Holly Solomon, the Glamorous Collector Who Became an Influential Dealer

Portrait of American art dealer Holly Solomon in her Soho gallery, 1982. Photo by Michel Delsol/Getty Images.

When Conceptual

 artist Gordon Matta-Clark

 was looking for a house to cut up with power tools, he knew exactly who to turn to for help.

“He called me one day [in the early 1970s] and said, ‘Holly, I need a house,’” gallerist Holly Solomon recalled decades later in an interview. “And I, like a nice housewife, called [my husband] Horace and said, ‘Gordon needs a house.’” It took a week, but Horace found a two-story clapboard residence slated for demolition in Englewood, New Jersey. It was just what the young artist had in mind.

“Gordon took the house and cut it in half,” Solomon said. “Literally, with a hacksaw, cut the house in half. He was a master architect, so when he cut a house in half, it stood.”

The Holly Solomon Collection

Field trip to Gordon Matta-Clark's "Splitting" house, circa 1974