The Letter

In the early 1960s, on an overnight visit to New York, Rae discovered that she had forgotten her dressing gown. Her sister, Rick, with whom Ben and Rae were staying, offered her one she had just purchased.

From the moment Rae slipped the peignoir on, all three realized it was something special to see Rae in it. Her sister never wore the peignoir again, as it returned with Ben and Rae to the Studio where Ben did a series of at least 10 watercolors of Rae wearing the peignoir. In each work, Rae is seen from the back looking into a mirror.The piece seen here is simply titled “Peignoir” and shows Rae in studio in front of Ben’s full length mirror in front of the studio windows.

In Water & Light, we have two examples of these acclaimed works, including one that hung in the Solowey bedroom for years.

One day we hope to mount an exhibition of these works, but for now this is your chance to see this particular obsession of Ben Solowey.

Our new show, WATER & LIGHT: The Watercolors of Ben Solowey, is a hit with what we refer to as the three C’s: Critics, Crowds and Collectors.

This Sunday there will be a nice review of the exhibition in The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Next week, The Bucks County Courier Times and The Intelligencer are publishing a big feature on the Studio and our current show. The photographer was out on a beautiful day, so there are sure to be some lovely new images of the Studio.

There will be more than watercolors in our new exhibition. For the first time in thirty years, visitors will see a striking portrait of a dear friend of Ben and Rae Solowey: Viginia Widenmeyer (nee Castleton).

Virigina was a writer living in the area who met the Soloweys through her husband. Ben and Rae so enjoyed her company that the publicity-averse Rae even consented to participate in an interview with Virginia on her beauty secrets for Prevention magazine! And it was Virginia who Rae turned to write a piece on Ben for the 1979 memorial exhibiton of Ben’s work at the Woodmere Art Museum.

Since her time in Bucks County, Virginia has led a peripatetic life and in her eighth decade she decided that she could no longer carry all of her beautiful objects of art with her wherever she goes. She contacted the Studio and sent two beautiful pastel still lifes (one in a Solowey handmade frame) and her portrait to be included in this exhibition.

There are landscapes, portraits, figurative pieces, and still lifes in our new show, WATER & LIGHT: The Watercolors of Ben Solowey, covering a nearly fifty year period.

Almost exactly sixty four years from our June 7th opening you could have seen the same work Spring Flowers - Iris & Daisies at the opening of the Art Institute of Chicago’s annual watercolor exhibition. Ben’s floral painting hung alongside works by Charles Sheeler, Edward Hopper, Diego Rivera (an old neighbor of Ben’s from New York), and Reginald Marsh to name a few.

There is also a classic example of a spontaneous watercolor inspiring a series of related works. “Evening,” a watercolor (top), turned to “Storm,” and oil painting passing through stages as a drawing and an etching.

“One of the most rewarding things in life,” writes critic John Russell on artist’s sketchbooks, “is to look over the shoulder of a great artist and see exactly what is going on.” Ben delighted in using pen, pencil or brush to record a quick observation or to study a composition that he might eventually use for a more accomplished painting. We have two sketchbooks with exquisite watercolors that provide us a revealing view of Ben at work, capturing the essence of the world around him.

There are three self portraits in the exhibition, including the classic Self Portrait at Modeling Stand where shows himself sculpting with Rae seated nearby in the studio with a landscape and still life also on view. it is as complete a resume as Ben ever created.

Manet called still life ”the touchstone of the painter,” and this show includes several beautiful ones. Al of the flowers seen in these works were culled fromthe garden right outside the studio.

WATER & LIGHT: The Watercolors of Ben Solowey, the ultimate collection of works in watercolor, casein, and gouache by Ben Solowey will open to the public on Saturday June 7th at the Solowey Studio in Bedminster, PA with a reception from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. The installation will continue Saturdays and Sundays, 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., through June 29, 2008.

