Figures Walking on a Road and Landscape

When Marguerite Thompson Zorach first arrived in Paris in 1908, her first contact with art was at the avant-garde Salon d’Automne where she encountered the new ideas of the Fauve artists, Henri Matisse, André Derain, and Maurice Vlaminck. In response she rejected traditional academic art, declaring it to be both redundant and completely lacking in originality. She devoted herself to assimilating the new trends in European art and before departing France in the fall of 1911 had already exhibited at the Salon d'Automne. Figures Walking on a Road was one of her earliest efforts in this entirely new approach to painting.