by Michael Kimmelman, February 1999

At 90 A Veteran Remembers it All
At the little-known Mercury Gallery in Boston, a mostly forgotten group of American artists from the 1930's is the focus of an exhibition that also turns the attention to the group's sole surviving member, a very fine painter named Joseph Solman. Having just turned 90 last week, Mr. Solman, you'll be glad to know is still painting in his cluttered studio above the Second Avenue Deli in the East Village of Manhattan, where he has worked more or less since Jackson Pollock was a new name on the American scene.
  The show in Boston, (through February) is about the Ten, as the group chose to call itself, somewhat eccentrically, considering that there were only nine of them in the beginning. (The numbers changed over the years.) Mr Solman was the youngest member and somewhat of a ringleader. He was a works Progress Administration artist and an editor with Meyer Schapiro and Harold Rosenberg, of the Progressive Art Front magazine.
  The Ten also included Mark Rothko, who was still calling himself Rothkowitz at the time, and Adolph Gottleib. "Rothko was a big talker and Adolph's Svengali," Mr. Solman recalled recently. "I almost think Rothko convinced him to go Surrealist. I'd loved Gottlieb's early work, which was wry and had an awfully nice paint quality to it."
  Conforming neither to the American Scene painting of Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Brenton nor to Social Realism, they generally found themselves excluded from the Whitney's surveys of new American art. So, like many ambitious young artists before them and since, they organized their own exhibitions, issued decrees ("the symbol of the silo is an ascendancy," they rallied against Wood, Brenton and company in their "Whitney Dissenters' Manifesto" which Rothko wrote), until they finally achieved recognition and were able to get their own ways. As the show in Boston proves, they had never really shared a common style, just a common enemy, so their breakup was essentially predestined.
  "I was stunned," Mr. Solman remembers. Tartly opinionated but generous and essentially optimistic, he happens to have one of those infallible memories that allow him to remember exhibitions that took place 70 years ago, not to mention almost every other event in his life.   He grew up in Jamaica, Queens. His father was a tailor. For $10 per term, he got an art education at the National Academy of Design, but he likes to say that he learned more by sketching people on the subway. He still rides buses around town, making the rounds of galleries, sketching along the way.
  His shows were steadily reviewed over the years; Arts News published "Solman paints a picture" in 1951 as part of its famous series, and he acquired a good deal of respect among other painters. But for a long time, like most artists, he was not making a lot of money from his art. So to make ends meet he taught and also worked half of each year as a parimutuel clerk at Aqueduct and Belmont. That job, he points out, always impressed his son more than the fact that his artist friends included people like de Kooning and Milton Avery, because he was able to bring home autographs of Brooklyn Dodgers who had placed bets at his window. In 1964 when he showed some of the gouache portraits that he painted while commuting to the track, The New York Times called him a "parimutuel Picasso."
  He started out by looking at Rembrandt and Rouault and painting pictures so murky that he says even he could not make them out. Then his taste and palette changed. He looked at Klee and Morandi. He painted still-lifes and city scenes, with an inclination towards urban clutter, jauntily drawn. He became a distinctive and subtle colorist, particularly when he turned to portraiture, which, bucking fashion, he did increasingly after the 1940's. There was something of Modigliani and also something of Daumier about his portraits. They looked both lean and expressive.
  "Daumier I consider part of my lineage. Klee is my favorite. But Cézanne is the most important in the end because he taught humility through his persistent attempt to climb the mountain of realism, whether he was painting landscapes or people. Over all these years, I have never felt the need to go entirely abstract because there are just too many things in the world, too many faces, that I want to paint."
  He seems without rancor, however. "Listen I have seen so many movements come and go. I was not impressed with Gottlieb going of in that direction and I did not understand Rothko at first, although now I love his work. I think Rothko's art has a wonderful glow a mystical quality. On the other hand, I'm not a fan of Pollock. There was a lot of gimmicky stuff going on, a lot of people jumping on the bandwagon. They wanted to forget Social Realism, but I was not connected to that anyway. It had always seemed to me like poor art for poor people, as Gorky said. The important point is that I was already modern in 1935. I was addicted to the two-dimensional flat surface, which is the hallmark of the modern art to me, as opposed to illusionistic space. And I was satisfied with what I was doing, so I did not need new credos like pure abstraction."
  Put differently, Mr. Solman continued to see himself as a craftsman, an artist grounded in tradition and experience, painting modern pictures, while the Abstract Expressionists went off in their direction, taking American art history with them.
  What, we might ask, is the value of constancy or the cost of fashion? We can of course appreciate art without the regard to the judgements of history, which has its own shifting standard. Mr. Solman is in many ways a paradigm of the American artist, which is not to say the American art star, during this fickle century.
  For the past several years he has been mostly drawing skyscrapers, turning their stepped-back silhouettes into jagged shapes flanking lighter, narrow passages. "What intrigues me is the space and color of the sky between the buildings, which I see when I ride the bus around twilight." These are near-abstract images, although not really much more abstract than his work from the 30's, in which he reduced the city to similar zigzag forms, idiosyncratically disposed.
  He remains, in other words, a modernist enthusiastically tethered to the world around him. "As I have said before, subject matter yields more poetry and drama and abstract tension than any shapes we can make up." Productive after seven decades, he's a prime example of the lifeblood of American art.