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JOSEPH SOLMAN A Tough Race.
Gouache, crayon and watercolor on newsprint, 1965. 387x260 mm; 15 1/4x10 1/4 inches. Mounted on card stock. Signed in black crayon, lower right recto.
Painted on a Morning Telegraph racing form, A Tough Race depicts a gentleman reading the local horse race results.
According to the artist's son, Paul, before Joseph Solman became a professor of painting at City University, he spent roughly 20 years working as a clerk at the Belmont, Aqueduct and Jamaica raceways. From 1945 until around 1963, Solman spent his long commute making pencil studies of fellow straphangers, to which he added gouache at his studio. He considered the subway the best place to create figure studies, as his life subjects would effortlessly hold an unwitting pose for time on end.
