ABOUT DAHLOV IPCAR
Ipcar was born on November 12, 1917 in Windsor, Vermont to famed sculptor, painter and educator William Zorach and painter and textile artist Marguerite (Thompson) Zorach. William and Marguerite were known in the art world as “the Zorachs” — two artists who produced highly individual work, explored similar styles, techniques and subjects and had innovative collaborations. The Zorach homes doubled as studio and salon space. Exhibitions in their home were publicized as the Zorach Studio. Their expansive works included batiks, bronze sculptures and direct carvings of wood and stone, embroideries, hooked rugs, murals, printmaking, poetry, oil paintings, set design and watercolors.
278 and 276 Hicks Street in Brooklyn, New York. (The Zorach’s carriage house is on the right.) 1976. Photograph by Edmund Vincent Gillon, from the Museum of the City of New York. Courtesy of the Zorach Collection.
Throughout their lives, the Zorachs maintained a deep love for the natural world. Access to it was critically important to their life. Marguerite Zorach believed that the rejuvenating qualities of nature were essential for creativity, so she insisted the family spend summers in the country, rather than remain in the city. While in New York City, the Zorachs worked out of their Greenwich Village home until 1937 and later from their Hicks Street residence in Brooklyn. Painting at the Maine house happened after family and art students left for the summer.
Their daughter grew up in Greenwich Village, spending most of her summers in Maine. Dahlov (Zorach) Ipcar was her parents’ greatest creative experiment. Marguerite and William Zorach educated their daughter with a progressive philosophy, encouraging material experimentation and stressing the importance of individual expression. They took her to museums and artist friends’ studios, exposing her from a young age to early-20th-century avant-garde movements like Cubism and Fauvism. Ipcar describes her childhood as unusual, “I grew up in a home full of modern art, of Fauvism and Cubism, in a creative atmosphere, where everything in our home was exciting and different from other people’s homes. From the beginning, art seemed like a natural part of life.”
Marguerite, William, Tessim and Dahlov in Plainfield, New Hampshire. 1918. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of the Zorach Collection.
William Zorach with Tessim and Dahlov at 123 West 10th Street in Greenwich Village, New York City. 1924. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of the Zorach Collection.
Dahlov Ipcar and her Dalmatian standing next to her mural for the La Follette, Tennessee Post Office, leaned against the Apple Shed at her farm in Maine. 1939. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of the Zorach Collection.
Dahlov on roller skates outside the Zorach apartment on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village. 1927. Photographer unknown.
MARGUERITE ZORACH. Nude and Flowers. 1922. Hooked Rug. Available through Rachel Walls Fine Art.
While Marguerite and William Zorach were united in their commitment to each other and their work, the public focused on William's contributions to the modern art scene, despite Marguerite Zorach's embroideries receiving critical acclaim attracting notable collectors during Ipcar’s youth. An outspoken supporter of craft as a legitimate art form, Marguerite Zorach was a founding member of the Society of Women Artists in 1925 and later served as the Society’s President.
DAHLOV IPCAR. My Mother, Marguerite Zorach. 1999. This oil on linen painting has been shown at the Portland Museum of Art and Farnsworth Art Museum, both in Maine.
Dahlov Ipcar shared, “My mother was a wonderful role model. She could produce amazing art, rebuild a house, design and cultivate a garden, hang wallpaper, cook delicious meals, raise two children, tended chickens, milked cows, bred Dalmatians and be a partner in my father’s art world. She created artistic beauty in everything she put her hand to, and she could put her hand to just about anything. My mother and I painted side by side and exchanged criticism and praise freely as equals.”
Ipcar attended progressive schools where William Zorach taught the art classes: City and Country School, Walden School and then Lincoln School of Teachers College, all in New York City. She spent one semester at Oberlin College. Uninterested in traditional art courses, Dahlov made use of a vacant room, where she created large-scale pastel chalk drawings. After the semester, she returned home and married Adolph Ipcar in 1936. During the first year of her marriage, Dahlov Ipcar was a teacher’s assistant at Florence Kane’s Art School in Rockefeller Center where she learned about lithography and how to use the offset press.
