NEW YORK, NY.- David M. Solinger (1906-1996) was many things: a highly successful lawyer, among the first to specialize in advertising law, and legal representative to a number of leading artists; a transformational force as President of the board of the Whitney Museum of American Art (the first person from outside the Whitney family to hold this position); a highly engaged amateur artist, whose confrontation with the challenges of painting brought him closer to the art and artists of his day; an abundantly generous philanthropist, who donated important works to Cornell University (his alma mater), the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Smith College and others; and – not least – a collector in the truest sense.
This fall, across a series of sales in New York and Paris which will open with a dedicated evening sale in New York on November 14,
Sotheby’s will offer some 90 works from David Solinger’s collection. Estimated in excess of $100 million, they together present a precise vision of the art created on both sides of the Atlantic in the post-war years. Established European artists such as Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Joan Miró, Jean Dubuffet, and Paul Klee, take their place alongside a younger generation of rising stars in Paris, including Pierre Soulages, Nicolas de Staël, and Georges Mathieu, and their leading American contemporaries such as Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Alexander Calder, and Adolph Gottlieb.
At the same time, the coming to market of this exceptional collection affords a rare glimpse into the mind and approach of one of the leading collectors of his day. During his lifetime, David Solinger gave two extensive interviews, one to Columbia University and one to the Smithsonian, the contents of which paint a captivating picture of someone who relied on his own eye and the confidence of his convictions; who approached the art of collecting from the standpoint of an artist, and for whom looking at art, and owning it, was both a tonic and a passion: “I’ve come home at night exhausted from some activity or other and flopped into a chair and just looked at the pictures in the room and I find myself revived. The thrill of looking at a great picture, either for the first time or a picture that I have seen again and again, is a great tonic. If it’s a good picture, it often has a way of revealing itself slowly… Pictures that grow on one slowly are frequently the best pictures.”
DAVID SOLINGER: ARTIST, ART LOVER AND ‘SELF-MADE’ COLLECTOR
As David Solinger describes, “the vast majority of [his] collecting was done in the early fifties.”6 For him, art, and the idea of collecting it, came relatively suddenly, born – almost unexpectedly – of a brief encounter with a friend soon after his return from duty in the war. That friend had just enrolled for art classes at YMHA and Solinger decided to do the same. From that grew a life-long passion for painting: “I became not a Sunday painter, but a summer painter. I would take my vacation by going off to paint, much to the amusement of some professional artists who couldn’t understand how it could be a vacation for me to spend six or eight or ten hours a day painting.”
As his love of painting grew, so too did his desire to understand how other painters addressed the same challenges he encountered. So, he started to visit galleries and museums, quickly falling in love with the art he saw there. From admiring works on gallery walls came a strong desire to hang them on his own. The first painting he purchased was by Reuben Tam (now in the Whitney Museum), after which he was, in his own words, unstoppable: “Once I broke the ice, I was incorrigible.” In the process, Solinger’s eye quickly honed to the point that, by his own admission and as his collection attests, he “was able to really single out the major talents.”
Fortuitously perhaps, David Solinger’s collecting journey coincided almost exactly with a new wave of American abstract painting which appealed to him so much: “[my] eye was pretty good for abstract expressionist painting.”10 Though the market for, and potential longevity of, this kind of art was at the time untested, Solinger embraced it unreservedly.
And yet, in spite of the excitements of the New York art scene, Solinger’s approach remained resolutely global: he was among the first American collectors to fully embrace the art of great European talents of the moment, some of whom, like Jean Dubuffet and Pierre Soulages, were just making their US debuts.
Forming lasting relationships with the most influential dealers and gallerists of the day, including Samuel Kootz, Pierre Matisse, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Sidney Janis, Edith Halpert of the Downtown Gallery, and Aimé Maeght, Solinger sought out great works by established masters as well as the very best of the avant-garde generation. At a moment when the two creative capitals of Paris and New York vied for cultural dominance, and artists from both cities challenged and influenced each other’s artistic ideas, Solinger built not just a collection but a transatlantic bridge: an exceptionally insightful dialogue between the two great epicenters of Modern art in the pre- and post-war eras.
Complementing all of this, Solinger also assembled a remarkable group of African and pre-Columbian objects of the kinds that served as inspiration to the artists represented in his collection.
