 RAPHAEL
SOYER (1899-1987)
Raphael Soyer was born in Russia in 1899,
came to the United States in 1912, and studied art at Cooper
Union, the National Academy of Design, and with Guy Pene du Bois
at the Art Students League. He was the founder, along with such
other realist artists as Edward Hopper, Ben Shahn, and Yasuo
Kuniyoshi, of 'Reality', an influential art magazine of the 1950's.
He has exhibited his works professionally in galleries since
1929. His works have been collected by the Boston Museum of Fine
Arts; the Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo; the Museum of Modern
Art, New York; the Detroit Institute of Art; and the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York; and his works can be found in hundreds
of private collections throughout the world. He has enjoyed over
three hundred one-man shows and two major museum retrospectives.
Soyer began to draw at an early age. It
wasn't until he witnessed his father being sketched by a noted
town artist that he decided to pursue a career as an artist.
"That one could draw a living person was a sudden revelation
to me," he remembers. "I stopped drawing for several
days, then asked my father to pose for me. When the drawing was
praised, my elation was boundless. From then on I became a confirmed
realist."
Later in his career Soyer deliberately
discarded traditional perspective and detailed delineation for
simple, flat patterns and minimum detail; then he would begin
again with acutely observed portraits. This technical virtuosity
characterized his work and charged it with subtle understatement,
tenderness of subject, and sentiment, qualities that have allowed
him to explore life among New York's poor without resorting to
picturesqueness or satire. Soyer paints from nature, not imagination.
Like his favorites, Thomas Eakins and Edward Hopper, Soyer's
sense of humanistic passion makes his work special. His isolated
and introspective portraits are universally admired and treasured.
|
