JOSEPH SOLMAN

Joseph Solman (January 25, 1909 – April 16, 2008) was an 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 City Subway, his studio interiors and the streets and buildings of New York City.

Joseph Solman was born in 1909 in Vitebsk, in what is now Belarus, the son of Russian-Jewish parents who emigrated to the USA in 1912, to settle in Jamaica, Long Island. Already drawing and painting in his teens, his first portrait commissions were completed at high school. Out of school in 1930, he took night jobs soda-jerking and running elevators in order to paint in the daytime and study old masters in the Metropolitan.

After high school, Solman went straight to the National Academy of Design but found that the painting was rather ‘old-school’ and he began to ask people in the park to model for his portraits which were his first love. He continued to develop his style during the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, visiting as many museums as he could – including the first show at the ‘Modern Museum’ which opened with Seurat, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Cezanne. The artist has mentioned that by about 1931, he started to find his ‘own road’ by painting the streets and back alleys of his neighbourhood.

In an interview with the Smithsonian, Solman discussed his early influences. “And though I'm sure one can trace some influences there, I thought I fused some elements of cubism, some elements of Rouault, my own feeling for locale into something that I could honestly call my own. They were small gouaches, maybe six by nine inches in size; but they were easy to do outside because of the small size. I'd take my watercolors and gouache - I'd carry everything. And I was very prolific. I did the railroad yards, the bridges, the alleys, the streets, and so on. And I felt a great satisfaction in coming back with something I felt was in step with my own feeling, my own forms, my own colors, and so on.” Using the same subject matter, he then moved on to working with oils.

The 1930’s

Solman painted gouaches and oils of the streets and railroad yards around Jamaica. He hung four of these pictures in the famous Jumble Shop, two in a group show at the Balzac Galleries, and had an oil in Patrick Codyre’s “No-Name” show at the Hotel Marguery in September, 1933. He also married Ruth Romanofsky in the same year and had his first solo exhibition at Contemporary Arts in April 1934 where he showed a number of “very dark” pictures, many of which he says he later destroyed as he could hardly see them himself. The influence of Rouault was noticed. One reviewer called him a “a celebrant of gloom…impressed by the mystery that lurks in deserted streets in the late twilight.” Another, looking closer, noted that what seemed “almost deadly color” came to have “an astonishing rich quality that burns outward beneath the surface.”

From 1935-1939, while he was on the WPA project art project, Solman painted full time. New York streets, harbours, parks, theatres provide the elements from which he fashions increasingly forceful designs, subordinating colour and using black outlines to point up the tensions and contrasts of a pattern. He shapes and reshapes his own symbols of the city: The Blacksmith’s Shop; Venus of 23rd Street; The Oculist; The Third Avenue El. In each he pulls out the image that sums up the scene and sets it with flat planes, sharp, contrasting angles and receding horizontal lines. The power of these paintings derives primarily from his struggle with and increasing control of the lineaments of his design.

“The Ten”

This was hardly a popular or a profitable pursuit when the galleries were full of realism, social comment and political propaganda. Another Place, on Eighth Street, gave him a show in 1937, just about the time when a group of artists realized that in insisting upon a certain freedom in their means of expression, they had a common purpose and were being consistently unrecognized. Thus “The Ten” came into existence as the first articulate group of painters to challenge “the supremacy of the silo” and open the way for a more cosmopolitan range of expression in American Painting.

 “The Ten” consisted of Ben-Zion, Ilya Bolotowsky, Adolph Gottlieb, Louis Harris, Jack Kufeld, Marcus Rothkowitz (later Rothko), Louis Schanker, Joseph Solman and Tschacbasov. They announced themselves as an independent group and started off with an exhibition at the Montross Gallery in 1936. They were actually nine, but in a succession of shows through 1940 some of the members were replaced, and the number was rounded out by such guests as Karl Knaths, Jean Liberte, Lee Gatch and Maurice Golubov. The press called them “expressionists” (a fighting word in those days), “uninhibited” and “radicals.”