DAVID SOLINGER AND THE ART WORLD
In 1956, David Solinger received a call from Lloyd Goodrich, asking him to join a meeting with others who were interested in the Whitney Museum. At that point, the museum was private, dependent entirely on a by-then-inadequate endowment created by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1931. As a result of this meeting, Solinger offered to organize a not-for- profit corporation called “The Friends of the Whitney Museum”, a novel idea at the time and one that proved highly successful. Within a decade, Solinger had risen to be President of the Whitney Museum – the first non-family member to hold this position. He took the museum public and grew its finances, staffing and collection. He also raised enough money ($7 million) to fund the building of a new Marcel Breuer-designed home for the Museum on Madison and 75th street.
Committed as he was to the Whitney Museum, David Solinger remained deeply interested in – and generous towards – other museums. During the course of his lifetime, he gifted many works to a variety of leading institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum and – of course – the Whitney Museum.
Beyond museums and the people involved in them, David Solinger was closely connected to the leading artists of the day who, he felt, displayed more good character and generosity than any other group of people – dining with Dubuffet, supporting Kline in his debut show, taking painting classes from Hofmann and visiting de Kooning’s studio.
Solinger even provided legal representation for Louise Nevelson who, in gratitude, gifted him a gold sculpture titled “Dawn – And Summer.” Speaking of Nevelson, he said: “She was like a grande dame. She had great dignity... She was a woman of character and a very determined personality. Her life was not an easy one. She struggled, struggled for a long time for recognition, which finally came.”
A GLIMPSE INSIDE THE COLLECTION
DE KOONING
Having first seen de Kooning’s work at the Charles Egan Gallery in 1948, David Solinger later recalled: “I spent the whole day there. I was riveted. I couldn’t leave.” Among the first to fully recognize de Kooning’s greatness, Solinger became a regular visitor to the artist’s studio, developing a firm friendship, and acquiring works direct from de Kooning both for the Whitney Museum and for his own collection: “I made it my business to get at least one, and if possible more, great de Koonings to enrich the Whitney collection.”
Collage is not just a dazzling example of the visceral power of abstraction in de Kooning’s hands, it is also an entirely unique example of a work that captures for posterity a critical aspect of de Kooning’s working practice.
Throughout the 1940s and 50s, de Kooning would often use a collage technique to plan his compositions, tracing shapes onto paper and arranging them in various ways across a painting’s surface. Here, though, he did not remove these layered elements, making for a richly textured surface that is built up in layers of paper, paint, charcoal and even scattered silver thumbtacks. As a result, Collage is not only a seductive jewel of a work, it is also a unique record of the working practice that defines de Kooning’s most significant canvases.
Collage has been featured in several of the most important exhibitions of the artist’s work, including the landmark 1968-69 traveling survey shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Stedelijk Musuem in Amsterdam, Tate in London, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Los Angeles County Museum, as well as in a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 2011-12, and the watershed Abstract Expressionism exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts London in 2016-17.
GIACOMETTI
Having first seen this powerful sculpture on a visit to Giacometti’s studio in 1951, David Solinger acquired it just months later from the artist’s dealer, Galerie Maeght in Paris.
Conceived in 1949, Trois hommes qui marchent (Grand plateau) is among the earliest of the famed multi-figure works, which had begun to populate Giacometti’s small Parisian studio prior to his first solo show at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1948. It captures three figures mid-stride, weaving their way past each other. They are connected yet isolated, embodying city life in a way that spoke directly to Solinger: “There’s an energy in those figures. If one comes to earth thousands of years from now and sees this sculpture, he’ll get some of the feeling of energy, the rush of city people.”
Though seemingly minimal, the sculpture is nonetheless extremely textured, having been created first in clay, with Giacometti moulding and pinching the forms to achieve highly tactile figures which, with the help of his brother Diego, were then cast into bronze, preserving every pinch and physical impression.
This particular work is also one of only a small number of examples to have been hand-painted by the artist himself. The quality of the hand painting on the surface of the cast is remarkable, from the dark hair of each male figure to the green-gold details of each figure and the broad, brushy swaths of gray green on the platform above the deep red base. Most works bearing this kind of precise detail are now held in museum collections, with the few that have come to auction accounting for some of the highest prices ever achieved for the artist’s work.
This bronze is coming to auction for the first time. Other casts of Trois hommes qui marchent (Grand plateau) now reside in major global collections including the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Fondation Louis Vuitton and the Giacometti Fondation, Paris.
PICASSO
Painted within just three weeks of Picasso’s famous first encounter with Marie-Thérèse Walter, the lover and ‘golden muse’ who was to be the subject of many of Picasso’s most celebrated works, this fascinating canvas is among the first in which her features appear.
