Robert Dash (1931–2013)
618 Sagg Main Street, Sagaponack, NY 11962
631-537-8200
ABOUT
“It winked at me.” said Robert Dash when he saw the property, and he named it Madoo, Old Scots for “my dove.” The earliest part of the garden was the secret garden in the courtyard of the summer house, which he had fashioned from a 1740 hay barn.
Dash’s extensive research into garden history inspired many of Madoo’s follies. In the early 1990s, Dash reimagined the pond garden as the more fanciful Asian-inspired garden. What was a rose rill in the winter garden started as a brick path, leading the eye to the adjacent farms with an obelisk at the end. A Camellia garden was added in 2019 and the winter house garden was renovated in 2020 with a simplification of the quincunx gardens, and creation of four tapestry hedged rooms. In Dash’s words “I don’t want to inhibit or prohibit or fix this garden in amber; it must remain vital.”
SPECIAL RESOURCES
“I think actually to paint you have to know everything — because I think everything goes into it and that the moment you paint you have to render yourself just a vehicle or vessel for the thing to come out…”
— Robert Dash in an interview with Paul Cummings for the Archives of American Art, 1974
Robert Dash (1931–2013)
Robert Dash was born in downtown New York in 1931. He studied literature and anthropology at The University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Having no formal training as a painter, he “bought a can of white and a can of black and sloshed them around.” In 1959, Dash traveled to Maine with Alex Katz, and soon thereafter began visiting Fairfield Porter in his home and studio in Southampton.
In 1967, Dash relocated permanently to Sagaponack, to the home he christened Madoo. Here he was freely devoted to painting, poetry, and gardening. Throughout the 1970s, Dash was regarded as an accomplished painter for his depictions of a now all but vanished Sagaponack landscape. The 1980s and ‘90s were marked by works with a gestural brushstroke, loaded surfaces and personal iconography leading up to his highly regarded Florilegium and Sagg Main series from the 2000s. Dash died in 2013.
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Following Robert Dash’s 1967 purchase of the property, the garden was developed as a meadow through which Dash would mow paths and place a chair or a bench when he came across a good view. Among the visitors who game to Madoo were Dash’s coterie of writer friends from New York City. Many had been in his circle during the 1950s and ‘60s, when he was writing poetry and art criticism. His close friendship with the painter Fairfield Porter brought Dash to the East End, and he spent many summers at Porter’s house in Southampton. The poet Douglas Crase recalls being thrilled to see one of his poems framed on a wall at Madoo, and poet John Koethe has described Madoo as “one of the great literary salons of the late-20th century.” In the 1980s, the garden began to come into its own with his growing friendship with legendary English garden designer Rosemary Verey who inspired many of Madoo’s plantings. The plantings at this point also became more “gardenesque,” as Dash moved away from the native meadow plants that had caught his attention in the early years.
The link between poetry and Madoo is an ever-present leitmotif in both the garden and its history. The connection between garden, poetry, and art is exemplified in the suite of serigraphs that Dash created with Pulitzer Prize–winning poet James Schuyler, whose words are matched with Dash’s reductivist images of Madoo. Poems written at Madoo often reflect the world Dash created. In Schuyler’s poem People Who See Bubbles Rise, a reference to violet curtains is a nod to those hanging in a Madoo guest room, depicted in a tondo painted by Dash.
