Conversations  with
Dorothea and Leo

An Outline of the  Rabkin Collection

The exhibition "Just Plain People: Folk Sculpture from the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Collection at the Museum of American Folk Art" opens this spring at the Sidney Mishkin Gallery at Baruch College in New York. Organized by Dr. Sandra Kraskin, director of the Mishkin Gallery, the exhibition features approximately twenty-five objects that - although they are representations of men and women at work and at play - are far from plain. The carvings are engaging, exciting, thought-provoking, moving - most of them literally - and beautiful.

Over the past forty years, Dorothea and Leo Rabkin have collected more than 1,200 objects, the majority of which are carved from wood in the human form and present themselves as whirligigs, wind toys, dancing toys, mannequins, dolls, ventriloquists' dummies, carnival figures, and weathervanes. The Rabkins modestly refer to themselves as "just plain people," but every adjective used to describe these carved figures could easily be applied to the couple who have chosen to populate their lives with them.

Dorothea and her twin sister, Rose, were born in Berlin in the 1920s to a Jewish father, Franz Herz, a lawyer, and a non-Jewish mother, Elsa Herz, nee Herr. After Hitler came to power, Elsa divorced Franz and denounced the twins, who spent the war years as "hidden children." In order to be kept safe from the Nazis, Dorothea and Rose were separated and, through the efforts of "the underground," secretly moved from home to home throughout the city. Franz, when pursued by the Gestapo, committed suicide. When the war ended, Dorothea and Rose tried to put their lives back together. They found jobs, put away some money, and planned their immigration to the United States.

Leo Rabkin was born in Cincinnati in 1919 to David and Bessie Rabkin. As the son of a successful building contractor, Leo was well educated and exposed to the arts. His uncle Louis Aronoff owned an antiques business and eventually became the head of Cincinnati's leading auction house. Before the war, Leo helped out at his uncle's store on school breaks and gained an appreciation for the beautiful, the rare, and the odd. Even as a student with limited financial resources, Leo managed to build a small collection of American Indian pottery.

In 1945, after serving in the U. S. Army, Leo moved to New York to become an artist and to attend graduate school. He received a master's degree in education with a concentration in guidance from New York University, and worked as a teacher and vocational counselor, specializing in helping disturbed youths, all the while continuing to draw and paint. Today, his work is represented in many museums, including The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and The Brooklyn Museum.

In December 1949, Dorothea arrived in New York, shortly after Rose. Although she had studied art in school and regularly visited museums, Dorothea did not resume her formal education in the United States, as she needed to work to support herself. She worked as a cook in a Schrafft's restaurant until she felt secure with the English language. She next worked as a German correspondent in a Swiss watch company and then as the secretary to the promotions director for a group of trade magazines serving the food and drug industry. Dorothea became an avid reader in both German and English, and seriously studied French (in fact, she still does). She was interested in Asian art, and collected Japanese netsuke, the small and often intricately carved toggles of wood or ivory that are used to fasten a small container to a kimono sash. Dorothea settled into her new country, worked hard on losing her accent, and in 1958 introduced herself to her blind date, Leo Rabkin, by her Americanized name, Dorothy. A mutual friend had given Leo Dorothea's phone number and urged him to give her a call. They met on January 2 and were married five months later.

In a recent conversation, Dorothy-always referred to affectionately by her husband as Dorothea expressed a desire to return to her given name. "In all these years I have not been able to lose my German accent," she said. "I suppose now I should accept it, and so I wish I had not changed my name to Dorothy. I would like now to return to my real name."

The Rabkins set up housekeeping on a shoestring budget. They trolled the flea markets, secondhand stores, and curio shops, and explored New York's Greenwich Village for hidden and sometimes (to some of their friends' thinking) sunken treasure with which to furnish their home. They bought country furniture, quilts, pressed glass, paintings, and pottery, and started looking at hand-carved toys. Both found themselves drawn to the freedom of expression in these little folk carvings. Dorothea saw the work as a reflection of the American spirit and work ethic, and delighted in what she describes as the American sense of humor. The Rabkins' close friend, art historian Susan Larsen, has said that "Dorothea has a compassionate heart for people who have endured hardship. She is utterly free of timid prejudice and laughs heartily at a good joke, an amusing story, or the art of someone depicting the ironies of everyday life."

