The House of David

Maybe a picture is worth a thousand words, but at the Studio of Ben Solowey in Bedminster, in Upper Bucks County, the exchange rate is rather more generous. When you ask David Leopold about one of his late great-uncle’s paintings or drawings or sculptures, settle in.

 

You’ll get the basics—title, date, size, medium—as well as provenance and price, as you might expect from a curator and archivist. Leopold, not incidentally, is both. He’ll tell you the frame may have been made by the artist. Solowey’s craftsmanship, after all, is part of the history of the studio and farmhouse he restored, and Leopold is something of a historian as well.

 

The thousands of bonus words spill out in stories, because Leopold is also a talker, a charmer, and a raconteur nonpareil. His great-uncle’s story alone is enthralling: the immigrant, the prodigy, the chronicler of Broadway, and the uncompromising artist madly in love with Rae, his wife and muse.

 

Bearded and ponytailed, Leopold is also a bit of a showman, which brings us to the other deceased artist whose presence hovers over the Bedminster property: Al Hirschfeld, the renowned Broadway caricaturist whose work on a recent visit filled the gallery walls adjacent to Solowey’s main studio. Leopold has been Hirschfeld’s archivist since contacting him not long out of college some thirty-five years ago. Officially, Leopold is the creative director of the Al Hirschfeld Foundation, a nonprofit that supports theaters and the dramatic arts and lends works to museums. Last fall Leopold held an exhibition of Hirschfeld’s work at the Solowey studio, timed with the release of Hirschfeld’s Sondheim (Abrams ComicArts), one of the dozen or so books and exhibition catalogs he’s authored or edited. Because he’s an author and editor, too.

 

Leopold’s showman side flourishes in the talks about Hirschfeld he gives around the country, free-range riffing packed with anecdote and illustration, while a large screen displays the distinctive swooping-line caricatures that Hirschfeld drew over seventy-seven of his ninety-nine years, working until two days before his death in 2003. One such talk took place at Bucks County Playhouse, in New Hope, in September 2022, where Leopold took to the stage to narrate a program he called “Hirschfeld’s Broadway,” a benefit that raised $13,000 for the playhouse.

 

Leopold is also a Deadhead. More about that later.

 

Outside the double-height, north-facing windows of Ben Solowey’s barn-turned-studio, the view of the fields today is virtually identical to what it looked like when Ben and Rae bought the thirty-four acres and the 1765 house in 1936. After years of back-and-forth to and from New York City, the Soloweys moved to the farm for good in 1942. Seven years later, they installed electricity and running water.

 

Leopold keeps the walls of the studio filled with Solowey’s work, a rotating array of landscapes, interiors, portraits, self-portraits, still lifes, charcoal sketches, oils, watercolors, ink drawings, sculptures, etchings. And everywhere, Rae: seated, standing, reclined; clothed and nude; young and old.

 

If you’ve ever been to the Michener Art Museum, in Doylestown, you’ve probably seen Rae. That’s her in a four-foot-high oil from 1935, Rae Seated (Green Dress), a stunner that has hung there prominently for more than three decades. Before she died in 1990, Rae had asked her great-nephew to preserve the studio for future generations to enjoy.

 

Ben Solowey is firmly established within the Bucks County pantheon of acclaimed painters. “An artist’s artist,” Leopold says. “Ben Solowey never spent any time cultivating collectors. He never had an agent, never had a dealer, never had a gallery. Not that people didn’t want to represent him and sell his work. That wasn’t what he was doing it for.” Today, Solowey’s works are part of the permanent collections at the Michener Art Museum, the Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia, and The New York Public Library.

 

Born in Warsaw in 1900, Solowey with his family immigrated to America—to Philadelphia, by way of St. Petersburg, Russia—when he was 14 years old. He was a natural from childhood, trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, in Philadelphia. No less an authority than Edward Redfield judged the work of 19-year-old Ben Solowey worthy of a three-year scholarship. Daniel Garber, another leading figure in the vaunted New Hope Colony of artists, was one of his instructors. After completing his studies at the Academy in 1923, Solowey joined the crew of the ocean liner SS Leviathan to sail to Europe and soak it all up, copying the masters at the Louvre and studying the modernists elsewhere. Paul Cézanne and Édouard Manet were favorites.

