Joseph Solman, American (1909 - 2008)
Joseph Solman (January 25, 1909 – April 16, 2008) was a
Jewish American painter, a founder of The Ten, a group of New York City
Expressionist painters in the 1930s. His best known works include his
"Subway Gouaches" depicting travellers on the New York subways.Born
in Vitebsk, Belarus, he was brought to America from Belarus as a child in 1912,
Solman was a prodigious draftsman and knew, in his earliest teens, that he
would be an artist. He went straight from high school to the National Academy
of Design, though he says he learned more by sketching in the subway on the way
back from school late at night: people “pose perfectly when they’re asleep.” In
1929, Solman saw the inaugural show at the Museum of Modern Art
featuring Seurat, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Cezanne.
In 1934, Solman had his first one-man show, much influenced by
the French modern artist Georges Rouault. One critic was impressed by “the
mystery that lurks in deserted streets in the late twilight.” Another noted
that Solman’s color had “an astonishingly rich quality that burns outward
beneath the surface.”
Joseph Solman was, with Mark Rothko, the unofficial co-leader
of The Ten, a group of expressionist painters including Louis Schanker, Adolph
Gottlieb and Ilya Bolotowsky, who exhibited as the “Whitney Dissenters” at the
Mercury Galleries in New York City
in 1938. A champion of modernism, Solman was elected an editor of Art Front
Magazinewhen its other editors, art historian Meyer Shapiro and critic Harold
Rosenberg, were still partial to Social Realism. But Solman never believed in
abstraction for abstraction’s sake. “I have long discovered for myself,” Solman
has said, “that what we call the subject yields more pattern, more poetry, more
drama, greater abstract design and tension than any shapes we may invent.” In
writing about a purchase of a typical 1930s
Solman street scene for the Wichita Museum,
director Howard Wooden put it this way: “Solman has produced the equivalent of
an abstract expressionist painting a full decade before the abstract
expressionist movement came to dominate the American art scene, but without
abandoning identifiable forms.”
In 1964, The Times, discussing his well-known subway
gouaches (done while commuting to his some-time job as a racetrack pari-mutuel
clerk), called him a “Pari-Mutuel Picasso.”In 1985, on the occasion of a
50-year retrospective, The Washington Post wrote: “It appears to have
dawned, at last, on many collectors that this is art that has already stood the
acid test of time.”
Joseph Solman died in his sleep, at his long-time home in New York City, on April
16, 2008. He was the father of economist and television commentator Paul
Solman.
Active through his nineties, Joseph Solman was a pivotal figure
in the development of 20th century American art. Emigrating to the United States from Russia at the age of three, he
studied drawing under Ivan Olinsky at the National Academy of Design in the
late Twenties From 1936 to 1941, he was active in the easel division of the WPA
Federal Art Project. In 1949, he was honored with a retrospective exhibition at
the Phillips Memorial Gallery in Washington,
D.C. and received the 1961 award
in painting from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. His works are
included in more than two dozen major museum collections throughout the world.
Always an innovator, Solman’s work merges realism with abstract
expressionism. His portraits and figure studies are characterized by bold
outlines, flat backgrounds, a fauvist palette and a gift for psychological
perception. In his introduction to the 1995 publication Joseph Solman (NY: Da
Capo Press), Theodore F. Wolff described Solman’s portraits as
"startlingly direct ‘speaking likenesses’ of real human beings in
richly-hued canvases that exist as provocatively designed modern works of
art." His studio interiors employ light "principally [as] a means of
forcing the spectator to discover strange beauties in unpromising places,"
wrote Stuart Preston in the same monograph, adding that "there is also a
note of strangeness in the absence of all figures when everything speaks of
human presence."