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Solotaire Playing in Portland
Robert Solotaire was a Downtown Guy
by Edgar Allen Beem
Robert Solotaire passed away a year ago this month at a very youthful 78 years of age. Bob was a downtown kind of guy, a ubiquitous presence on the streets of Portland, particularly up in the West End where he ran a boarding house, wrote for the neighborhood newspaper, and painted the lively urban scenes for which he is well-known.
On the first anniversary of his death, Gleason Fine Art has mounted a memorial exhibition (through November 14) in its Portland gallery. For those who sorely miss Bob, the Gleason show is an opportunity to reconnect and reflect. For those who didn't know him and his work, it's an excellent chance to get to see a body of his supremely humanistic art - scenes of everyday life infused with the artist?s own peculiar sense of humor.
Bob Solotaire was born in 1930 in New York City, where his father ran a ticket agency on Times Square. That may account for the lightly theatrical quality of his view of the world. As a young man, he studied at Bard College, but his most important and enduring influence were the drawing classes he took at the Art Students League with German émigré artist Ernest Fiene (1894-1965). Fiene seems to have instilled in Solotaire an appreciation for the mundane as theater, cities as settings for the little dramas of human existence.
Not only did Solotaire retain much of Ernest Fiene's social aesthetic, he also painted many of the same places Fiene painted - the streets of New York, the industrial landscapes of Pittsburgh, and the coast of Maine. Locally, Solotaire is probably best know for his paintings of Portland landmarks, but when he first came to Maine it was as a summer resident of coastal Harspwell. There he was mentored by romantic realist Stephen Etnier (1903-1984).
Solotaire and Etnier were married to sisters for a time, and the older, more commercially successful Etnier persuaded Solotaire to work outdoors directly from nature. Etnier himself had been a student of Rockwell Kent (1882-1971), so there is a clear artistic lineage running from Kent through Etnier and Fiene (who, like Kent, painted on Monhegan) to Solotaire. But where Kent's take on the world was one of heroic individualism and Etnier's one of elegiac sadness at the passing of a way of life, Solotaire's worldview was a more wryly upbeat one.
Bob Solotaire loved the business (busy-ness) of ordinary life and he celebrated it in paintings of people in the streets as well as in industrial landscapes of mills and quarries and paintings that made mechanical machinery look like amusement park attractions. He loved to work and his art was often about work, human enterprise.
Though he was a painter of impressive technical ability when it came to detailing visual complexities, Solotaire was not a photorealist, not a precision realist. He had an old fashion love of paint and didn't try to hide his brushwork beneath the appearances. He was a realist but not an illusionist. The human figures in his work were rarely life-like, instead possessing the slightly comic look of cartoons. If you don?t smile when you look at a Bob Solotaire painting, you may be missing the point.
[Gleason Fine Art, 545 Congress St., Portland ME, 207-699-5599.]
p.s. Click on the paintings to enlarge them.
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