 

Back in Philadelphia, a practical streak led Solowey to take commissions for decorative paintings before he headed to New York in 1928. For the next thirteen years, he drew charcoal portraits of Broadway, opera, and ballet stars, primarily for the New York Times and Herald Tribune—a lucrative gig during the Depression, especially when his subjects would buy the original.

 

When he wangled an appointment with theater’s grande dame, Ethel Barrymore, she kept him waiting for two hours in a sitting room. On one wall hung a charcoal portrait of her. The artist was John Singer Sargent. “He got nervous,” Leopold says. Solowey was granted forty-five minutes with Barrymore. It was his first portrait drawn from life, and his subject loved the result so much that she autographed it. Katharine Hepburn said she would sit for him if he came to her apartment on East Forty-Ninth Street. She offered him a drink and a banana. Solowey drew Hepburn many times over the decades, and she collected several drawings for her home.

 

Leopold tells these stories with verve and detail. Noel Coward, Laurence Olivier, Spencer Tracy, Helen Hayes, Lillian Gish—Solowey did about 900 portraits, all from life, not photographs.

 

Solowey’s serious works—landscapes, still lifes, and figurative paintings—were shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Soloweys’ New York friends included Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Arshile Gorky.

 

Heady times indeed. But the city and its celebrities held little sway on the artist, who preferred more pastoral landscapes. “Ben believed that you were a product of your surroundings,” Leopold says. “And if you’re surrounded by beautiful things, you’re going to have a beautiful life.” That beauty included Rae Landis. She’d grown up in Harrisburg, and they’d met through a mutual friend in New York. He proposed on their first date. Two months later, in the late spring of 1930, they were married.

 

David Leopold is 60 years old, which means he’s spent more than half his life at the Bedminster farm. He moved there in 1988 and was joined seven years later by his wife, Laura Rathgeb, a speech-language pathologist, and seven years after that by their son, Henry, who’s now 24. When he was a child, Leopold’s family would take day trips to the farm (Rae was the sister of Leopold’s maternal grandmother), “running around outside, and we loved it.” They ventured into Solowey’s studio timidly and only under supervision.

 

Leopold grew up in Susquehanna Township, near Harrisburg, with a twin brother, John, an older brother, Matthew, an older sister, Ann (who died in 2013), and a younger sister, Debbie. Their father worked in the Pennsylvania State Capitol as an advisor to the Senate Appropriations Committee. Their mother was an administrator at a state mental institution. In their home hung a few Solowey originals. Although Leopold enjoyed a carefree childhood in a nurturing home, he found life in Susquehanna, well, dull. “Nothing ever happened,” he says.

 

Adventure soon arrived. In 1982, when they were 16, the twins were at a high school party where they met a guy—the older brother of the party’s teenage hostess—who loved the Grateful Dead. As they left, he told them that summer he’d be heading to Red Rocks, the amphitheater carved out of a Rocky Mountain hillside overlooking Denver, to see the Grateful Dead in concert. He invited the brothers to join him. “We couldn’t believe it,” Leopold says.

 

Also unbelievable: Their parents agreed.

 

Over the next fourteen years, the brothers Leopold would see about 300 Dead shows, joining the merry band of Deadheads who followed the band from city to city. “The Grateful Dead is really the thing that changed my life,” David says. “We were not staying in Harrisburg the rest of our lives.”

 

At the University of Pittsburgh, Leopold developed a love for theater, inspired by a professor and newspaper critic, Chris Rawson, as well as the fifteen-to-one ratio of women to men (him) in a theater class. He invented a major: theater history and administration, graduated, and kept following the Dead. He figured maybe someday he’d be running a small theater in the San Francisco Bay Area.

