was one of America's leading modernist painters in the years immediately before and immediately after the Armory Show (1913), in which both she and her husband exhibited. At this time she painted in a style influenced by Fauvism and Expressionism. In her later career, however, much of her time was spent selflessly helping her husband with his sculptural commissions, producing many of the preliminary drawings for his work.

Morris, William (1834–96). English artist, poet, craftsman, medievalist, and printer, who had a profound effect on architecture. Early in his career he studied the medieval churches of England and France. Working briefly (1856) in Street's office, he met Philip Webb, with whom he became friendly, and was influenced by the ideas of Ruskin. Disappointed by contemporary architecture and design, he commissioned Webb to build his own dwelling, the Red House, Bexleyheath, Kent (1859–60): with its unpretentious brick walls, fenestration arranged where needed, and tiled roof, it drew on vernacular, Gothic, and other traditions, treated in a very free way, and was influential, especially in the search for a style-less architecture. The difficulties of finding furniture and furnishings for the house led Morris to found Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, & Co., ‘Fine Art Workmen in Painting, Carving, Furniture, and the Metals’ in London (1861—after 1874 Morris & Co.).

Morris founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB—1877) in response to the over-zealous and destructive ideas of church-‘restorers’. He was anxious to publicize not only the concept of conservation (as opposed to wholesale renovation) but the qualities of hitherto unappreciated vernacular buildings, all of which led him to be regarded as a founding-father of the Arts-and-Crafts movement, the Domestic Revival, conservation, and the search for a society in which work would be a joy. His was the inspiration behind the establishment of the Art-Workers' Guild (1884), the first Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society exhibition (1888), and many other late-C19 organizations intended to improve design, craftsmanship, and the appreciation of art. His published works include The Earthly Paradise (1868–70), various beautifully produced volumes from his Kelmscott Press (which had a great influence on typography), and the Utopian News from Nowhere (1891) in which by the end of C21 London was rebuilt in a way inspired by medieval architecture (this suggests that Gropius's claims to have been influenced by Morris were absurd).

Bibliography

A. Crawford & C. Cunningham (eds.) (1977);
C. Harvey & and Press (1996);
Henderson (1967);
Leatham (1994);
MacCarthy (1979, 1994);
Morris (1966);
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004);
Pevsner (1968, 1972, 1974a);
Stansky (1996);
P. Thompson (1993)