Joseph Solman : oils : portraits

The Sitter as Subject by Dore Ashton (an extract from the book ‘Joseph Solman’ by DaCapo Press, 1977)

One of Joseph Solman's contemporaries, the painter Will Barnet, called him a painter's painter. By that he didn't mean that only a painter could fully respond to his work. Rather, that in Solman's work, the art of the painter was respected in every aspect, and that the painterly conventions of some five hundred years of art history had been studied, absorbed and refreshed in one painter's contribution to its flow. This is not a matter of traditionalism. It is a matter of metier. All good painters love their materials and their means, struggling lifetimes to refine and enliven them.

Although Solman has made accomplished paintings in several genres, I have admired above all his portraits - a genre he stubbornly developed in spite of its languishing status in the United States during the years Solman entered his professional life. Solman, whose fundamental principle is that you have to love a subject to paint it, loves faces. So do I. During his long life of studying faces, and for that matter, attitudes and gestures that reveal the individual, Solman has in each case found the characteristic that bespeaks the whole. And in finding that, he has found the means to make a painting an abstract entity, since portrait, still-life, cityscape, or any other image, always characterizes by means of distillation .

These portraits have the double virtue of being at once paintings and portraits thanks to Solman's thorough understanding of the nature of painting.

Much of Solman's expressive ability can be attributed to his unerring draftsmanship. A lifetime of quick sketching has endowed his hand with an agility that is dedicated to finding the essential line that will define a plane, search out the most telling profile of a form , place the form in its proper level of the imagined space, and, with intelligent economy, sum up its being. In the art of portraiture, drawing is crucial. When Solman arranges his sitter (and he always works from life) he has in mind the turn of a head, the incline of a body, the lift of a shoulder that will best describe the unique individual before him. To accomplish the whole, he must weigh, with his brush, each element. Drawing, then, is of vital significance. If he uses the flat of his brush, or merely its point, he is locating a form in space. In earlier work, his search is more evident, as his brush seeks out the nuances that define the human face. Later, the hand becomes sure, and he emphasizes the total posture of his sitter with encompassing outlines - a means of emphasis he says he learned as a youth when he studied the work of Gauguin .

I don 't mean to suggest that Solman is a purely linear painter. On the contrary, he has a rich vocabulary as a "painterly" painter, using the full range of effects available in pigment and its thinners and binders. But his drawing with the brush is what distinguishes his portraits as paintings . No area of his canvas is mere filler. Each detail contributes to the portrayal of a distinctive person. Sometimes he catches his sitter with the merest incline of the head, sometimes with the lift of a hand, sometimes turned three-quarters, sometimes head-on. But always, the form he is painting-the human being - is ensconced in an active congeries of forms, each with its own significance.

Solman is alert to certain styles of gesture . After all, the Victorians affected a different posture, and the ancient Greeks certainly walked differently from us. When he undertook to portray his lower East Side neighborhood during the 1960s through its bohemian and flower-children denizens, he respected each individual, but finally, offered a telling commentary on the nature of that turbulent period. In the wonderful series of sketches from the subway, quickly recorded on his racing form (Solman, to my delight, is probably the only painter who ever earned his daily bread as a pari-mutuel employee at the race track), he captured the human comedy of New York as surely as Daumier had captured 19th-century Paris. In both his portraits of the disoriented youth of his neighborhood, and the working people on the subway, Solman exhibited a little of the ruthless precision found in the work of Egon Schiele, while in other portraits of family, friends and fellow painters, he shows feelings ranging from tenderness to profound respect.

In all his undertakings as a painter, Solman has, as Paul Klee said a painter must, always followed his own heartbeat . His work reflects an ethical position, maintained steadfastly despite the vagaries of artistic fashion, and forms an authentic entity within 20th-century American art history.