![]() After meeting Buckminster Fuller in 1973 through Cage, according to Arthur Solway, his father developed a market for Fuller’s objects based on the architect’s rich store of ideas, disseminating them to a wider audience and raising needed funds. One of Solway’s great gifts was his ability to realize the market possibilities for strong artistic concepts. probably far exceeded the entire year’s worth of business in 1971” at Solway’s gallery, he said. Some 46 years later, Cohan sold three of the complete editions of Cage’s plexigram work, to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Seattle Art Museum, and a private foundation. It was at that moment in my own basement, as they were furiously installing, that I thought: I could do this.” But more than that, he said, Solway and Bolton “described ideas which made the objects come alive. in addition to Op art paintings.” Cohan, then 11, was dazzled by the objects. “I distinctly recall an early very simple George Rickey sitting on the bar, a Miró scroll, and a falling figure by Ernst Trova. They installed an exhibition in my family’s finished basement (tiki bar and all) and had an opening and saw clients for a weekend. “They rolled up to our house in Cleveland in a VW van full of art. Solway traveled with his assistant Jack Bolton, who later became the curator for Chase Manhattan Bank’s collection, Cohan said. The New York dealer James Cohan, a nephew of Solway’s, fondly remembers a visit of the rolling gallery. But like many dealers of the time, before art fairs proliferated and the Internet was developed, Solway had to take his stock on the road to make enough sales to survive. The next year, after the breakup of his marriage with Forberg, Solway changed the name of the business to Carl Solway Gallery and participated in the first Art Basel fair in Switzerland. It was a foray into a wider art world, if a tentative one. They called the sets “plexigrams,” and titled the overall work Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel. These panels could be shuffled and changed for display in a custom stand. ![]() It took the form of eight constructions, each one comprising eight plexiglass panels, composed with the aid of coin tosses. All the really great art dealers of the past are those who fought for artists of their own generation.” In 1969 he published Cage’s first work of visual art, a complex multiple dedicated to his recently deceased mentor and friend Marcel Duchamp. The two struck up a friendship that would have a significant effect on them both.Īrthur Solway-himself a retired art dealer who worked for leading galleries in both New York and Shanghai-said in an interview that Cage “would come play chess with Carl on Saturdays, and he looked around one day and said, ‘You have a nice gallery here, but all the artists are dead.’ ”Īs Carl said later, “I decided to focus on the classical work of my own generation. ![]() In 1967 Cage came to the University of Cincinnati to teach music as a visiting composer, and was introduced to Solway. ![]() He placed a Kandinsky print portfolio in the collection of the Cincinnati Art Museum in 1965, Solway’s first sale of many to a public institution. At the time, the gallery focused on local artists and important prints. He married his high school sweetheart, Gail Fisher (now Forberg), and together they opened Flair Gallery in Cincinnati in 1962. Solway went to high school in Cincinnati before attending the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, graduating in 1956. Carl’s upbringing, his son Arthur said via email, was “merchant class, Jewish, and all that came with it in those days.” His father, a pharmacist named Arthur Maltz, died when Carl was just four years old, and his mother moved to Cincinnati for what his family called “an arranged marriage” to Harry Solway, who owned a furniture store. Lou Stovall, Printmaker to Stars Such as Jacob Lawrence and Sam Gilliam, Dies at 86Ĭarl Ellis Solway was born in Chicago on January 12, 1935.
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