By Margaret Hammel
From our April 1974 issue
A one-lane road winds tortuously through a kind of Black Forest of hemlock, spruce, and giant rhododendron, crosses a rushing stream, barely skirts granite outcroppings thick with lichens, drops into a gully and, in a last sharp upward thrust, stops abruptly in the dooryard of Dahlov Ipcar. On her saltwater farm, hayfields and cultivated land lie to the south; woodlots, well set back, encompass the property, lending to the sturdy white house an open yet protected aspect. It is a secluded Maine setting where, on foggy days when the wind is right, a bracing smell of the sea rolls in from Robinhood Cove, Georgetown Island.
To know Dahlov’s paintings is to anticipate a wholly different landscape: jungle foliage, prancing zebras and antelopes, exotic leopards on some African terrain; or elegant, stylistic horses, their manes swirling like plumes against a lunar landscape. One might well ask how a realm so foreign to hayfields and woodlots, to coves and brooks, came to inhabit this artist’s imagination.
Certainly a lack of intimate acquaintance with her surroundings cannot be held responsible. On the 100-acre Robinhood Farm, once owned by her parents, she began spending summers at the age of six, and has lived there year-round for the past 35 years, many of them spent in hard-core farming with her husband, Adolph, a native of Ohio. When they married in one of the bottom years of the Depression, Dahlov was not yet 20, and had lived most of her life in Greenwich Village, New York City. Despite their urban backgrounds, the young couple embraced the challenge of becoming self-sufficient on what was then a largely uncultivated homestead. Their house lacked electricity and central heat; ice and wood had to be harvested; vegetables and fruits grown and preserved; livestock cared for — and, in time, two young sons. As guaranteed cash income there was an imposing stipend of $50 a month provided by Dahlov’s parents, an amount formerly paid to a local caretaker.
A good life, the armchair devotee of rural fantasies might think, but it was by no means an easy one. Hardest of all, perhaps, was that despite dawn-to-dark chores, Dahlov seized time to paint. Since early childhood, it had been an engrossing need.
As a future artist, the girl was fortunate in her heritage. Her late father, William Zorach, who emigrated to this country from Lithuania when he was a child, became the preeminent sculptor of his time. Her mother, Marguerite Thompson, descendant of a New England mariner, was a distinguished painter who, while studying in Paris in the early 1900s, had been caught up in the revolt against classic art forms. Later, in addition to painting, she was to become famous for her embroideries. A notable one, which required three years to complete, was an almost life-size tapestry of the Rockefeller family at Seal Harbor.
Given such parents and allowed the freedom of their studios, Dahlov might be said to have come by her gifts quite naturally. But talent is not an inherited trait, nor is environment a deciding factor. In certain climates, it will flourish; sometimes, obstinate and ineradicable, it will grow despite adverse, even hostile, circumstances.
The second of two children, Dahlov was born “off schedule, just before the first snow” (as her father was to write in his autobiography, Art Is My Life) in the town of Windsor, Vermont, in 1917. In succeeding summers, the Zorach family lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where the parents acted with the Provincetown Players and designed sets and costumes for many of Eugene O’Neill’s plays. Then there was the summer of 1923, in Stonington, when the search for a permanent summer home in Maine resulted in their buying the house in Robinhood. This had variously served as a sea captain’s house, the post office for Riggsville (former name for Robinhood), and a boardinghouse. To this property the Zorachs were to return every year until the end of their long and productive lives.
With hindsight, Dahlov now freely acknowledges a special debt to her mother: a respect for what has come to be called the work ethic. Like any child, she resented the first-things-first discipline Marguerite Zorach imposed. Whether absorbed in a book or raptly engaged in drawing, she would be routed out of her sunrise bed to do house or garden chores. Even with strong evidence of early talent, the girl received little of that cosseting so often given children with no discernible gifts.
With discipline, however, went a goodly amount of freedom. When she was old enough to find her way around New York City, she was allowed to explore two notable institutions which especially influenced the subject matter of her work. One was the Bronx Zoo, which provided “natural” habitats for its African and Asian animals; the other was the Museum of Natural History. Even then, Dahlov seldom made sketches of animals she saw, preferring to train her visual memory so that subsequent paintings would not be merely realistic and static. Her lifelong fascination with wildlife made National Geographic her favorite periodical, even before she learned to read. Her parents allowed her to keep a menagerie of pets, and enlivened their house with murals representing the Garden of Eden, full of fanciful birds, flowers, and animals.
The Zorachs never formally taught her to draw or paint. Early crayon studies, many done in the attic of the Robinhood house, were given generous encouragement, but extravagant praise was not their style. If her family disliked her work, they withheld criticism. “They just said nothing,” Dahlov recalls. However, open scorn was shown for copied work, and the young girl fast learned that only her original work had any validity.
She was fortunate, too, in the schools her parents chose for her. From ages three to 13, she attended City and Country School, in New York City, an experimental progressive institution where children were encouraged in all forms of creative expression. Pupils used poster paints on large sheets of newsprint in their regular classrooms. Dahlov never experienced the so-called barren period that overtakes children once they become self-conscious about their work, but she came close to it when she strove for realism. At 11, she began to be influenced by magazine art and was inclined to do what she describes as “rather smart-alecky things.” Happily, about this time, she began studying East Indian art, and this, with its disregard for perspective and fussy detail, was to affect her work permanently.