Leo's own abstract sculpture - glorious buttresses of wire and string, metal and cloth, that virtually sing from their wall mounts - attest to his fine sense of beauty and three-dimensional design. A recent exhibition of his work, "Words on Edge: An Abstract Installation," was held at New York's Herbert Lust Gallery in May and June of 1996. Dorothea and Leo's combined artistic sensitivity has made them exceptional fisher folk, and together they have gathered in some wonderful catches.

They were regulars at the Greenwich House Community Center Annual Antiques Show in the 1960s and were well known to dealers there, including Robert Bishop, who became the director of the Museum of American Folk Art in 1977. Bishop developed a close friendship with the Rabkins and in fact sold them their first piece of folk sculpture - a wooden carving of a man with outstretched arms, probably part of a toy. The figure's face reminded Dorothea of the work of German expressionist painter Max Beckmann, whose post World War II work was a combination of brutal realism and social criticism. The wooden figure's harsh countenance and seemingly entreating, outstretched arms appealed to her. Larsen notes that "Dorothea Rabkin has the rare ability to accept and to understand the raw and powerful qualities of expressionist and outsider art. She is not put off by the awkward and the rough, as long as there is emotional truth in the work." More than a thousand objects later, The Man with Outstretched Arms is still one of Dorothea's favorite pieces.

The Rabkins became known for some of their offbeat choices. They often relate the following story, sometimes telling it together: "A friend of ours found a small Voodoo coffin, which had been washed up on the shore at Coney Island. It was only about three inches high and contained two cloth figures stuck with pins. Since we had a reputation among our friends as liking this weird stuff, our friend gave it to us." Almost without realizing it - although apparently their friends had - collecting had become their pastime, their pleasure, and their passion.

Dorothea and Leo branched out. In their little Volkswagen Beetle, they ventured into New Jersey and upstate New York to find dealers they had been told about and to search tag sales, yard sales, and bam sales for art. They bought what they liked and did not care what others were collecting. They did not buy as an investment. They have never sold anything they've bought in order to "trade up." Leo strongly asserts that "the only reason to purchase art is if it appeals to you. Folk art appeals to me because it embraces all the impulses and freedoms of Americans."

One of the Rabkins' most important purchases is a whirligig depicting Uncle Sam riding a bicycle, carved sometime between 1880 and 1920. In 1973, Ada Harris, a dealer in Winfield, New York, on Route 20 near Cooperstown, called the Rabkins to offer them this imposing object. She thought it would fit perfectly into their collection. When they agreed to buy it-Dorothea and Leo always have to agree on a purchase-Harris insisted on payment in cash. Afraid to travel with what they considered a huge sum, Dorothea and Leo made the trip to Winfield with the purchase price in traveler's checks. Uncle Sam Riding A Bicycle, a promised bequest to the Museum of American Folk Art, has become an icon of the museum and one of the most important pieces of folk art in its collection. This object is most often photographed from the side, showing Uncle Sam "riding" off to the viewer's left, trailing a beautifully carved American flag that virtually ripples in the wind. What is not apparent is that the Canadian flag is painted on the reverse side of the American one. As the wind turned the propeller, Uncle Sam's legs moved up and down, peddling the bicycle wheels. The whole sculpture is about five feet long, a snug fit in a Volkswagen to be sure.

In the summer of 1980, the Museum of American Folk Art mounted an ambitious exhibition of 143 objects from the Rabkins' collection. Leo humorously recounts that Bishop, finding himself director of a museum of small holdings and an almost empty warehouse, implored them to make their collection available to the public. "Whirligigs, Windtoys and Woodcarvings: Promised Bequests from the Collection of Leo and Dorothy Rabkin" was on view from August through November, and according to Leo, because the museum had very limited exhibition funds, it was "displayed in showcases borrowed from a friend at New York's Fashion Institute of Technology." The exhibition catalog, published as an insert in the Summer/Fall 1980 issue of The Clarion (the former title of this magazine), included a complete checklist. Uncle Sam Riding a Bicycle was featured on the magazine's front cover.