After knocking at many doors with dark photographs of dark paintings, the group received unexpected hospitality at a rather conservative gallery, the Montross at 785 Fifth Avenue. The exhibition, the first as a new group, took place from December 16, 1935 through January 4, 1936. Each artist showed four works.

Immediately following this first show, “The Ten” exhibited from January 7 to 18 in the opening show of the Municipal Art Galleries. Edgar Levy, a good friend of Adolph Gottlieb, was included in this show as the "tenth man." With the help of Joseph Brummer, they also exhibited at Galerie Bonaparte in Paris in November 1936.

The Group exhibited several other times but drew the most attention as “The Whitney Dissenters” in November 1938 at the Mercury Galleries, refusing to submit their works in the Whitney Annual. As their forward expresses it, in the third person: “As a group they are homogeneous in their consistent opposition to conservatism, in their capacity to see objects as though for the first time…the title of this exhibition is designed to call attention to a significant section of art being produced in America. Its implications go beyond one group of dissenters. It is a protect against the reputed equivalence of American painting and literal painting.” Most critics labelled the group as inchoate expressionists.

By early 1939, “The Ten” had added John Graham, Earl Kerkam, and Ralph Rosenborg to their group. Lee Gatch showed with them for a short time and Karl Knaths was a guest artist twice. Each of the artists were beginning to attach themselves as a distinct member to particular galleries. In 1938 the New Art Circle added Solman to its roster that already included among its Americans Gatch, Knaths, and de Martini. Along with Kerkam, they were billed  as “Five New American Painters” in May of 1938. The Artists Gallery favored Ben-Zion and Adolph Gottlieb with large shows. Each artist was graduating into his fixed gallery.

With their first tentative appearances in group shows, and their baptism under fire at the Contemporary Arts and Secession galleries, the foothold of independence that the WPA/FAP gave them and the formation of The Ten allowed each of the artists to mature considerably in only a few years. The Ten’s last exhibition took place at the Bonestell gallery late in 1939.

The 1940’s

In the same year, Solman left New York for a year teaching at the Spokane Art Center in Washington, and this is a point of significant transition for the artist. Separated from the city which he had so thoroughly explored and painted, he turned more inward, painted some self-portraits and, for the first time since he was a student, became seriously engaged in still life studies.

When he returned to New York, he moved into a spacious loft on 28th street which had an entire wall of mullioned windows above a wide sill. These two features, plus the studio’s sparse furnishings, would fuel his creativity for the next ten years. Solman has said “When I came back the streets seemed to vanish and I accepted and appreciated the mundane objects around me.” Within this more intimate focus, there is gradually less emphasis upon shape-making and more diffusion of color to convey local atmosphere. In Solman’s 1942 exhibition at the Bonestall Gallery, Sidney Janis wrote in a preface to the announcement: ”His viewpoint it has been reversed, and with it, the lights and darks of all he gazes upon. The style as well has altered, being neither abstract nor expressionist, but rather diffusion of the two.”

The decade was also marked by large one-man shows in New York and in Washington D.C. His work was purchased by notable collections, including the Phillips Memorial Gallery , Pepsi-Cola, Joseph Hirshhorn, and Brandeis University.

The 1950’s

Solman’s long association with the ACA Gallery began in 1950, and a year later Dorothy Seckler was to write of his Interior paintings in Art News “His characteristic bent-wire line – black mixed with green – was sensitive but never impulsive as he set down the contours of objects, feeling patiently fr the most expressive relationship, the edge that would imply a plane, clarify space and provide a resonance to the big rhythms.”

While his Studio Interiors still held the attention of critics and public, the growing number of portraits issuing from Solman’s studio presaged an increasing preoccupation with this, by then, neglected form. His devotion to portraits at a time when commissions were hard to come by, struck his friends as a foolish pursuit. Portrait painting, they pointed out, was obsolete; the camera had seen to that.

Solman, however, appeared not to be listening. On his mind’s eye, he saw the construction of a painting that would use what he considered to be the greatest resource for any artist: the human figure. He was proven out when, despite gloomy predictions that an exhibition of his portraits could not hope for any sales, an exhibition of the work at the ACA Galleries in 1954 resulted in The Hirshhorn Collection acquiring four paintings and six more sold to other collectors.

