Artist Syd Solomon was born near Uniontown, Pennsylvania in 1917. He began painting in high school. From 1935-38 he studied at the Art institute of Chicago. After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Solomon was enlisted to help create camouflage for the California coast around San Francisco. He arrived in England on D-Day 2 and met artists Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. They worked together to create camouflage for ports on the English Coast. He later designed camouflage systems for the desert war in Northern Africa. The artist has said that the aerial reconnaissance he did during WWII, influenced his ideas about abstract art. He attended sessions at L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts, in Paris in 1945.

In 1946, Syd and Annie Solomon settled in Sarasota, Florida, which was home to the Ringling Museum of Art. Everett “Chick” Austin, was then the museum’s Director. Solomon’s work quickly gained attention of other artists, curators and collectors. At the suggestion of Alfred Barr, Solomon’s work was the first by a contemporary artist, to be collected by the Ringling Museum. This began a long association of the artist with the Museum, as well as with the Ringling School of Art and nearby New College.

In 1955 the Solomons visited East Hampton for the first time at the invitation of a fellow artist David Budd. Solomon met many of the artists of the New York School then including Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning. By 1959 Solomon had developed a lifestyle that split the year, spending winter and spring in Sarasota and summer and fall in the Hamptons. He was to follow this dual location life-style, which greatly influenced his work, for over the next 30 years. During the 1950s Solomon’s paintings were included in numerous national exhibitions. His early and experimental use of acrylics and his expression of the raw forces of nature through gesture caught the attention of the wider art world. Included in shows at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Dallas Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, The Smithsonian, The Butler Institute of Art, The National Academy of Design, The High Museum, The Academy of Arts and Letters and many others, Solomon’s work and reputation flourished.

The artist began showing regularly in New York in 1959 with the Saidenberg Gallery. Solomon also had regular shows in the Hamptons and in Miami, at the James David Gallery. In the 1960s his reputation reached an apex. In 1961 Solomon won numerous national awards and accolades including the Painting of the Year from The Whitney and the 13th New England Annual awarded by the Guggenheim’s, H.H. Arnason. Solomon was also on the list of the 10 Outstanding Painters of the Year chosen by Thomas Hess of Art News. The Guggenheim, The Whitney, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, The Wadsworth Athenaeum and many other nationally prominent museums, purchased his work.

Solomon became an influential artist and personality in the Hamptons and in Florida in the 1960s. He created the Institute of Fine Art at New College in Sarasota and is credited with bringing many nationally known artists to Florida. Larry Rivers, Phil Guston, James Brooks, Conrad Marca-Relli, were among the artists that taught at the Institute. In East Hampton the Solomon home was the epicenter of artists and writers, who had settled in the Hamptons. Solomon hosted the first Artist / Writers Baseball Game in his backyard in 1966. A number of artist-produced performances were also held at the Solomon home in the late 1960s, including the Frank O’Hara play, “Try, Try”.

In 1970, with architect Gene Leedy, the artist built an award winning house and studio on Siesta Key in Sarasota. In 1975 a retrospective exhibition of Solomon’s work was held at the New York Cultural Center and at the Ringling Museum in Sarasota. Writer Kurt Vonnegut Jr. conducted an interview with Solomon for the exhibition catalog. The artist was close with many writers, including Harold Rosenberg, Joy Williams, Budd Schulberg, Elia Kazan and John D. McDonald. He also had close friends in the music world including Mitch Miller, Eric Von Schmidt, Jerry Leiber and Jerry Wexler. Around 1990, Solomon began to show the symptoms of Alzheimer’s. In 1990, the Ringling Museum of Art honored the artist with the one-man exhibition “A Dialog With Nature”. The artist died in Sarasota in January 2004.

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