At the age of twenty, Saul Bolasni, having had less than a year at the Cleveland Institute of Art, packed a roll of drawings and bought a bus ticket to New York. His immediate goal was to become a designer for Radio City Music Hall. That plan did not come to fruition, but Saul did very soon find work as an illustrator for magazines, especially for The New Yorker.
Saul also began to study dance after arriving in the city and landed jobs as a dancer in shows on Broadway while continuing to work as a free lance illustrator. In addition to The New Yorker , his illustrations appeared in Town and Country , Vogue , and Harpers . In 1942 Saul’s drawing of a Victorian dowager decorating an egg graced the cover of the Easter issue of The New Yorker .
A portrait of Lotte Lenya by Bolasni is in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington; theater designs in the Museum of The City New York; and costume illustrations in the archive of the Fashion Institue of Technology.
Today, the young man who came to New York from Ohio is still enjoying life in the big city.
– Rob Hugh Rosen