Syd Solomon

How do you mark the miraculous milestone of a 100th birthday? If you’re Annie Solomon, renowned hostess and party giver extraordinaire, you welcome guests to your bayfront condo with plenty of great food and drink, plus a very special piece of clothing and a group photograph.

An Abstract Expressionist painter, Syd Solomon, held important roles in the art communities of Sarasota, Florida, and East Hampton, New York. He began painting in high school in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, where he was an All-American football player. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1935 to 1938. Before the attack on Pearl Harbor, he joined the war effort. He was assigned to the 924th Engineer Aviation Regiment of the US Army where he was able to hone his artistic skills by creating camouflage from the air, which protected the airfields being built by the battalion.

On my last visit to Chelsea, a must-see was the Syd Solomon show at the Berry Campbell gallery. Surveying all the paintings in this show, one can quickly see that Syd Solomon, an abstract painter who from 1959 and for the next thirty-five years split his time between Sarasota and the Hamptons, lived to paint. These works, from the ’70s and ’80s, today still look fresh and energetic; the aerosol enamel and acrylic paint he used is vibrant. The paintings are composed of exuberant swaths of color, his northern and southern coastal imagery melding together, collage-like. In “Morning Light Signs” the flotsam and jetsam of pink and orange recede and return to the foreground as if floating. There is an excitement to Solomon’s abstraction, as in “Lunareach,” where ribbons of orange and yellow tangle in an infinite darkened distance.

In this exhibition's museum-quality catalogue, Gail Levin makes a plausible case that we don't know Syd Solomon better only because he enlisted. The mildly infirm and the conscientious objectors were able to form their art in the modernist heyday of early-1940s New York City while Solomon was off earning Bronze Stars and contracting frostbite in the Battle of the Bulge.

When 99-year-old Annie Solomon attends an opening at an art gallery, she’s as much of a focal point as the paintings on the walls. Artists, art lovers, students and retirees all want to hang out with her.

Some admire her because she’s a vibrant link to Sarasota’s days as an arts colony in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. The widow of abstract expressionist painter Syd Solomon, she has clear memories of those bohemian times, when she and Syd hosted parties for local artists, writers and musicians, as well as famous visitors such as Kurt Vonnegut, Elia Kazan and Betty Friedan.

There is a natural tendency among art historians, critics, curators, and even in human nature to place people, places, and things in categories, eras, styles, periods. It helps make sense of how ideas and objects fit into a continuum, or where they fall along the timeline. At the centenary of Syd Solomon’s birth, it is time to free the artist from these constraints and celebrate him for his unique contributions, which is what “Syd Solomon: Time and Tide,” a show at the Berry Campbell Gallery in New York City, does eloquently.

Celebrating the centenary of the artist’s birth, “Syd Solomon: Time and Tide” showcases his renowned works. Born in Pennsylvania and a student of the Art Institute of Chicago, Solomon used his artistic skill to create camouflage instruction manuals during WWII. After the war, Solomon experimented with new synthetic media, the precursors to acrylic paints, which put him at the forefront of technical innovations in his generation

“Syd Solomon: Time and Tide,” a centenary exhibition of paintings by the influential Abstract Expressionist, will open tonight at 6 with a reception at the Berry Campbell Gallery in Chelsea. It will run through Nov. 11.

Berry Campbell Gallery announces an exhibition of paintings by Syd Solomon to celebrate the centenary of his birth. Syd Solomon: Time and Tide will open on October 12 and run through November 11, 2017. This centenary exhibition precedes the artist’s traveling museum retrospective to open at Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, New York, in October 2018. The retrospective, which will also travel to the John and Mable Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida, is accompanied by a 96-page exhibition catalogue with essays by Dr. Gail Levin, Michael Auping, Mike Solomon, and George Bolge. 

Syd Solomon (1917-2004), the gifted abstract-expressionist painter, was well recognized as an artist in the middle of the last century, especially in the early 1960s. He kept studios in East Hampton and Sarasota in Florida, spending time in both places during the course of the year. Solomon established an art presence in Sarasota, bringing in artists such as James Brooks and Larry Rivers to participate in the community there, as well as teaching at Sarasota’s Institute of Fine Art, the educational center he founded at New College. In the East Hamptons, he met Pollock, de Kooning, and Kline. His work, an attractive amalgam of bright colors and mostly organic shapes, feels as if it were heavily influenced by his experience of landscape. As a noted member of the abstract expressionists’ first generation, Solomon played a distinctive role as an artist who brought people together, at the same time developing a compelling style of his own. This style can’t be clearly tied to any particular colleague, but takes part in a playfully exuberant use of color only barely contained by the natural forms that they fill. Living as Solomon did in places of unusual beauty, it seems inevitable that his art would reflect his surroundings.