text: THE juxtaposition of shows by William Zorach (1889-1966) and Turku Trajan (1887-1956) at the Zabriskie Gallery (29 West 57th Street) is apt in many ways. Both men were immigrants - Zorach from Lithuania and Trajan from Hungary - and both were sculptors who also painted. But while the one achieved considerable success in his lifetime, the other died in poverty, having failed to sell one work.
  
  Zorach's fame as a sculptor was closely connected with the ''truth to materials'' movement, which started in France as a reaction to Rodin and the studio system in general. Regarded at first as the ''esthetic left wing'' of sculpture and later as modern academism, the style derived its inspiration variously from folk, tribal and pre-Columbian art, as well as from Cubism, and yielded imagery subordinate to the shape and character of the materials from which it was made.
  
  Though this show includes five bronzes, some of which look to be translations of wood carvings, it focuses on Zorach's early years (1912-22), when he was working as a painter. Cezanne, Matisse and Cubism all influenced him, but evidently to little avail. There are several quite attractive watercolor landscapes - ''A Tree in Spring'' (1915), for example, where distant mountains rimmed in purple preside over green fields similarly treated, and a 1916 study of a schooner that evokes Van Gogh's fishing boats. But overall, the impression is of lostness.
  
  Zorach was prone to ''abstracting'' figures and landscape with Cubist facets, and he also tried to combine Cubism with Fauve color, as in the oil of a stylized woman and child in bright red, silhouetted against a yellow sunset. However, the forms of Yosemite, executed in both oils and watercolors, seem to have released an Expressionistic energy in him. Perhaps it was this that led him ultimately to sculpture.
  
  With the modernist revolution now processed by hindsight and by historians into inevitability, it is sometimes difficult to appreciate the gropings of its lesser adherents. Yet Cubism must have seemed, to all but the most brilliant and intuitive aspirants, as obscure as the Theory of Relativity, and it's no wonder that Zorach, like many others, never really got below its surface. The show indicates that the artist was both an emotional and a pragmatic personality for whom painting alone was too cerebral an activity. Though he continued to make watercolors - note the conventional 1926 view of Grenada - it is apparent that he needed the solidity of sculpture and the ritual of its craftsmanship to anchor him.
  
  Had Trajan been born a little earlier and remained in Europe, he might have helped revive the heroic aspects of sculpture, in the manner of Bourdelle. If he had lived much later, he would probably have benefited from the permissiveness of late modernism. As it was, he belonged nowhere and was unable either to impose his own vision or to submit to anyone else's.
  
  Though his tragedy, which included the humiliation (for a professional) of showing once in the Washington Square Outdoor Art Exhibition, is familiar, the man himself and the way in which he survived remains a mystery. Still he is known to have been somewhat mystical, and if the head - squarish and with deepset eyes and a tight mouth -that recurs in his art can be seen as a kind of selfportrait, he may well have been obstinate to the point of willfulness.
  
  As a painter of still lifes on paper, in a mixture of gouache, pastel and possibly oil, Trajan worked impressionistically in slashing strokes of rather pasty colors and left parts of the ground exposed.
  
  As a sculptor, he alternately modeled, using a kind of cement, and painted his forms. One of the two heads here is dabbed arbitrarily with many colors, the other has a yellow face, rusty red hair and is varnished overall.
  
  Two obviously imaginary works, ''Pagliacci'' and ''Helen of Troy,'' are touched only here and there with color. They are the most interesting pieces in the show, the first being a kneeling figure in doublet and ruff with winglike forms framing a face that resembles a gargoyle. Technically a high relief, the second figure stands wearing a long dress and a cloak and leans at an angle as if resting on a cane. The face -again with deep-set eyes and a determined mouth - is most haunting.
  
  There is neither a sense of time nor of place in the work (nothing is dated), nor is it clear whether or not the artist received formal training. Not to minimize its cruelty, the neglect that Trajan experienced seems not to have been gratuitous. He obviously could not and would not participate in his time. But he was no primitive either, and so his art lacked the childlike charm and eccentricity of, say, an Eilshemius, which, with luck and a nod from Marcel Duchamp, might have got him into art society through the back door. (Through July 10.)
  
  Other shows this week include: Kay Rosen/Kay Walkingstick (Urdang, 29 West 57th Street): Kay Rosen shows two large diagrams ruled in black and red ink on paper and a ''Notation'' in colored graphic tape on matte Mylar. In a complicated way, the drawings chart the progress of people walking up and down staircases in selected art institutions. Though the investigation is a perfect instance of scientific pointlessness, its results are not unpleasing - columns of short black lines, diagonal and horizontal, that are punctuated by red bars. The drawings look like the kind of herringbone tweed a computer might weave.
  
  Kay Walkingstick's canvases seem less sexual in connotation than they were, perhaps because the reviewer was seeing them for the first time out of a feminist group context. Until recently, Miss Walkingstick - the name is Cherokee - has worked on two layers of canvas, applying a thick mixture of encaustic and acrylic with her fingers. As the earlier works here show, the effect is of coarse, dark animal hide incised with one or two slits and scored with lines. Now that the artist is working on paper glued to board and is laying on thinner pigment with a knife, the paintings have acquired a greater, more mysterious power. Though smaller than before, they seem to have maintained - even gained - scale. Their leaden complexions, tinged with green, red, brown and blue, are of a rich, enameled quality, and the lozenge-shaped openings, treated in subtly contrasting hues, now look more like objects floating in space than lesions. This is intense and very promising work. (Through June 27.)
summary: THE juxtaposition of shows by William Zorach (1889-1966) and Turku Trajan (1887-1956) at the Zabriskie Gallery (29 West 57th Street) is apt in many ways. Both men were immigrants - Zorach from Lithuania and Trajan from Hungary - and both were sculptors who also painted.  But while the one achieved considerable success in his lifetime, the other died in poverty, having failed to sell one work.   Zorach's fame as a sculptor was closely connected with the ''truth to materials'' movement, which started in France as a reaction to Rodin and the studio system in general. Regarded at first as the ''esthetic left wing'' of sculpture and later as modern academism, the style derived its inspiration variously from folk, tribal and pre-Columbian art, as well as from Cubism, and yielded imagery subordinate to the shape and character of the materials from which it was made.