The Letter

Olga Baclanova. Pastel on paper, 30 x 25 inches. 192

Even in his twenties, pastel played a role in Ben Solowey’s art and led to some of his best-known work.

After returning from a five-month sojourn in Europe in the fall of 1924, Ben Solowey supported himself in Philadelphia as a decorative painter recreating Old Master still lifes and game paintings for interior decorators and furniture stores, while continuing to show his own award-winning work in exhibitions around the city. When he left for New York four years later, he also left behind his decorative work. New York had fourteen daily newspapers, and all of them featured drawings as they were easier to reproduce than photographs, particularly in the Drama sections of the papers, which included many drawings of performers who were to open on shows on Broadway, in movie theaters, or perform on a concert stage. With his affinity for portraiture, Ben Solowey decided he would become a newspaper contributor.

Despite having no connections, Ben was undeterred from approaching editors of The New York Herald Tribune, The New York Times and other papers with an example of his work. He could have chosen to show his remarkable charcoal portrait of a cleaning woman from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts that had won him the Ramborger Prize at the school and was featured in the school’s catalogue. Instead, he created a stunning pastel portrait of the Russian born actress Olga Baclanova from a black and white photo he found of her, presumably in a movie magazine at the time.

Olga Baclanova. Hand colored photo postcard. c. 1928

Baclanova was born in Russia in the late 1800s and as a teenager was accepted into the Moscow Art Theatre (M.A.T), an invitation, according to some reports, that came Konstantin Stanislavski himself.  She had significant roles in plays by Ibsen, Chekhov and Turgenev, and M.A.T productions of Shakespeare and Dickens. She also starred in Russian films, and by 1925 she was named a “Merited Artist of the Republic”, the highest Soviet artist honor.

After touring America in 1925 in a M.A.T. production of Lysistrata, she remained in America when the troupe returned home. She appeared on stage in southern California before soon finding work in Hollywood silent films. By 1928, Baclanova was at the height of her fame. She appeared in seven feature films (and two shorts) that year, including the now classic The Man Who Laughs. Judging by film stills, Ben may have used one from the 1928 film, The Docks of New York, as a visual reference for his portrait.

Olga Baclanova in The Docks of New York. 1928. Directed by Josef von Sternberg.

If Baclanova is known at all today, it is because in 1932 she starred as the scheming trapeze artist Cleopatra in Tod Browning’s unsettling film Freaks. Her film career began to slow after that, and while she did perform on Broadway, most notably in the hit Claudia in 1941 as Madame Daruschka (a role she would reprise in the film adaptation two years later), she would slowly disappear from the world of the performing arts. She died in Switzerland in 1974.

This portrait, which has never been published, was distinctive enough that editors began to give Ben assignments for performer portraits. Ben’s “Theatre Portraits” (as he called them) began to appear in January 1929, the start of 12 year career in which he drew close to 900 charcoal portraits for New York newspapers, almost all from life. As vivid as this colorful pastel portrait is, either Ben or his editors realized that a black and white charcoal drawing would be more dramatic in the newspaper. Ben would be among the first artists to exploit half tone in newspaper reproductions and quickly having Solowey draw your portrait was a sign that one had “arrived.” It certainly the way that many learned of Ben and his work as his regular Sunday “exhibition” in the papers reached millions more viewers than any picture in a gallery or museum. And to think it all started with a pastel.

Philip Barry’s play, The Philadelphia Story debuted on Broadway on March 28, 1939. Barry had written the romantic comedy specifically for Katharine Hepburn, and she was so eager to rid of herself of the stench of “box office poison” after her last few films had failed, that she became an unbilled producer of the play with the Theatre Guild, and took no pay but got a portion of the show’s profits. And it was hit, running for 417 performances in a little more than a year. It would have undoubtedly won several Tonys, but they had not yet been created.

Clipping of Joseph Cotten in The Philadelphia Story. 1939

Ben Solowey drew five members of the cast of the Broadway production. The first was Hepburn’s co-star Joseph Cotten who originated the role of C.K. Dexter Haven, played in the film by Cary Grant. Cotten loved his portrait so much he purchased it for $50, which he paid in $10 installments over several months.

