Ipcar, no ipecac

The PMA allows for a body full of transformations

By Jenna Russell

“Dahlov Ipcar: Seven Decades of Creativity” shows at the Portland Museum of Art through Jan. 27, 2002. Call (207) 775-6148.

“PHASIANIDAE,”: oil on canvas, 2000, by Dahlov Ipcar.

In her 1954 painting “The Brave Birds,” Dahlov Ipcar depicts a group of roosters scattered and clustered like cocktail party guests. This is not a Rockwell-esque documentation of everyday life at mid-century, like her earlier pictures of plow horses. The birds’ tail feathers — black, scythe-shaped — dominate the composition, abstract, inky blots against a spare, modern backdrop of white hen houses. The roosters dance assigned roles, in a design wholly choreographed by Ipcar. The artist slips the bonds of representation, and takes control.

Ipcar, who lives in Georgetown and will turn 84 this month, has been painting a long time, long enough to undergo more than one metamorphosis. Her artistic development is thoroughly, dazzlingly traced in the current retrospective at the Portland Museum of Art, “Dahlov Ipcar: Seven Decades of Creativity.” The daughter of early modernist artists William and Marguerite Zorach, she spent her childhood in Greenwich Village, surrounded by pets and her parents’ semi-Cubist works, and taught herself to make art. The museum offers an unique opportunity to study the two generations together with the opening this week of “Harmonies and Contrasts: The Art of Marguerite and William Zorach,” in its first-floor galleries. The museum architecture reinforces the family connection; it’s possible to stand by a row of Ipcar watercolors, upstairs near the balcony, and steal glances down into the heart of the Zorach show.

The earliest works in the show are unsophisticated portraits like “Charlie in High Chair,” done by the young mother in 1944. Encouraged by her parents, Ipcar mostly rejected formal art instruction, and the early paintings show her figuring things out for herself. She married young and moved to Maine for good around 1940, and her paintings of the next two decades largely feature life on her farm, the shoeing of horses and the separating of cream. These are quiet scenes, compared to what would come later: farmers bow their heads and horses plod steadily through the fields. The palette, similarly subdued, favors the gray and brown of Maine winter and spring.

Ipcar has dated major change in her painting style to 1960, when her children’s book “The Calico Jungle” was published, the first of many books she wrote and illustrated. Fascinated with quilts, batiks and calicos — her mother was an expert embroiderer of tapestries — Ipcar imitated patterned fabrics in painting the book’s watercolor animals. The experiment suggested a new kind of art, one that would engage her for decades to come, drawing her out of narrative realism and into a realm ruled by visual impact alone.

A neon tiger, pitched somewhere between pink and orange, glows like a setting sun in 1963’s “In the Forests of the Night,” against a twilight jungle of giant plants and hard-to-see, leaping black wolves or coyotes. Richly detailed and steeped in fantasy, the oil is reminiscent of Henri Rousseau’s jungle dreams. Once dismissed as primitive, the turn-of-the-century French artist has been reassessed more recently as an influence on Picasso, de Chirico, and 20th-century surrealism. Living a suburban life far from any safari, Rousseau imagined large, intricate studies of exotic flora and fauna, with lions, tigers, and monkeys set deep in dark greenery. Both Ipcar and Rousseau could be called escapist, drawn to the diversion of the unfamiliar, and actively heightening its strangeness.

“Increasingly, I have come to feel that the reality created by the artist is more important than actual reality,” Ipcar has written. “The real world may come to seem oppressively dull and barren unless transformed and revitalized by imagination.”

Picking up speed in her quest for revitalization, Ipcar ultimately complicated her works with whole herds of rampaging animals, and design-driven divisions of space that left behind traditional pictorial arrangements in favor of prismatic, collage-style layouts. “Harlequin Jungle” (1972) is striped with horizontal lines that demarcate separate pathways for hyenas, buffalo, and zebras. The animals are almost always in motion, charging forward, chasing each other, though often the romp looks more playful than fatal, as in the watercolor “Wild Dog Hunt.”

Sometimes Ipcar retells Bible stories, as in “Adam Naming the Beasts,” and “Moon Ark,” where a panda’s arm is slung cozily over a tiger’s shoulder, and seals and fish swim along beside the boat. In one of her most powerful paintings, “Island of King Minos” (1979), large golden orbs, moons or suns, float among leaping white and orange cows. Large oval shapes contain the action, so the picture seems a cut-away view of events inside a body or atmosphere. Stand way back, out in the hall by the balcony, and the cows disappear. The moons bounce in modern, abstract color-play.

Ipcar’s mature paintings are rarely diagrammed in advance, instead developing spontaneously as she works. Their leaping cats might represent, in four-legged form, her own mental sprints in the hours before the canvas. Her interest is in controlled chaos: There is order in the art, but blurred by extravagance. She pleases herself with an insistence on beauty and magic, and rejects much of what modern art has become — making Ipcar an unlikely rebel, with the stubborn independence of a native Mainer. Undomesticated by the decades, her imagination still leaps like an antelope.

Jenna Russell can be reached at russelljenna@hotmail.com.