When the history of galleries in postwar New York is written, there will most likely be a chapter devoted to Holly Solomon (1934-2002), the petite and feisty blonde who was a vivid art-world presence for nearly 40 years. In the meantime, her gallery is being revisited in “Hooray for Hollywood!,” a big, sumptuous exhibition spread between adjacent Chelsea galleries, Mixed Greens and Pavel Zoubok. The show has the added advantage of offering a relatively wide-angle view of the 1970s and the ’80s, a period that recent curatorial habit — most prominently at the Museum of Modern Art — has reduced to a depressingly thin gruel of Post-Minimalism, Conceptual art and appropriation art.
Starting in the early 1960s, Ms. Solomon went from self-anointed “Pop princess” to plugged-in collector and patron and finally to art dealer. With her husband, Horace, she opened the Holly Solomon Gallery on West Broadway in SoHo in 1975, exhibiting an eclectic mix of Post-Minimalists and younger sorts with ideas of their own. Most prominent was the irreverent upstart art movement Pattern and Decoration and related tendencies that broke with the more austere aspects of Post-Minimalism and Conceptualism.
“P and D,” as it was sometimes called, included, among others, Kim MacConnel, Robert Kushner, Robert Zakanitch, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Brad Davis, Valerie Jaudon and Ned Smyth. Their often riotously patterned, unstretched paintings, sometimes functional sculpture and various environments promoted the notion — fairly shocking in the early 1970s — that art should be pleasurable, witty, visually sophisticated and maybe even usable.
But Ms. Solomon’s taste cut a broad, eclectic swath. Some of the shocks I remember from her gallery include not only the singing color and loose patterns of Mr. MacConnel’s paintings operating in the gap between Matisse and Hawaiian shirts but also the bright process-oriented abstract paintings of Mary Heilmann; chunks of buildings repurposed as sculpture by Gordon Matta-Clark; and the immersive installations of Judy Pfaff. Ms. Solomon also unsettled things with the first New York exhibition by the influential German painter Sigmar Polke in 1982.
