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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.

About the Artist
Dahlov Ipcar was both the first woman and the youngest person in history to have a solo exhibition in 1937 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. An award-winning illustrator and author of over thirty (30) books, as well as a prolific and accomplished painter, Ipcar’s larger works include ten (10) mural projects in the United States, including post offices in Tennessee and Oklahoma and hospitals in Maine and Massachusetts. Ipcar received Junior Literature Guild selections in 1950, 1955, 1959, 1961,1962, 1965, 1967 and 1975; the Deborah Morton Award from Westbrook College in 1978; the Westbrook College and Junior League of Portland Maine Women of Achievement Award in 1984; the Kerlan Award for Children’s Literature from the University of Minnesota in 1998; the Maryann Hartman Award from the University of Maine in 2003; Maine in America Award from the Farnsworth Art Museum in 2012 and The Society of Illustrators’ Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023. Dahlov Ipcar’s artwork is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Smithsonian of American Art, Washington DC; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; as well as several museums in Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Maryland.

Visual Arts

Father and Daughter: Dahlov Ipcar

Maine Jewish Museum

Father and Daughter: Dahlov Ipcar

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