Acknowledged in his own day as an original and independent watercolorist, Ben Solowey had an intuitive relationship with this challenging yet flexible medium. A staple of his career, watercolors, and related media such as casein and gouache, were also his classroom, a way for him to learn through experimentation—with color theory, composition, materials, optics, style, subject matter, and technique, “far more freely than he could in the arena of oil painting,” says David Leopold, The Director of the Studio of Ben Solowey.” This exhibition provides an intimate look at how one of region’s most celebrated painters discovered for himself, over a period of more than five decades, the secrets of the watercolor medium.”

WATER & LIGHT: The Watercolors of Ben Solowey is the largest exhibition of Solowey’s watercolors ever to be presented. It features more than 40 rarely exhibited watercolors from the Solowey Studio’s collection that tells the story of Solowey’s development as an artist, presenting an intimate look at his watercolor practice, his techniques and materials, and the way he adapted his approach and his color palette to the many different environments in which he painted, from the quiet interior of his studio to the violent weather of an approaching storm. Throughout are works of his wife and primary model, Rae Solowey from soon after they first met and married through four decades of their life together.

The exhibition also examines the way Solowey’s watercolors relate to his work in oil and other media, revealing the central role the medium played in helping him to achieve the fresh, direct and beguiling scenes that have become his most enduring legacy to American art.

“With our Second Studio devoted to landscapes,” says David Leopold, Director of The Studio of Ben Solowey, “Ben’s main studio will feature a new installation of Solowey paintings, drawings, and sculpture.”

Studio Director David Leopold’s latest project is a unique installation  for the Shaw Festival celebrating Al Hirschfeld’s drawings of George Bernard Shaw’s productions in america over seven decades.

Over those seven decades,  Hirschfeld saw most major Shaw productions on and off-Broadway. Beginning with the Theatre Guild’s Major Barbara (1929), Hirschfeld captured the quicksilver of Katharine Cornell’s Candida (1937, which Ben also drew), Orson Welles’ Heartbreak House (1938), Ingrid Bergman in Captain Brassbound’s Conversion (1972) and more than 30 other performances. Perhaps no other artist documented Shaw in America as thoroughly as Al Hirschfeld.

Shaw and Hirschfeld both had lengthy active careers, great capacities for work, and wore beards. Hirschfeld’s modern calligraphic portraits, combining his journalistic eye and wit, not only show us what the productions look like, but they give us the essence of the performances through his distinct point of view. “My contribution,” Hirschfeld wrote, “is to take the character — created by the playwright and acted out by the actor — and reinvent it for the reader.”

Hirschfeld tried to convince Moss Hart that Shaw’s Pygmalion was not going to be improved with songs and dance…just as the playwright/director began work on My Fair Lady. But soon Hirschfeld was literally drawn in as his poster art captured both the spirit of the show and its original author. “…Shaw up in the clouds, manipulating Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews on strings, like marionettes,” as a priest in Paul Rudnick’s 1994 comedy, Jeffrey describes the drawing. “It was your parents’ [cast] album, you were little, you thought it was a picture of God.  As, I believe, did Shaw.”

This installation and the banners throughout the Shaw Festival theaters and the main display in the Triggs Production Centre are selections from more than sixty years of Shaw as seen by Hirschfeld. They provide the opportunity to appreciate the work of two theater legends and their immortal lines.

This fall and winter, the James A. Michener Art Museum exhibits the work of celebrated illustrators Norman Rockwell and Charles Hargens. Norman Rockwell in the 1940s: A View of the American Homefront and Charles Hargens: American Illustrator are on view at the Museum’s New Hope, Union Square location October 19, 2007 through February 10, 2008.

“These two exhibits provide a unique opportunity for viewers to see the work of two well-known and accomplished American illustrators, both of whom had a hand in creating the popular mythology of our culture,” said Brian H. Peterson, Senior Curator at the Michener Art Museum. “Illustrators have often helped us define how we see ourselves, and the work of these two artists also opens a door to America’s past—the Old West and the Revolutionary period as interpreted by Hargens, World War II at home as seen by Rockwell.”

