Raphael Soyer
1889-1987

Raphael Soyer and his twin Moses were born in the southern Russian city of Borisoglebsk, Russia in 1899.  The Soyer family was forced to immigrate to the United States in 1913, due to Soyer Pere’s progressive politics and the anti-Semitism of the Russian Tsar’s regime.  The family settled in Manhattan’s Lower East Side and by 1915 Soyer was attending art classes at the Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design; later he studied at the Art Students League.  Soyer’s immediate surroundings provided him with great inspiration and subject matter from the beginning of his career; like members of the so-called Ashcan School, he strove to capture the bustle of the immigrant neighborhood and its attendant poverty.

In the late 1920s, while studying at the Art Students League, Soyer’s teacher Guy Pène du Bois introduced him to Charles Daniel, who gave Soyer his first solo exhibition in 1929.  By the early 1930s he was an established artist, often referred to as a member of the Social Realist movement.  But unlike other Social Realist artists, Soyer’s politics were subtler; his interest’s lay more with the realistic evocation of his subjects’ world rather than with the expression of a political ideology.