FATHER AND DAUGHTER: DAHLOV IPCAR

Dahlov Ipcar
March 7 – May 3, 2024
Maine Jewish Museum

About This Exhibition

Dahlov (Zorach) Ipcar is considered her parents’ greatest creative experiment. Ipcar was born at a hospital in Windsor, Vermont to the famed sculptor, painter and educator William Zorach and his wife, the painter and textile artist Marguerite (Thompson) Zorach in 1917, while they were living at Echo Farm in Plainfield, New Hampshire.

William and Marguerite, who met at art school in Paris, were known in the New York art world as “the Zorachs” — two artists who produced highly individual work, explored similar styles, techniques and subjects and had innovative collaborations. An unfinished portrait of their daughter, Dahlov, by Marguerite Zorach in oil paint on canvas along with a textile of The Ipcar Family at Robinhood Farm completed in 1944 will be in this exhibition.

Marguerite and William Zorach lived in New York City’s Greenwich Village and 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.”

In the late 1930s after marrying Adolph Ipcar, a longtime friend and summer neighbor in Maine, in New York City, the newlywed Ipcars moved to Maine permanently where they lived on Robinhood Farm, part of the Zorach’s property on Georgetown Island, Maine. Over twenty works from Ipcar’s personal collection, the majority of which were created in her studio and later hung in her residence on Robinhood Farm will be shown in this exhibition.

Additionally, an oil on beaverboard room divider painted in 1935 in New York City that was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1937, in Ipcar’s historic exhibition and appears in the Zorach’s home on Hicks Street in Brooklyn, NY during their March 15, 1957 interview with Edward R. Murrow will be on view. These iconic works created in multiple mediums between 1935 and 2009 will demonstrate Ipcar’s own connections to Judaism and how stories like Noah and the Ark and Adam and Eve influenced her painting, Embarkation, and textile masterpiece, Garden of Eden. Photographs of Ipcar’s home and art collection will accompany the exhibition with a catalogue.