In 1929, Solman saw the inaugural show at the Museum of Modern Art featuring Seurat, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Cézanne.
Joseph Solman was, with Mark Rothko, the unofficial co-leader of The Ten, a group of expressionist painters[citation needed] including Louis Schanker, Adolph Gottlieb and Ilya Bolotowsky, who exhibited as the "Whitney Dissenters" at the Mercury Galleries in New York City in 1938.
"I have long discovered for myself," Solman has said, "that what we call the subject yields more pattern, more poetry, more drama, greater abstract design and tension than any shapes we may invent.
"[1] In writing about a purchase of a typical 1930s Solman street scene for the Wichita Museum, director Howard Wooden put it this way: "Solman has produced the equivalent of an abstract expressionist painting a full decade before the abstract expressionist movement came to dominate the American art scene, but without abandoning identifiable forms."
"[1] In 1985, on the occasion of a 50-year retrospective, The Washington Post wrote: "It appears to have dawned, at last, on many collectors that this is art that has already stood the acid test of time.