Ruth and Joesph Solman made their first visit to Europe with the money realised from the sales and the artist finally was able to see many of the masterpieces that had inspired and influenced him in person. It was a deeply moving experience for him.

In the later 1950’s, Solman also started producing a series of ‘Subway Rider’ pencil drawings, executed on newspaper pages while he was riding the trains, to which he later added gouache colour – at first in monochrome, just to cover up the printed newspaper matter within the outlines of the drawings, and eventually adding colour to these areas.

The 1960’s

The 1960’s bought an influx of new young people to the neighbourhood now called the East Village in New York City. Solman warmed to the colourful ensembles he passed on the street and would stop and ask especially “paintable” subjects to pose for him resulting in some prime examples of his more colourful portraiture.

In 1967, through a few commissions and selling some paintings to a few dealers, Solman bought a summer house and studio in Rockport, MA. This is where he began to try monotype printing – using glass plates, oil paints thinned with turpentine and marks made with sponges and stylus to produce unique prints on paper. He spent 4 months each year working on these, and the rest of his time back in New York painting with oils.

The 1970’s and 1980’s

The 1970’s and 1980’s saw a resurgence of interest in Solman’s art with a number of both gallery and museum exhibitions as well as being the recipient of several prestigious awards. Several 50 year retrospectives were held in Washington and New York, all of which were well reviewed and received.

Solman continued to paint his portraits, New York scenes, subway sketches, and monotypes throughout the period. A trip to Venice in 1979 provided many opportunities to produce monotypes of his second favourite city. A book of his monotypes was published in 1977 by Da Capo Press.

In the mid-1980’s, the importance of Solman’s place in the history of American art was starting to be understood with an especial resurgence of interest in his 1930’s WPA period gouache paintings. The Washington Post wrote, in 1985 “…these small paintings are filled with the warmth of remembrance, of nostalgia for bits of city life now gone….almost miraculously, none of these works has become in any way “dated” – the ultimate test of any work of art.”

The Later Years

In his later years, Solman continued to remain active painting, sketching and monotype printing with interest in his works continuing to grow with a number of shows at the Judi Rotenberg Gallery in Boston and even more so with his move to be represented by the Mercury Gallery in Boston. Solman was also exhibited several times on the West Coast of the US with a number of exhibitions at the Eleonore Austerer Gallery in San Francisco. He also had his first show in Europe since “The Ten” showed in Paris in 1936.

His book ‘Mozartiana, Two Centuries of Notes, Quotes and Anecdotes about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart” gathered opinions, remembrances, letters, and more from Albert Einstein, Virginia Woolf, Friedrich Nietzsche, Leonard Bernstein, Maurice Sendak, and some 200 others blended with his own sketches and drawings of the great composer, was published in 1990.

In 1995, a dedicated and colour illustrated monograph of Solman’s work was published covering examples of his work from the late 1920’s through to the date of publication with tributes from Dore Ashton, John Simon, Sidney Janis, Larry Campbell, and Stuart Preston.

His New York scenes of this later period focussed less on the detailed architecture of the buildings and more on the contrast of light between the buildings (the so called ‘New York Canyons’) and the sky between them. Solman explained “What intrigues me, is the space and color of the sky between buildings, which I see when I ride the bus around twilight.”

Having visited a gallery and, along with a friend, washed down a light dinner with Scotch in Midtown Manhattan, Joseph Solman passed away peacefully on the 16th April 2008 at his home and studio in New York City.

Michael Kimmelman wrote in his obituary for the The New York Times….

”One of the last painters from a bygone generation, Mr. Solman reflected on his trajectory in an interview several years ago in his studio, unfinished portraits and oil sketches of the city scattered everywhere, with a view uptown through the tall windows behind him and the smell of corned beef wafting from the deli below.” “Over all these years, I’ve never felt the need to go entirely abstract,” he said. “There are just too many things in the world that I want to paint.”

Joseph Solman (January 25, 1909 – April 16, 2008)