Joseph Solman
Birth Date: January 25, 1909
Death Date: April 16, 2008
Artist Gallery
Joseph Solman was born in 1909 in Vitebsk, which at that time was part of Russia. He was the son of Russian-Jewish parents who emigrated to the US in 1912, and settled in Long Island. His graphic talent was clear from an early age, and he went straight to the National Academy of Design in New York from high school. He married Ruth Romanofsky in the 1930s. They have two children: his daughter Ronni, a schoolteacher in Los Angeles, and his son Paul, a television economics correspondent in Boston. In 1935, when he had been exhibiting for a few years, Mr. Solman formed a progressive group called the Ten, a proto-grouping, nine in all, of what, by the 1950s, was the abstract expressionist New York School of painters, many of whom would by then have achieved global stardom. He had been closely associated from the start with Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb and, a little later, Jackson Pollock. Under another hat, he worked as co-editor of the avant-garde Art Front Magazine alongside the critics Meyer Schapiro and Harold Rosenberg. Solman eventually came to view abstraction as the new hegemony, and founded a short lived group called Reality with Edward Hopper and Jack Levine in the 1950s. The group, in 1950s New York, was certainly neither the time nor place to be rowing against the abstract tide. For some years Solman was constrained, albeit with his habitual cheerfulness, to take a part-time job as a betting clerk at Aqueduct, the racecourse in the neighboring borough of Queens. Even as a student he had drawn his fellow passengers on the subway - people, he noted, "pose perfectly when they're asleep" - and now his pad of betting slips would prove a handy sketch-book on the A-train to and from the track. The discreet notes he made, worked up and exhibited as his Subway Gouaches, would give him at least some lasting recognition. It was, however, the opening of the Museum of Modern Art that committed him forever away from the purely academic. Yet his work would always hold a character quite its own, strong in color and rich on the surface, simple and forthright in its handling and formal construction. “Over all these years, I’ve never felt the need to go entirely abstract, there are just too many things in the world that I want to paint. The night before he died, the American expressionist painter Joseph Solman enjoyed a convivial dinner with family and friends in his old apartment on 10th Street in New York. He was eight months short of his 100th birthday, active and productive to the last. He had lived to see himself to an extent rediscovered, and his reputation burgeoned in his later years.