1917 - Born in the small village of Belograd in Czarist Russia. His mother
told him that while giving birth she could hear the masses cheering the
unraveling events of the revolution… The family then moved to a small
village of Gonyonze in Lithuania, a village of mixed gentile/Jewish
population (referred to in Jewish jargon as "Shteitle"). His was a childhood
marked by rustic, farmland scenes of flowing rivers, woodland, wooden huts,
water delivered by water-drawers, geese and cows, farmers working their
fields, petty Jewish merchants in the village core and daily religious
Jewish activities and routines, all with no electric, sewage or water grids,
much as seen in the film "Moi Abraham, Toi—Ivan"…. In his elementary
public Polish school he had shown interest and talent in drawing and
painting and won school awards for it. In fact at one point, he used to muse
with those who knew him, he entered the same painting in the same
competition under several names and swept all 3 first prizes…
1929 – After being orphaned from both parents he moves in
with an aunt in Bjialistock. Soltz continued painting as a teenager, while
working in a bicycle repair shop.
1938 - Drafted to the Polish army in the eve of World War
II, and serves in the mounted engineering corps. Fights with his unit the
invading German army and displays courage under fire.
1939 - After the Polish surrender to the Germans and a
short detention as a Russian prisoner of war (and a daring escape), Soltz
managed to be one of the 2,000 or so Jewish refugees who succeeded in
receiving a Japanese transit Visa from the renegade Japanese consul to
Vilna, Mr. Sugihara, who did so against the explicit wishes and instructions
of his own government. Soltz then traveled, using at first the Japanese
Visa, for over 2 years, through Russia, Siberia, a sojourn in Kobe Japan,
then to Shanghai, Burma and India (in which he stayed for over a year)
arriving finally via the Suez canal at British mandate Palestine, carrying
with him, all along, some of his treasured, early day paintings, at times at
great risk to himself. Soltz wrote about his wartime adventures in his book
"850 days between borders & countries".
1942 – Arrives at Palestine by boat via the Suez Canal
and trans-Sinai train. In Palestine he works in weaving (a trade he picked
in India), as a heavy equipment and machinery operator and then, until
retirement, as a foreman in a large public-works company. In the company he
also served for a short period as head of his trade-union local. During his
short, volunteering tenure in this position (his successors did it for money
and other privileges…) he managed to gain the greatest ever improvement in
conditions from the employer for his peers.
While keeping his low-key position and job, the
soft-spoken Soltz supported his family modestly, but dedicated his entire
free time to painting. He did so in lengthy painting sessions stretching,
sometimes, late into the wee hours of the night; but also as a student of
some of Israel’s leading art teachers at the time. At first in Israel’s
famed Avni Art Institute under Avni himself, Kehana, and the internationally
acclaimed sculptor Kosso Eloul. He trained in sculpting also under the great
Rudolf ("Rudi") Lehman, in painting under leading abstract artist Moses
Props. Lehman, in fact, considered Soltz’s sculpting work amongst the best
he had seen. With time Soltz became a teaching assistant to both Props and
Lehman. Later, before proceeding to experiment in such techniques on his
own, he studied printing techniques under leading Israeli print masters
Tuvia Be’eri and Alima.
While keeping low public profile and shying away from
bohemian life style characteristic of his peers and the period, and staying
out of the various clicks and schools of thought of local artists, Soltz
still managed to receive great reviews for his works whenever on display in
several group and solo exhibitions.
After years of painting in the kitchen of his small,
crammed apartment, Soltz proceeded later to print his silk-screens in his
tiny, second floor artist studio in the artist colony of old Jaffa. There he
also explored other print techniques on a press that he built by himself.
Among works of Soltz that are on public display one may
count his silk-screens that are on display in museums and are in collections
in the United States and Israel. A very large painted cast-aluminum mural,
"The evolution of the word" in the Lobby of one of Bar-Ilan University’s
main buildings, cast aluminum relief plates "The Creation" hang in the
entrance of a large religious seminary ("Yeshiva") in Israel, and a cast
aluminum sculpture "The Burning Bush" is affixed to the façade of
Jerusalem’s "Grand Synagogue".
Soltz was a man of little speech and, indeed, of little
speech skills perhaps, but of much creativity, curiosity and innovative
spirit. While known for his lack of articulate explanation, he was
pre-occupied as intimated by him to those who knew him, with the exploration
of techniques and materials, and their impact on the arts created in and
through them. While excellent in figurative painting he quickly moved to
abstract explorations. He introduced various materials that he researched by
himself and used by few or no others at all into his artwork: plaster of
Paris treated with various experimental polymers and pigments, applied 3
dimensionally to jute canvases, complete, at times, with wires, springs,
gears and other "objéts trouvés" he came across in his work in the heavy
equipment yard. Similarly, in sculpting, Soltz explored the interplay of
various layers of rendition of the art object: he tended to mask the medium
by applying paint to it. Thus, he carved in wood and cast in bronze and
aluminum his mainly abstract works, but then proceeded to paint them, hiding
their true material nature underneath. His most common exclamation regarding
the nature of his work was that it was but an exploration of compositions:
composition of shapes, composition and balance of colors, composition, or,
interplay of materials, and, finally, the interaction, or "composition" of
all of those with each other.
When Soltz, as a wartime refugee, passed in 1939 in the
Kremlin, his only note in the notebook he always carried on him —and the
only thing that mattered to him in this visit-- was on the large size
pictures on the Kremlin’s walls. Similarly some of his very last comments,
quite literally on his deathbed, were on artistic matters as well,
commenting at a moment of lucidity that "…the color [of the TV studio
background-] is the same as that [dominant] color" of one of his painting
that happened to hang next to his TV set…
While not revolutionary in the deepest sense, Soltz’s
works are most unique, original and revolutionary in their exploration of
the abstract and the mediums in which it may be expressed. Being a man of
very few words, little theorization and much hands-on explorations, one
might best characterize Soltz’s work as "Naïve Abstractism".