Joseph Solman, preeminent painter at crossroads of 20th-century American art
Joseph Solman, whose painting career spanned more than seven decades in American art, taking him from the '30s avant-garde to grand-old-man eminence, died Wednesday at his New York apartment. He was 99.
In 1999, a
He edited a radical magazine, Art Front, with the critics Meyer Schapiro and Harold Rosenberg. He and Jackson Pollock worked together as painters for the Works Progress Administration during the Depression.
Mr. Solman attended the inaugural exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1929. "That was some revelation," he said in a 1998 Globe interview. "I'd seen some modern art, but that show was such an eye-opener."
Generally given to a dark, somber palette, Mr. Solman's art was nonetheless often imbued with the light of Cape Ann. He started spending summers there in 1951 and bought a house in East Gloucester in 1967.
Institutions that own Mr. Solman's work include the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Corcoran Gallery, The Phillips Collection, the Hirshhorn Museum, and the British Museum.
Mr. Solman liked to cite Honoré Daumier, Paul Cézanne, and, especially, Paul Klee as his major influences. He worked in many media - drawings, monotypes, and gouaches as well as oils. Best known for portraits, Mr. Solman also executed still lifes, bathers, landscapes, and other genres. The one constant throughout his career was an attachment to figuration.
"I like artists who are moved by subject matter," Mr. Solman said in 1998. "That's why I never went for abstraction. The subject has more interest than any shape we might invent. I take what's out there, and that's what lights up my imagination."
There was some irony in Mr. Solman's abjuring abstraction. He first made a name for himself as a member of The Ten, a group of artists who in 1935 issued a manifesto attacking the American Scene painting favored by the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art's preference for European Expressionism over the work of American Expressionists. The best-known members of the group, Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, later became two of the most famous Abstract Expressionists.
The art historian Bram Dijkstra wrote in his book "American Expressionism that Mr. Solman "anticipated - and probably helped inspire - the internal luminescence" of Rothko's '50s canvases.
Indeed, there were strong similarities between Mr. Solman and his abstractionist contemporaries. Using figuration for expressive rather than representational ends, he often verged on abstraction, especially in his late-period cityscapes. As a Globe review noted in 2000, "in terms of color, shape, gesture, and brushwork that all operated as independent presences, he enjoyed as much freedom as the Abstract Expressionists."
Mr. Solman was born in Vitebsk, Russia, on Jan. 25, 1909. His parents, Nathan Solman and Rose (Peskin) Solman, immigrated to the United States. He grew up in Queens, N.Y., and studied at the National Academy of Design. Making light of his formal training, he said his daily commute to class was more important to his artistic growth than his classes were. "I learned to draw more on the subway than I ever did at the academy," he said in 1998.
To support his art, Mr. Solman held a variety of jobs: art teacher, elevator operator, even betting clerk at Aqueduct and Belmont race tracks. In 1964, The
He also taught at City University of New York.
He published "Mozartiana," a commonplace book about the composer with sketches by Mr. Solman, in 1990.
Mr. Solman was treasurer of the National Academy of Design from 1979-1985, a member of the board of the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors from 1968-1989, and a life fellow of the Art Students League.
Mr. Solman leaves a son, Paul of Newton, economics correspondent for PBS's "The NewsHour"; a daughter, Ronni of Los Angeles; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
Mr. Solman's wife, Ruth (Romanofsky), died in 1999.
There will be a memorial service next month. 