The Shepherd

Eugene Zaks The Shepherd from 1910-11 depicts a solitary shepherd figure against a stylized landscape with the archaic simplicity and decorative refinement that distinguish Zaks unique synthesis of Byzantine icon painting, Italian Primitivism, and modernist abstraction. Zak, a Polish-born artist who worked in Paris and exhibited with the Section dOr and the Salon dAutomne, developed a style that combined the hieratic stillness of early Renaissance painting with the formal reduction of Cubism, producing images that existed in a timeless space between the archaic and the modern. The shepherd stands in a frontal pose reminiscent of a Byzantine icon, his features simplified to the point of abstraction, his drapery falling in angular folds that suggest both classical sculpture and Cubist faceting. The landscape behind him is rendered in flat, decorative planes of color that deny atmospheric depth in favor of a spatial organization that refers to both medieval altarpieces and the contemporary experiments of Braque and Picasso. The years 1910-11 mark the peak of Zaks engagement with Cubism, but his Cubism is never analytic in the manner of Braque and Picasso: it is Cubism filtered through the memory of Byzantine icons and Italian Primitives, a modernism that looks backward as much as forward, combining the most radical formal experiments of the Parisian avant-garde with the most ancient traditions of European sacred art.

Zak occupies a unique position in the history of modernism as an artist who combined Cubist formal innovation with Byzantine and Proto-Renaissance visual conventions. The Shepherd exemplifies the archaic modernism that influenced the Italian Metaphysical painters and the Novecento movement, and anticipates the renewed interest in archaic forms that characterized European painting between the wars.

A hieratic painting by Zak depicting a shepherd with the frontal simplicity of a Byzantine icon and the planar abstraction of Cubism, representing a unique synthesis of archaic and modernist traditions in the Parisian avant-garde of 1910-11.