The Letter

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.

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.

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.