Patricia L. Coblentz, the museum's assistant director and curator for the exhibition, wrote: "This special exhibition of whirligigs, wind toys, and woodcarvings is only a small portion of the collection of Leo and Dorothy Rabkin. They have gathered a wonderful assemblage of handcrafted objects from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries featuring the human form, ranging from figures as small as I inch to as large as 6 feet.... Viewing their collection is a visual and mental delight."

Two other whirligigs featured in that exhibition were a witch on a broomstick and a farm scene. Witch, carved in New England in the second half of the 19th century, resembles a pensive medieval maiden, more than a scary witch. Her skirts are gaily painted in red and yellow stripes, and her broom has a simple single propeller that spins in the wind. In contrast, Farm Vignette is quite intricate. Coblentz described it like this: "The horse's tail swishes as his head drops into the bucket to drink the water the farmer is pumping for him; the sawyer is industriously cutting a log into pieces; the chicken's tail moves as he picks the worms out of the fisherman's bait can; and the fisherman's leg moves in time with his arms as he pulls his rod back and forth." The Man with Outstretched Arms was also shown in this exhibition.

Two years later, the Nassau County Museum of Fine Art in Roslyn Harbor, New York, presented "Americans at Work and Play: Folk Sculpture from the Collection of Dorothy and Leo Rabkin" in cooperation with the Museum of American Folk Art. This exhibition was on view October 1982 through January 1983. The catalog's main essays, "Americans at Work" and "Americans at Play," were written by the co-curators, Elizabeth V. Warren and Ann Dauberman, respectively. In addition to wooden whirligigs and wind toys, the exhibition checklist of 115 objects featured eighteen Shaker objects (including furniture, boxes, a yam swift, and a mirror), five bottle whimsies, and three stone figures by Raymond Coins. Of the twenty-four objects chosen for illustration in the catalog, one of the most striking is a rather frightening carving of a monkey. The fettered animal, which stands almost two feet tail, stares out at the viewer with a beseeching and confused look in its glass eyes, and bares real teeth. The power and pathos of this piece belies any notion that the Rabkins' collection encompasses only the whimsical and the charming.

In 1973, the Rabkins purchased a garden environment that had been assembled by Matteo Radoslovich in the back garden of his home in West New York, New Jersey, between 1947 and 1972. In "Matteo Radoslovich: A Twentieth Century Crafted Environment," written for The Challenge of Folk Materials for New Jersey's Museums (Museum Council of New Jersey, 1986), art historian Mary Ann Demos wrote: "Motion is the characteristic that most sharply differentiates the Radoslovich garden environment from other folk art environments.... The motion, the color, the use of wire and metal, the fanciful objects, and the seeming identity of some of the Radoslovich figures as performers all remind one of Alexander Calder's circus and his mobiles." Clown with Drum on Bottle and Pumpkin Head Figure, both "performers" in Radoslovich's circus, are among the thirty-seven objects purchased by the Rabkins and, ten years later, donated to the Museum of American Folk Art.

Although the concentration in the Rabkins' collection is on the kind of sculptural forms discussed here - works made mostly by unknown artists in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century - Dorothea and Leo have, in the 1980s and 1990s, collected paintings and three dimensional works by contemporary self-taught and outsider artists. Some of the artists represented in their collection are Clyde Angel, James Castle, Sam Doyle, Howard Finster, Bessie Harvey, Louis Monza, J.B. Murry, Nellie Mae Rowe, Jon Serl, Mose Tolliver, and Bill Traylor.

For the past ten years, Dorothea has been a member of the Collections Committee of the Museum of American Folk Art and has been responsible, along with its other members, for recommending and voting on proposed additions to the museum's holdings. Dorothea was one of the first to recognize the importance of the work of Justin McCarthy, and she strongly recommended his work for the museum's collection. "Dorothea is a modest, but strong woman," says Larsen. "As a collector, she is sure of her convictions, an early supporter of unknown artists, and entirely focused on intrinsic merit. Many other collectors watch her choices and seek her advice."

Through their efforts and zeal, Dorothea and Leo Rabkin have preserved a wide variety of objects that represent an important part of America's folk heritage. By choosing the Museum of American Folk art as the permanent repository of their collection, Dorothea and Leo make their vision accessible to just plain people and make these unique works of art available to the public for generations to come.

Rosemary Gabriel
Folk Art
Spring 1998