DR. EUGENE A. SOLOW When The Art Institute of Chicago established in 1988 a new series of exhibitions under the Kemper Educational and Charitable Fund, it turned first to the collection of Dr. Eugene A. Solow, who for more than thirty years had been one of the leading figures in the city's cultural life. Dr. Solow, a prominent allergist, helped found the Museum of Contemporary Art, and began his association with The Art Institute in 1967 when he joined the Advisory Committee on Prints and Drawings. Dr. Solow's wife, Gloria Brackstone Solow, who pre-deceased him in 1966, was instrumental in kindling the family's interest in collecting. She was a talented amateur painter. While on a stopover in Oslo during a cruise in the Norwegian fjords in 1960, a drawing by Edvard Munch in a cluttered gallery caught her eye. It became the Solows' first important acquistion. Their appetite for pictures was difficult to satisfy, and every Wednesday - Dr. Solow's day of rest from his busy practice - they made the rounds of local galleries and museums. The Art Institute soon became the focus of their activities, and they became friendly with the late Harold Joachim, Curator of Prints and Drawings, and the late Joshua Taylor, professor of Art History at the University of Chicago. The Solows shared a taste for figurative art, and collected pictures in which the human image is the focus of expression. Like many Midwestern collectors of Central European heritage, they were drawn to the works of German and Austrian artists, especially those of the Expressionists. They eagerly sought the drawings of Egon Schiele, and in 1966, in the memory of his wife, Dr. Solow donated the powerful 1916 watercolor Russicher Kriegsgetangener (Grigori Kladjishuili) to The Art Institute. The cornerstone of the present collection is Schiele's Hockender (Selbstbildnis), a watercolor done in the same year as the artist's brief but traumatic confinement on morals charges, and very likely not long after he was released. We witness Schiele's preoccupation with the theme of the artist as a solitary seer in the struggle against the mores of a decaying social system. The defiant, staring eyes of the artist burn with rebellious, visionary fervor. The primitive force of German Expressionism characterizes a carefully selected group of woodcuts, lithographs and etchings by Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde. Heckel's Schlafende Negerin, 1908, reflects the Expressionist interest in subjects drawn from exotic, non-European cultures. From the year earlier, Nolde's Frau Kopf stüzend with its vivid hand-coloring presages the artist's full immersion in Expressionist theory. Das Dorli, 1917, and Bauernpaar in der Hutte, 1919, were done during the early years of Kirchner's stay in Switzerland, and demonstrate the artist's return to natural motifs as he slowly recovered from the scarring experience of the First World War. Such special pursuits notwithstanding, Dr. Solow never established an agenda for his acquisitions, and he also collected works from the broad range of Modern artists whom we know as the School of Paris. He was attracted to Modern sculpture, especially works by artists like Giacometti, Manzù, Matisse and Rodin, who are notable both as sculptors and draughtsmen. In the richly-modeled surfaces of Matisse's Nu couché à la chemise, a female figure created during the artist's brief Fauvist period, we observe in three-dimensional terms the transition from a divisionist painting style inherited from the Neo-Impressionists of the late 19th Century to the beginnings of a more radical and expressive Modernist approach, in which many conventions of subject and form are overturned, rethought and eventually reduced to their essentials. Dr. Solow collected fourteen etchings from Picasso's Vollard Suite, one of the great landmarks of printmaking in this century. He was particularly drawn to the theme of the blind minotaur, and the artist and model. This series, executed in the 1930s, reflects the full ripening of the Neoclassical tendency in French painting which Picasso himself largely set in motion in the years immediately following World War I. The School of Paris achieves its final flowering in the aftermath of the Second World War in the work of Jean Dubuffet. As if to sum up the great Modernist tradition, and to bring it full circle to its violent beginnings early in the century, Dr. Solow's collection features the drawing Corps de dame, from the celebrated series Dubuffet created in 1950. The underlying theme within the collection is Dr. Solow's love for works on paper, reflecting an individual preference for the illuminating and insightful over the superficial and merely decorative. Drawing and printmaking are arts of process and discovery, and constitute a world within the fields of collecting which demands and inspires the most avid connoisseurship. In putting pencil or chalk to paper, the artist engages and analyzes reality in a manner that mixes equal parts of feeling and intellect, and despite its apparent austerity of means, it involves the viewer directly and spontaneously in the very act of creation. While painting in oils, in its use of color and a richly textured surface, may seduce the viewer into a more intensely sensual experience, it rarely achieves the absolute stillness and intimacy of drawing; indeed, by limiting color or eschewing it altogether, drawing creates a world which is infinitely detailed and yet significant in all its parts, where a single pure line may resonate with a multi-dimensional reality. Dr. Solow was equally drawn to printmakers, who practice a far more complex and effortlful technique, but who are nonetheless successful insofar as they preserve the initial flourish of thought and feeling inherent in the drawn image. As the physician uses his instruments to probe the human body in his effort to understand the cause and effect of life processes, so does the artist with his pen and pencil draw in order to comprehend the human form and the physical world around him. Both disciplines initiate their practitioners with a study of human anatomy, and place great value on the artist's or physician's empathy for his subject. Reflecting upon these similarities, it should appear to be no coincidence that many great collectors of drawings and prints in the past have been notable physicians. Dr. Solow, who died in 1995, continued and upheld this distinguished humanist tradition.

Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski, b. 1908)

Femme debout aux bras levées

Details

Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski, b. 1908)
Femme debout aux bras levées
pencil on paper
13 5/8 x 10½in. (34.5 x 26.7cm.)
Drawn circa 1937

Provenance

E.V. Thaw & Co., New York
B.C. Holland Gallery, Chicago (acquired by Dr. Eugene A. Solow, 1966)

Exhibited

Chicago, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Balthus in Chicago, Aug.-Nov., 1980, no. 8
Chicago, The Art Institute, Chicago Collects: Selections from the Collection of Dr. Eugene A. Solow, May-Aug., 1988, no. 3 (illustrated, p. 5, fig. 3)

Lot Essay

This drawing is a study for the standing female figure in the painting La Montagne (L'été), 1937 (coll. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).

Virginnie Monnier will include this drawing in the Balthus catalogue raisonné to be published by Editions Gallimard, Paris.