Joseph Solman : oils : EXteriors
New York Street Scenes, 1936-42 by Lawrence Campbell (an extract from the book ‘Joseph Solman’ by DaCapo Press, 1977)
In the days of the W.P.A. and the American Artists Union, when regionalist and social protest painting began to make its mark in America, a group of young avant-gardists met in Joseph Solman's New York studio to form The Ten. Founding members were Solman, Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Illya Bolotowsky, Louis Schanker, Ben-Zion, Nahum Tschacbasov, Louis Harris and Jankel Kufeld, who were later joined by Ralph Rosenborg, Earl Kerkam and John Graham. The Ten represented two new trends in American art: Expressionism and Symbolism.
By 1936, the year both The Ten and the American Abstract Artists were founded , Solman's technique was already decisive. He took a number of new admirations - Matisse, Klee, de Chirico, Cezanne - and superimposed them over earlier models such as Luks, Myers, and Whistler. It is not necessary to hunt for his signature - usually tucked away in some obscure part of the painting - to recognize one of his pictures. Apart from the characteristically expressionist distortions-the black lines which contoured his forms and unified his compositions, the swelling of the spaces between the lines, the thickness of the paint, the medley of superbly patterned shapes, the moodily Luminist coloring - there was evident that respect for a two-dimensional surface which marks the truly modern painting. The brilliance and poetry of these early works could be appreciated anew in these two recent shows.
In his introduction to a book of poetry by the English Poet Laureate John Betjeman, W. H. Auden introduced the word "topophilia" to characterize a special kind of affection for place. Solman is a pure topophile. It was not, however, the vision of an urban - or rather, urbane - America which drew him so much as the small neighborhood streets and houses he visited day in and day out: a stop on the Third Avenue El was for Solman certainly more beautiful than the soaring Chrysler Building . Indeed, Solman's brand of topophilism would prefer a view of a leaking fire hydrant to a view of untrammelled nature. His eyes are open to empty lots, to playgrounds, to where the pencil of the sky touches the sidewalk on crosstown streets. Solman painted Klein's Department Store in Union Square, 1936; the huge eyeball opposite the El in The Oculist, 1937; the large hanging street sign of a standing female which he calls Venus on 23rd Street, 1937; and everywhere the expressive garbage cans (almost a trademark), fire hydrants, subway kiosks and cellar doors belonging to ice and coal street merchants that made up the extraordinary Toonerville that is New York to him. (The oils were done from notes in his studio; the gouaches, outdoors, from direct observation .)
Stephen Vincent Benet wrote ''American Names" but the reader of this poem, which finishes with the famous line "Bury my heart at Wounded Knee," is not convinced that the poet had ever been there. "Bury My Heart on Avenue B" would be what a true topophile like Solman would have written . For viewers who admire his later paintings, especially those of the '50s, these earlier works, filled with sentiment and mood, will be a revelation.
Art in America, May, 1983.
