Subway Painting by Joseph Solman

Brought to America from Russia as a child in 1912, Joseph Solman was a prodigious draftsman and knew, in his earliest teens, that he would be an artist. He went straight from high school to the National Academy of Design, though he says he learned more by sketching in the subway on the way back from school late at night: people “pose perfectly when they’re asleep.” In 1929, Solman saw the inaugural show at the Museum of Modern Art featuring Seurat, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Cezanne. It changed his life – and his art. Joseph Solman was, with Mark Rothko, the unofficial co-leader of The Ten, a group of expressionist painters who exhibited as the “Whitney Dissenters” at the Mercury Galleries in New York in 1938. A champion of modernism, Solman was elected an editor of Art Front Magazine when its other editors, art historian Meyer Shapiro and critic Harold Rosenberg, were still partial to Social Realism In 1964, The Times, discussing his well-known subway gouaches (done while commuting to his some-time job as a racetrack pari-mutuel clerk), called him a “Pari-Mutuel Picasso.” In 1985, on the occasion of a 50-year retrospective, The Washington Post wrote: “It appears to have dawned, at last, on many collectors that this is art that has already stood the acid test of time.” We had the pleasure of the meeting the artist a few times at his home which was over the original Second Avenue Deli in the East Village.