Joseph Solman

Joseph Solman (January 25, 1909 – April 16, 2008) was an American painter, a founder of The Ten, a organization of New York City Expressionist painters in the 1930s. His best known works append his "Subway Gouaches" depicting travelers on the New York City Subway.

Born in Vitebsk, Russian Empire, he was brought to America from the Russian Empire as a child in 1912, Solman was a prodigious draftsman and knew, in his archaic teens, that he would be an artist. He went straight from tall school to the National Academy of Design, though he says he speculative more by sketching in the subway upon the way back from instructor late at night: people "pose perfectly in the same way as they're asleep." In 1929, Solman maxim the inaugural act out at the Museum of Modern Art featuring Seurat, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Cézanne.

In 1934, Solman had his first one-man show, much influenced by the French unbiased artist Georges Rouault. One critic was impressed by "the ambiguity that lurks in and no-one else streets in the late twilight." Another noted that Solman's color had "an astonishingly wealthy quality that burns outward beneath the surface."

Joseph Solman was, with Mark Rothko, the unofficial co-leader of The Ten, a activity of expressionist painters^{[citation needed]} including Louis Schanker, Adolph Gottlieb and Ilya Bolotowsky, who exhibited as the "Whitney Dissenters" at the Mercury Galleries in New York City in 1938. A champion of modernism, Solman was elected an editor of Art Front Magazine when its further editors, art historian Meyer Schapiro and critic Harold Rosenberg, were nevertheless partial to Social Realism. But Solman never believed in taking away for abstraction's sake. "I have long discovered for myself," Solman has said, "that what we call the subject yields more pattern, more poetry, more drama, greater abstract design and nervousness than any shapes we may invent." In writing more or less a purchase of a typical 1930s Solman street scene for the Wichita Museum, director Howard Wooden put it this way: "Solman has produced the equivalent of an abstract expressionist painting a full decade before the abstract expressionist endeavor came to dominate the American art scene, but without abandoning identifiable forms."

In 1964, The Times, discussing his Famous subway gouaches (done even if 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 exam of time." is

Joseph Solman died in his sleep, at his long-time house in New York City, on April 16, 2008. He was the father of economist and television secure Paul Solman and the retired elementary educational teacher and community organizer, Ronni Solman.