 

In the fall of 1987, Leopold was visiting his brother Matt in Doylestown when he and a friend dropped by the farm to see Rae. Leopold had corresponded with her during college. “I was studying the theater that she’d been a part of,” he says. “She sent me a story about Eugene O’Neill from personal experience. That’s when I realized we had something in common.”

 

Solowey had died in 1978. Nine years later, Leopold started helping his aunt around the home, sleeping on a pull-out couch in the studio. There would be leisurely nights at the dining table with Rae and her sister, “passing the tea kettle around until midnight, telling stories,” Leopold says. “They had great stories and wanted to hear mine.” Using some of his nascent skills, he staged an exhibition of Solowey’s work just for them, complete with a program. “They really, really loved it,” Leopold says. “Rae asked me to take over the farm when she was gone. And I said no. I was young. You know, this was the end of the world. It had none of the things that I was looking for.” A year later, he relented. “How am I going to let these people down? I had a great deal of respect for them. I said I can try.”

 

Rae died of cancer in 1990, at 83, at home, as she wished. “She had lived a full life,” Leoplold says, “and she missed Ben.”

 

Leopold had just started a new part-time gig, on East Ninety-Fifth Street in Manhattan, organizing and archiving the work of Hirschfeld, who’d been working prolifically for seventy years. “I was 24 and thought it maybe would last a year or two,” he says.

 

In the late 1980s, as he was cataloguing Solowey’s theater portraits in newspapers, Leopold kept coming across Hirschfeld’s drawings as well. As there weren’t many people who could tell him about the world of drawing for newspapers in the 1930s, Leopold thought to seek out Hirschfeld himself. “So I looked him up in the phone book,” he says, chuckling.

 

He wrote a letter instead and was astonished to get a reply. “It was the warmest letter I’ve ever received from somebody who wasn’t a family member,” he says. They met and had a wonderful conversation. “I soon learned that Al Hirschfeld hit it off with everybody,” he says, “because he was just that kind of guy.”

 

Leopold was hired part-time to start organizing decades of Hirschfeld’s work at his East Side townhouse. “It was like going into King Tut’s tomb,” he says. “Unimaginable riches everywhere you look. Drawings, prints, magazines, newspapers, books, record covers, all this stuff.” He’d write down information on index cards, then take the bus back to Bucks County and enter it all on his Apple II computer. “I was really young and dumb,” he says, “and all of a sudden I’m in Al Hirschfeld’s home and he’s treating me like a peer.”

 

The job ramped up to nearly full-time. When someone would ask Hirschfeld about past work, the artist would joke, “You’ll have to talk to my archivist, because he’s put everything in order and now I can’t find anything.” (With better organization, Leopold notes, licensing income grew tenfold.) Hirschfeld was a joy to be around, chatting about art and theater during lunch breaks. Even when working, Hirschfeld would take questions from his archivist. “He’d look up,” Leopold says, “then look back down at the drawing, continue drawing, and answer the question.”

 

During that time, Leopold had reconnected with Laura, a girlfriend from college who was acting and directing in New York. Life was sweet: “I’m getting paid to go through Al Hirschfeld history. I am living here,” he says, gesturing to Ben Solowey’s studio and farm. “I’m dating a beautiful actress. I’m like, This is it!”

 

Of course, there would be more. Over the years, Leopold would write books about Hirschfeld, including the acclaimed The Hirschfeld Century: Portrait of an Artist and His Age. He’d present stage exhibitions, notably “The Line King’s Library,” in 2013, at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. In 2023, at the same library, he presented an exhibition of works by both Solowey and Hirschfeld.

 

“I thought I was going to be doing something with theater, and art was my predilection,” he says. “I found myself actually doing art, and theater was sort of my side gig.”

