Self-Portrait With Curved Pipe
Oil On Canvas, 24x20. 1932
Ben Solowey Frame

Imaginative Flowers
Oil On Board, 20 X 16. 1924
Ben Solowey Frame
This work, painted the year Solowey finished at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and before he would travel to Europe, shows the influence of Arthur B. Carles in both palette and in composition. Carles was a contemporary of Charles Demuth when both were students at the Academy.

Bellevue, France
Oil On Board, 13x16. 1924
Although Ben Solowey won many awards at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, he failed to win a Cresson scholarship to study in Europe. Instead he worked his way across the Atlantic as a steward on the S.S. levithan. He spent nearly eight months in Europe, most of it in and around Paris. Whereas today’s traveler might take snapshots of the locations they visited, Solowey made oil sketches on wood panels to record his impressions of the places he visited.

The Bridge
Oil On Board, 13x16. 1925
Solowey returned from Europe in 1925 and immediately interpolated the influence of the art he saw in Europe into his own work. This work won an Honorable Mention at the Philadelphia Sektch club in 1926.

Pansies
Oil On Canvas, 24 X 20. C. 1925-1928

Pierott And Pierette
Charcoal and Conte Crayon, 24x20. 1928
Like Demuth, Solowey was attracted to the theater and its performers. Between 1929 and 1942 he created nearly 900 charcoal portraits from life of performers on Broadway, opera, film and dance for the New York Times and the Herald Tribune. It is not surprising then to discover that these types of performers found their way into his easel work. Music and dance also played an important role in the modernist society in Philadelphia before Solowey left for Manhattan in late 1928.

Broken Pitcher Mountainview Farm, New Hampshire
Oil On Board, 16 x13. 1929

Landscape with White Cow
Oil On board, 16 x 13. C. 1929

Maine Rocks - Rocky Coast
Oil On Canvas, 20x24. 1930
On April 5, 1930 Ben Solowey met Rae Landis in New York and by June 8th they were married. They honeymooned for a summer in Casco Bay, Maine where Solowey created a number of seascapes that bring to mind Cezanne’s landscapes.

Bathers
Oil On Canvas, 20x24. 1930
Ben Solowey Frame
Solowey admired the work of Cezanne and in this work he pays tribute to Cezanne’s classic composition of bathers. In a similar work, he inscribed the back of the "homage to Cezanne." Instead of the French countryside, Solowey substitutes a New England landscape. Solowey joined Matisse, Picasso, Henry Moore, who were thoroughly enchanted by Cezanne’s bathers, and each tried their hand and emulating the composition.

New England Landscape
Watercolor, 14.75 X 19.5. 1931
Ben Solowey Frame

Asleep On Sofa
Pastel, 19x25. C. 1931

White Mountains Of New Hampshire
Oil On Canvas, 20x16. C. 1931

Still Life Arrangement
Watercolor, 12x17. 1932
Like Cezanne, Solowey was enchanted with the possibilities of a still life. The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke saw in Cezanne still lifes the net effect of all this effort, an almost mystical experience put into paint. "He lays his apples down on bedspreads," wrote Rilke, "that his housekeeper certainly misses one day, and puts his wine bottles among them, and whatever he happens to find, and like Van Gogh, makes his saints out of things like that, and compels them, compels them to be beautiful, to mean the whole world and all happiness and all glory."

The Three Graces
Watercolor, 19 X 25. C. 1932
Ben Solowey Frame
This work is an excellent example of Solowey’s combination of the classic and the modern. Artists have always been attracted to the myth of the Three Graces, goddesses presiding over the banquet, dance and art. Solowey takes this classical idea and renders the Graces in a modern way that suggest Matisse more than Michelangelo.

Rae Abstraction
Pencil, 16.375x13.25 C. 1932
"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." Solowey 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. This page from his sketchbook gives us a revealing view of Solowey at work, capturing the essence of the world around him.

Kimball Barnyard
Watercolor, 21x27. 1933

Nasturtiums
Oil On Canvas, 16x20. C. 1935

Ben Solowey Frames are those handcrafted by the artist