Hargens was a longtime friend of Ben’s and his portrait of Hargens is included in the exhibition.
The Michener describes Hargens this way: “Over the course of a long and industrious career, Charles Hargens (1893-1997) focused his illustrations on themes of the Old West and the American Revolutionary period. His drawings and paintings of cowboys driving cattle, Native Americans against the backdrop of Mount Rushmore and patriots huddled in front of a campfire quickly built him a reputation as one of America’s finest illustrators. His work regularly appeared on the front of the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Country Gentleman and Boys’ Life. He created hundreds of book covers for prestigious publishing houses and his work became the mainstay of Stetson Hat advertisements.”

Charles Hargens: American Illustrator, organized by the Michener Art Museum, gathers more than a dozen paintings including works used as covers for the Saturday Evening Post. The exhibition also features a charcoal-on-paper portrait of Hargens by Ben Solowey, a publisher’s promotional flyer for Portrait of a Marriage by Pearl S. Buck (for which Hargens illustrated the novel’s cover), plus magazines and photographs related to the artist’s work.

Remembered as a Bucks County, Pennsylvania artist by many, Hargens spent his youth in the Black Hills of South Dakota on a sprawling ranch near the Pine Ridge Reservation, home to the Sioux Indians. As the son of a frontier surgeon, Hargens developed close friendships with the Indians, who—while awaiting treatment from his father—served as subjects for the young artist’s first drawings. After high school in Iowa, Hargens moved to Philadelphia to attend the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where he became a star pupil and dear friend of the renowned painter Daniel Garber. In 1940, Hargens moved to Carversville in Bucks County, Pennsylvania and became an integral part of its growing arts community.

The president of Dakota Wesleyan University best summed up Hargens’ talent as a “mastery of realism, historically accurate detail and ability to capture the spirit of place.” According to the illustrator himself, “I was fascinated by the doings of people. I wanted to depict life as it was, life as it is, life as it would be. That human element… was the determining factor for me.”

One question we get from time to time is this: Was Ben Solowey related to the owners of the famous Solowey’s restaurant located across from Penn Station in New York City?

The answer is: No. Ben did have three brothers and a sister, but none were in the restaurant business in New York or anywhere else. the only Soloweys in America that were related to Ben were his immediate family and their offspring.

For anyone who does internet searches, whether on Google, Ebay, etc., you are sure to find some artifact from the restaurant. Alas, the only food served by the Soloweys, was at the table Ben made in their home. And if visitors are to be believed, we still serve excellent food at our openings.

Many people remember our 2004 exhibition of the works of Charles Ward. Ward was a friend of Ben’s and lived only minutes away from the Solowey studio.

In 1932 he moved to Carversville, Pennsylvania, where he maintained a studio for thirty years until his death. He drew his inspiration from the surrounding scene there, and from painting trips to Mexico, the first in 1939, and the second, with his family, in 1954.

In 1935, he made history when he executed the first Post Office mural. “Progress and Industry,” under the Treasury Department’s Fine Arts Section for the Trenton Post Office (now the Federal Courthouse). In 1937 he completed two others for the same building, entitled “Rural Delivery”, and “The Second Battle of Trenton”.

Now, The Historical Society for the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey is proud to announce its first public art exhibit, “ART FOR EVERYONE: Murals and Paintings by Charles W. Ward,” a celebration of Charles Ward’s three New Deal murals and a retrospective display of works from the five-decade career of Charles Ward (1900 – 1962), at the United States Courthouse in Trenton, New Jersey. The exhibition opens on Thursday October 11th with a reception from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. The free exhibit will continue Monday through Friday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., through November 30, 2007. Studio Director, DAvid leopold is the guest curator.

Ward’s easy versatility in oils, watercolor, drawing and printmaking, have drawn comparisons to Goya, Daumier, Rivera, Reginald Marsh, and Daniel Garber, but each work bears his personal stamp of integrity. His work is in a number of public collections including the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the James A. Michener Art Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the New Jersey State Museum.

We often are asked about conservation of paintings. For last seven years we have turned to Andrew Bertolino to do the conservation work for the Studio.

Visitors to his website can see not only this Solowey painting before and after his conservation work, but other works as well.

Since Andrew has completed the work on this stunning early portrait of Rae, it has become a visitor favorite and was the centerpiece of the main studio during our On The Road exhibition.