The Herald Tribune asked Ben for a portrait of Hepburn and her other co-star, Van Heflin, who played the role that won Jimmy Stewart his only Oscar. “I was told, ‘She’s rough; she’ll give you a hell of a time,’” remembered Ben to a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter in 1977. “I went backstage after seeing her in The Philadelphia Story. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘let’s go,’ and about midnight I went with her and one of her co-stars, Van Heflin, to her apartment. I had he sit on her kitchen table for a couple of hours. She offered me a drink and a banana. And she was so pleased with the drawings she bought it.” Hepburn paid for her drawing with one check, less than three weeks after it appeared in the paper, and so did Van Heflin.

Clipping of Van Heflin in The Philadelphia Story. 1939

Despite showing regularly with painters like Picasso, Matisse, de Kooning and Hopper, painting great canvases, restoring his 34-acre farm, the thing that people remembered about Ben was his interaction with Hepburn. When asked about her, he would simply reply that she had a good head, which caused people to send him clippings of her picture whenever it ran in the paper. Rae would eventually tack some of those clippings, along with one of Ben’s drawing on his studio door.

Al Hirschfeld did not draw the original production while it was on Broadway, but he did contribute thumbnail portraits of New York theater critics whose complimentary blurbs about the show were on the back of the souvenir program. Although he would draw Hepburn in several stage productions and many of her films, he did not draw her in the role again until the 1973 book, The Lively Years by Brooks Atkinson, which he illustrated.

In 1990, he was commissioned to draw her again in this iconic role. He liked it so much he asked for a full-size reproduction to be made that he inscribed and sent over to her. It turned out that Hirschfeld and Hepburn had a mutual admiration society for decades, and she collected a number of his drawings of herself for her home. This drawing proved to be so popular that it was published as a hand signed, limited edition lithograph, one of which will be in the Hirschfeld exhibition. You can see both “Kates” during the run of this exhibition.

Bringing Al Hirschfeld’s art to the Solowey Studio is very special to me. As many of you know, I spent thirteen years visiting Hirschfeld in his studio at least once a week to organize the archive of his career. We became quite close. I organized the first museum retrospective of his artwork, as well as the first exhibition that explored his art of the movies, which I put together for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and which subsequently toured internationally. I also wrote the best-selling companion book, Hirschfeld’s Hollywood. Although many know him for his drawings of the American Theatre, he got his start drawing films for studio publicity departments, and his first published caricatures were of film performers. When his first theatrical caricature appeared in December 1926, he was already a six yar veteran of films studio. We went through a lot together: the death of his wife Dolly Haas, the birth of my son, 9/11, a lawsuit with his gallery, and the announcement that a Broadway theatre was to be named in his honor. When the nonprofit Al Hirschfeld Foundation came into being by the terms of his will, I was the first hire, and I am now the Creative Director of the Foundation. He was a good friend and great supporter of me and my career, and like so many others, I had loved his art since I was child.

In 2003, we mounted a show titled “Side by Side” that explored how both Hirschfeld and Solowey saw shows on Broadway in the 1930s when their work literally appeared side by side in New York newspapers. It was a fascinating overview how two unique artists saw the shows that shaped the American Theatre. We are not remounting that show. This exhibition will show Hirschfeld’s incomparable portraits of performers and productions that defined American popular culture in the 20th century. From Duke Ellington to Liza Minnelli; from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel to Star Trek. This will be a combination of Hirschfeld’s ink on board drawings and his hand-signed limited edition prints that will need to be seen to be believed.

All sales of Hirschfeld art directly benefit the Al Hirschfeld Foundation’s mission which is “to promote interest in the theater and dramatic arts by supporting not-for-profit museums, libraries, theaters and similar cultural institutions” around the country. We have created an infrastructure where the overhead of the Foundation is almost non-existent, so that all funds raised go directly to its mission.

This is a special for me, and I think it will be for you. I hope you will visit.