DAHLOV IPCAR. Flappers in the Jungle. 1927. This gouache debuted to the public on November 1, 1939 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City when Ipcar was just twenty-one (21) years old.
Dahlov Ipcar established herself as a serious artist in 1939, holding her first national exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C. Later that year, Ipcar had an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The Director of the Museum of Modern Art’s Educational Project, Victor D’Amico, organized an exhibition of Dahlov Ipcar’s work in a space called the Young People’s Gallery — a Program of the Education Department that worked with local schools to put on shows and workshops. D’Amico felt Ipcar was a living testament to “the uninhibited progress a child can make with proper stimulation and encouragement from intelligent teachers and parents,” as he wrote in the show’s press release.
Creative Growth: Childhood to Maturity featuring the artwork of Dahlov Ipcar was on view at the Museum of Modern Art from November 1, 1939 to January 5, 1940. Photograph by Soichi Sunami. Courtesy of the Estate of Dahlov Ipcar.
The exhibition Creative Growth: Childhood to Maturity opened at MoMA that fall, making Ipcar both the first woman and the youngest person to have a solo show at the museum. The exhibition featured striking compositions of animals and human figures in oil, watercolor, drawing, lithograph, etching, and embroidery, as well as ceramics and wood carvings that Dahlov (Zorach) Ipcar had produced between the ages of three (3) and twenty-one (21) years old.
Dahlov with her sons in her bedroom at their farmhouse in Maine. 1948. Photograph by William A. Hatch, published in Mademoiselle magazine, February 1949, page 128. Courtesy of the Estate of Dahlov Ipcar.
In 1945, Dahlov Ipcar illustrated The Little Fisherman written by Margaret Wise Brown, a popular children's book author at the time. Ipcar was writing and illustrating her own children’s books by 1947, authoring thirty-four children’s books, three novels for young adults and two adult fiction novels, in addition to the three books she illustrated for three authors. Dahlov Ipcar received Junior Literature Guild selections for: One Horse Farm (1950), World Full of Horses (1955), Brown Cow Farm (1959), Stripes and Spots (1961), Wild and Tame Animals (1962), Horses of Long Ago (1965), The Song of the Day Birds and the Night Birds (1967) and Bug City (1975).
Photograph by John Ewing.
Bug City — a children’s book written and illustrated by Dahlov Ipcar in 1975 — was re-released by North Atlantic Books/Penguin Random House during summer 2019. Ipcar’s flamboyant, colorful illustrations create a charming story for readers to enjoy and learn how to identify a wide variety of bugs. “In both my painting and my writing, I create worlds of the imagination. I transform ordinary reality into a reality that has special meaning to me. I hope it will also have special meaning to others,” said Dahlov Ipcar — who used her parent’s home at 276 Hicks Street in Brooklyn, New York as the inspiration for the bug family’s house in the story.
Three thousand and forty (3040) copies of Bug City were donated to First Book — a nonprofit social enterprise based in Washington DC that believes education is the best way out of poverty and provides new books, educational resources, coats, snacks and hygiene kits to educators serving children in need across the United States and Canada. Primary schools, libraries, English as a second language programs, emergency relief programs, visual and performing arts programs, parent and family engagement programs and health service programs benefited from the Bug City gift.
Dahlov Ipcar earned an honorary doctor of humane letters from the University of Maine in 1979. Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degrees followed from Colby College in 1980, Bates College in 1991 and the Maine College of Art in 2013. She received the Kerlan Award for Children’s Literature from the University of Minnesota in 1998.
DAHLOV IPCAR. Blue Savanna. 1978. Gift to the Portland Museum of Art in Maine by the artist, Dahlov Ipcar.
Dahlov Ipcar’s work is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smithsonian of American Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In Maine her work is at the Bates College Art Museum, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Colby College Museum of Art, Farnsworth Art Museum, Portland Museum of Art, University of Maine and University of New England.
Dahlov Ipcar died on February 10, 2017. Adolph Ipcar predeceased her in 2003. They had been married 67 years. Dahlov Ipcar is survived by her sons and their families.