 

D avid Leopold is a busy man, always with several projects in the works, crisscrossing the country with his Hirschfeld shows, sometimes tailored to a locale. He presented “Hirschfeld’s Philadelphia Story” at the Fitler Club in Philly—telling stories about Hepburn, the play, the movie, and Hirschfeld’s own history with the city of Philadelphia. He’s curated shows at the Michener—his specialty is twentieth-century American art—and written or edited books on Irving Berlin, Bucks County artists Charles Ward and Robert Beck, and the political cartoonists David Levine and Tony Auth.

 

But Solowey and Hirschfeld dominate, including six books or catalogs on Hirschfeld, with Hirschfeld’s Icons scheduled to drop on April 28. Each year he mounts at least two themed shows of Solowey’s work at the studio.

 

“He’s a bit of an artist whisperer,” says Harry Katz, an author and former curator of prints and photos at the Library of Congress who has worked with Leopold on several projects. Knowing artists and their archives, Katz says, brings “a broader viewpoint that places the artists and the works in the right context.”

 

“He’s an editor’s dream,” says Charles Kochman, editor-in-chief of Abrams ComicArts, which published the innovative Hirschfeld’s Sondheim and this spring’s Hirschfeld’s Icons, each filled with stories and full-page caricatures that can be detached for framing. “He knows his subject intimately. He’s a beautiful writer. He’s funny, he’s knowledgeable and—this sounds odd—but he’s kind, which we shouldn’t take for granted these days.”

 

When Jerry Garcia died in 1995, Leopold asked Hirschfeld to draw him. “I now realize he was kind of doing it for me,” Leopold says, “because he knew I was into it.” He was not alone. The Garcia illustration became Hirschfeld’s fastest-selling work. In less than a week, Leopold says, 250 prints were sold, a mark not matched before or since.

 

Leopold has come to think of Hirschfeld and Garcia as kindred spirits. “They liked to have a good time,” he says. “They could articulate what they were about, and they did what they did not because you liked it or I liked it. It’s because that’s what they did.”

 

Leopold likens his “so-called career” to a Grateful Dead tour—“different show every night, and you didn’t know what was going to happen until it happened,” he says. “And that, to me, seemed like a paradigm—the improvised life.”

 

“Serendipity has been very good to me,” he says. “I was just like, ‘Okay, we’ll be open to what happens next, and maybe something interesting will happen. And so far, that’s been the case.”

 

Bill Stieg, a former editor and writer at Men’s Health, is a regular contributor to River Towns. He wrote about Reginald Browne, a member of America 250, the national commission charged with overseeing the nation’s 250^th anniversary celebration, for the Winter issue.

A few years ago, when my wife and I pulled onto the long lane off Olde Bedminster Road, Jennifer almost gasped. Memories flowed—this was where her mother had brought her, half a century earlier, to sit for an oil portrait painted by Mr. Ben Solowey, which took several days. “It’s the same,” Jen said quietly. She pointed to the farmhouse, then nodded at a converted barn: “And that’s the studio.”

 

David Leopold greeted us at the door, smiling. “I’ve been looking for your family!” he said.

 

Leopold explained that sometime in the late 1980s, early in the process of archiving his great-uncle’s works and papers, he’d found records of a series of portraits of five children of the Lin family. “Who are these people?” he had asked Solowey’s widow, his great-aunt Rae, who told him about the Lin family and all the children who had been painted or sculpted. But Rae only had an old address, and Leopold resigned himself to the notion that he might never find those now-grown children. More than three decades later, a mutual friend offered to make an introduction to Jen. Needless to say, Leopold was thrilled.

 

Anticipating our visit, Leopold had pulled out an unframed portrait of my wife that Solowey had painted when Jen was 12 years old. “That’s me!” she exclaimed. Solowey wasn’t satisfied with it. He had her sit again. This time the result met his standards. That first painting remains in the collection at Solowey’s studio. His second try—Jen in a ballet costume, looking pensive, not at all bored—hangs in our home.

 

The next show at The Studio of Ben Solowey—“The Pastels of Ben Solowey”—opens May 30, with a reception, and runs through June 14. The studio will be open from 1 to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Sundays. Gallery talks are at 2:30 p.m. each day. For more information: www.solowey.com.