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Beauty and delight: Artistic humility

My mother studied painting at the New York Art Students League with Joseph Solman, the American artist who died last year at age 99. Solman was briefly a member, along with Mark Rothko, of an artistic vanguard known as The Ten, which in the 1930s rejected the literalism of American art and championed expressionism. Yet Solman remained a traditionalist among radicals, resisting the turn to abstraction. “The subject has more interest than any shape we might invent,” he said in a 1998 interview. “I take what’s out there, and that’s what lights up my imagination.”

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