At 14, she went to Walden, a progressive high school in the city, whose faculty, in addition to members with high academic merit and a gift for teaching, included some of the outstanding dancers, poets, and artists in New York. All students interested in art worked together in a magnificently equipped art room. And it was at Walden that Dahlov first reacted to social and
political problems and to the conflicts of her time: the plight of the unemployed, the horrors and futility of war (All Quiet on the Western Front deeply affected her). The emotional crosscurrents aroused by her awakened interest in people and events now inspired another method of expression, writing, and she began to produce impassioned stories and poems. But writing was to remain only of secondary interest for some years, even though in mid-teens she was to design and write an elaborate Egyptian puppet show and also edit and contribute to the school literary magazine.
The graphic arts remained ascendant. Whether working in charcoal, pastel chalks, or oils, on large-scale murals or on rather cubistic abstractions, she held firmly to her preference for painting from her imagination. “I never liked to work from an object in front of me,” Dahlov says. “While I felt the need of accuracy in details of my pictures, my method was to observe closely and remember, rarely sketching, and I still regard this as an asset. My father once explained the oriental appearance of much of my work by saying, ‘This is because Dahlov, like Asian artists, was never exposed to lessons in anatomy or perspective. The people and animals she draws are boneless, yet appear natural. She draws a horse as she writes her name — through long, uninhibited practice.’”
The influence of her pre-college education was to be reflected in an exhibition of her work given at the Museum of Modern Art in November 1939. Called Creative Growth, it showed her development in art from the age of three through 17. Of it, Victor D’Amico, director of educational projects at the museum, wrote: “This exhibition should be of great interest to educators and parents because it shows the creative growth from infancy to adulthood of an individual who is neither a genius nor a prodigy. She was a normal, healthy child whose capacity for art flourished not because her parents are noted artists but because of their sensitivity and recognition of Dahlov as a creative individual. [It shows] the uninhibited progress a child can make with proper stimulation and encouragement from intelligent teachers and parents.”
In her 17th year, Dahlov matriculated at Oberlin College, in Ohio, and was dismayed by its old-fashioned art department. Students had to draw from plaster casts and execute landscapes on tiny 8-by-11-inch canvas boards. Refusing to participate in such regressive and stifling exercises, she was given a vacant room in which to work alone, doing large, mural-scale pastels. Bored at the end of her freshman year, she dropped out of college. After that, she worked at home on her own, almost entirely in oils, and abandoned the large scale for more normal-size figures. Even later, when she accepted two commissions from the treasury department (post offices in LaFollette, Tennessee, and Yukon, Oklahoma), they were more like large easel paintings than typical murals.
A year out of school, she became engaged to Adolph Ipcar, a student at a New York college, whom she had known for four years. While their marriage had her parents’ blessing, her first-things-first mother insisted that Dahlov undergo intensive training in cookery. Marguerite Zorach evidently set great store by the traditional “way to a man’s heart”; certainly she was determined that her daughter’s marriage would not founder on a poor table.
The Ipcars’ subsequent years on their Robinhood farm provide a record of struggle, learning, setbacks, forward leaps; of harsh winters that kept them snowbound, of summers given to unrelenting physical labor. Dahlov recalls a visiting neighbor who was outraged to see the two Ipcar boys tied to a tree by a long rope. “Why not?” Dahlov replied, busy making up hay. “They are safe from scythes and mowing machines — and besides, we always give them plenty of rope.”
When her children were small and there was no money for luxuries like toys, she began experimenting with what has since come to be admired as her famous “soft sculptures.” Stuffed figures, imaginatively designed and covered with beautiful fabrics, these cloth sculptures are today of museum quality. For one who heartily dislikes sewing, Dahlov can spend countless hours bringing off a witty, engaging piece which is no less than a genuine art form.
Today a major artist, her oils are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan, Whitney, and Newark museums, and in many university collections throughout the country. Apart from showing in important group exhibits, she has had six one-man shows in New York City and 12 in Maine. Early this year, five of her new oils were included in a show of Maine painters held at the Shore Gallery, in Boston. In 1972, she and her husband, a former director of the Maine Art Gallery, in Wiscasset, and the first president of the Bath-Brunswick Regional Arts Council, were jointly given the governor’s annual Maine State Award in recognition of their labors “for the aesthetic betterment” of the state.
Impressively well organized and industrious, she is also a prolific writer, having produced some 30 books for children and teenagers, most of them lavishly illustrated with her own art. An old apple house that once served as a studio has been replaced by a spacious workroom full of luxuriant plants, bookcases, drawing tables, and the tools of Dahlov’s two demanding trades.
If she was a pioneer dropout from college, sensibly affronted by its non-relation to her needs as an artist, she has never dropped out of community or state affairs. Her two sons went to local schools and later attended Maine colleges. Robert, who now makes documentary films, graduated from Colby; Charles, a Bowdoin graduate, is currently working for his doctorate in economic geography. Zealous in her devotion to Maine, she shares with her husband firm opinions about good government, and participates in all movements against invasion of industries she considers inimical to the state’s future. “Someone once said that Maine must be kept a human sanctuary,” Dahlov says. “It must — and I shall work for that right down the line.”
The world she creates in her art is unique. For reasons beyond probing, she has not lost that powerful imagination, which is more often the exclusive domain of precocious children. If anything, in the isolation of Robinhood Farm, Dahlov Ipcar’s poetic vision of fabled beasts in a fabulous kingdom becomes stronger every year — to the delight of her admirers, young and old, in Maine and all over the country.
Margaret Hammel served as Down East’s first managing editor. Dahlov Ipcar continued making art until her death, in 2017. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Portland Museum of Art, the Farnsworth Art Museum, and many others. The Possibilities of Patterns, a solo exhibition of Ipcar’s textile works, will be on view at Vermont’s Shelburne Museum from May 10 to October 26.