Marie-Thérèse was just 17 when Picasso first introduced himself to her. She was naive and completely oblivious of the fame that already surrounded the stranger who approached her as she was leaving the Paris Metro on January 8, 1927. “I was an innocent girl,” she later recalled. “I knew nothing – either of life or of Picasso … I had gone to do some shopping at the Galeries Lafayette, and Picasso saw me leaving the Metro. He simply took me by the arm and said: ‘I am Picasso! You and I are going to do great things together.’”
The couple’s relationship was kept a well-guarded secret for many years, both because Picasso was then still married (to Olga Khokhlova, a Russian-Ukrainian dancer he had met on tour with Diaghilev) and due to Marie-Thérèse’s age. But so infatuated was Picasso that he could not resist introducing the shapely features of his new love into his canvases. Here, she appears in the form of the curvaceous, languid lines that came to characterize his paintings of her. Her forms, meanwhile, contrast sharply with the angular, distorted features of his then wife Olga, with whom he was becoming increasingly frustrated – the jagged teeth and open mouth attesting to their marital spats and apparent rages.
Just as the painting is one of two women, so too it captures Picasso at a moment of artistic transition, bringing together the surrealist hallmarks that had characterized his previous work, and the softer, biomorphic forms that were to follow.
One of eleven paintings entrusted by Picasso to the Museum of Modern Art for safekeeping during the Second World War, Femme dans un fauteuil was later repatriated to Paris, and consigned by the artist to his dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiller, from whom it was quickly acquired by Solinger.
As befits its importance, it has appeared in many important museum shows, including: the Museum of Modern Art’s 1939 retrospective of the artist (in which Guernica was first debuted in the United States); the monumental retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1980; the São Paulo Museu de Arte Moderna’s second biennial in 1953 (when Picasso’s special exhibition caused massive crowds outside the venue’s doors); and the Modernist showcase Matisse–Picasso organized by the Tate in 2002-03.
MIRÓ
Miró is another artist with whom Solinger was captivated, represented in his collection by no fewer than five examples. Bringing together many of Joan Miró’s greatest motifs, Femme, étoiles from 1945, comes on the heels of the Constellations series – a key art historical opus of its time, executed over the course of, and somehow chronicling, Miró’s experience of the Second World War.
Of the related works from 1945, there is perhaps no other painting of such key historical significance, painted, as it was on 7 May 1945, the day that the German High Command signed an unconditional surrender at Reims – establishing a long-awaited end to the war. Capturing the import of that moment, Femme, étoiles brings together both the horror of conflict and the hope of freedom, with dueling expanses of light and dark, placid and menacing figures, and balance of heavy and fine lines.
At the same time that Miró’s Constellations opened to critical acclaim at Pierre Matisse’s gallery in New York in early 1945, the artist embarked upon yet another defining series which would translate the idols of his earlier gouache masterpieces into indelible large- scale canvases like Femme, étoiles. Of the eighteen other related canvases, ten are held in museum collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona. In addition to the important gallery shows in Paris and Stockholm in the late 1940s, Femme, étoiles was notably featured at the Museum of Modern Art’s historic centennial exhibition dedicated to Miró’s legacy, where it hung beside related works from the series and the fantastical sculptures that such paintings inspired.
DUBUFFET
Solinger was captivated by Jean Dubuffet – one of the first American collectors to really understand and embrace his work, hosting the artist at his home for dinner in the early 1960s and acquiring numerous examples of his paintings. Together, this group of works spans two crucial decades of the artist’s development and encapsulates many of the key themes that have come to define Dubuffet’s remarkable output, including a masterpiece of the artist’s best-known L’Hourloupe series, and an exquisitely rare early painting featured in the artist’s first solo exhibition at Galerie René Drouin in 1946.
KLEE
Solinger first encountered the work of Paul Klee at the dealer J.B. Neumann’s New Art Circle Gallery in New York. He was immediately taken with it, acquiring numerous examples, five of which will be offered in the November sales.
Among them are three works Klee produced between 1918 and 1919 – a pivotal moment of evolution for Klee, as his style moves from expressionism, cubism and surrealism to a more playful graphic abstraction, and his own personal “hieroglyphs’ start to appear.
Klee inserted a wealth of symbols and ideograms into his works, both to enrich the composition and unlock hidden meanings. In Landschaft mit dem Galgen (Landscape with Gallows), for instance, the cryptic and coded symbols have purportedly been said to present a Modernist revision of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Northern Renaissance painting, The Magpie on the Gallows (1568).
