Paul Solman Pays Tribute to His Father

PAUL SOLMAN: He never did. He went straight from high school to the National Academy of Design but by the 1930s, he was already an against-the-grain modernist painter.

JOSEPH SOLMAN: I met people who was in sympathy with me, sympathized with my ideas about modern art, flat space, more free brush work.

PAUL SOLMAN: So he helped found a cutting edge group, "The Ten," with Marcus Rothkowitz, soon to become Mark Rothko.

JOSEPH SOLMAN: We met in my studio late 1935 on East 15th Street and we formed a group. We decided on the name The Ten. It sounded nice and formidable. Of course, there were only nine of us.

PAUL SOLMAN: The public reception was mixed. The New York Times wrote that the paintings would "give anyone with the slightest academic sympathies apoplexy." Joe didn't mind, kept painting as he liked, became quite well-known.

But to keep our family secure, he worked half the year at the race track for almost three decades, selling tickets for bets at places like Belmont.

On the hour-plus train rides to and from work, tedious to anyone else, he did drawings, coloring them in at home.

JOSEPH SOLMAN: Of course the subway is one of the greatest artist studios of all time. I could tell when a person was reading or day-dreaming. They would hold the post a long time.

PAUL SOLMAN: There was almost nothing he couldn't positively reframe. Even his relative obscurity in the '60s and '70s as old friends like Rothko and DeKooning became household names. When the '80s and '90s came, and his star rose again, he said...

JOSEPH SOLMAN: I feel I'm being confirmed.

PAUL SOLMAN: Vindicated?

JOSEPH SOLMAN: Yes, to a certain extent.

PAUL SOLMAN: But I'd ask him what about the transcendence of new art, new ideas?

JOSEPH SOLMAN: That stuff's for critics. No artist would want to use that word. Your head's a little low.

PAUL SOLMAN: As to the artist as tortured soul...

JOSEPH SOLMAN: I think it's full of cliche and overused and that it distorts the image of the artist.

And, one would have to add, happy as ever to paint ... the sidewalks of New York.

JOSEPH SOLMAN: I used to be intimidated to think of drawing big buildings, because they were high and they weren't as interesting as broken down streets, so I used to draw on the East Side.

PAUL SOLMAN: He did streets to the end.

JOSEPH SOLMAN: You see how I put it? It echoes this one.

PAUL SOLMAN: On April 16, after a day in and around New York sketching, visiting a gallery, ice cream at lunch, Scotch at dinner, my dad came home, dozed off in his recliner at 8, died in his sleep around 10.

"A lucky guy" is how a great friend summed it up.

JOSEPH SOLMAN: See a self-portrait, way, way back...

PAUL SOLMAN: And I'm lucky to have been his son.