Obituaries - Artworld - editor Paul Gottlieb - sculptor George Rickey - poet Kenneth Koch - photographer Yousuf Karsh - art dealer Norman Hirschl - gallery director J. Carter Brown - art collector Phyllis Wattis - art dealer Holly Solomon - Obituary

Art in America, Sept, 2002 by Stephanie Cash, David Ebony

Holly Solomon, 1934-2002

Holly Solomon, 68, New York dealer and collector, died June 6 from pneumonia after a long battle with cancer. A key figure on the New York art scene for more than 30 years, Solomon began her career as an actress. Born Hollis Dworken in Bridgeport, Conn., she studied acting and art history at Vassar College and later at Sarah Lawrence. After her marriage to bobby-pin magnate Horace Solomon, she moved to Manhattan and enrolled in Lee Strasberg's Actor's Studio, adopting the stage name Hollis Belmont. Although she appeared in a number of films, including The Plot Against Harry (1969), she had scant success finding suitable roles and decided to refocus her attention on art.

The Solomons were avid collectors and champions of Pop art. In the '60s, Holly Solomon commissioned portraits of herself from artists such as Warhol and Lichtenstein for hundreds of dollars, which, in recent years, she sold at auction for millions. In 1969 the Solomons opened a nonprofit exhibition space at 98 Greene St. in SoHo, years before the area became a fashionable ad center. There, she exhibited the work of artists such as Christo, Nam June Paik, Neil Jenney, Robert Barry, William Wegman and Robert Mapplethorpe; she also sponsored performances and readings by Laurie Anderson and Ted Berrigan, among many others. She raised eyebrows in 1974 when she purchased a suburban New Jersey house so that Gordon Matta-Clark could saw it in half. In 1975, the Holly Solomon Gallery opened at 392 West Broadway.

Always elegantly dressed and vivacious in public, Solomon became a prominent figure in New York's post-Pop, neo-Conceptualist milieu of the '70s. She soon found an area, however, where she would playa central role. Attracted to the provocations of over-the-top decorative works, she introduced artists associated with the Pattern and Decoration movement, who helped expand the boundaries of modernism; prominent among them were Valerie Jaudon, Robert Kushner, Brad Davis, Ned Smyth, Kim MacConnel, Rodney Ripps and Thomas Lanigan-Schimdt. She also showed such diverse artists as Susan Rothenberg, Nicholas Africano, Peter Hutchinson, Izhar Patkin and Alexis Smith. During this period, Solomon caused a stir in Europe when she showcased her artists in Basel, Venice and elsewhere.

When SoHo became the center of New York's ad world in the early 1980s, a situation she helped create, she moved the gallery to 57th St., where she continued to pursue an eclectic, unpredictable and stimulating program. After her divorce in 1990, she returned to SoHo and later opened a large venue on the corner of Houston and Mercer Streets. There, she added new names to her stable of artists, including Rob Wynne, Julia Jacquette, Feng Mengbo, Lisa Hoke, Jeff Perrone, Virgil Marti, Barbara Pollack and Jean Lowe. As the downtown gallery scene shifted to Chelsea, and in the wake of difficulties with her landlord, Solomon closed the SoHo space. Since June '99, she had operated an appointment-only venue in the Chelsea Hotel. In the past several years her health began to decline, but her energy and enthusiasm for her artists did not. She was a formidable presence each year at New York's two biggest contemporary ad fairs, the Art Show, sponsored by the highbrow Art Dealers Association, and the Armory Show, featuring cutting-edge work. She also helped organize the sprawling 1999 touring museum retrospective of works by Nam June Paik, which debuted at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. A memorial for Solomon will be held in the Guggenheim's rotunda on the evening of Sept. 26.--David Ebony