Moses Soyer (1899-1974) American, Ballet Dancer Lithograph. Signed in the plate bottom right. Label on back with information about the artist, title, and authentication of the piece. 

Overall Size: 18 1/4 x 15 1/4 in. 

Sight Size: 12 1/2 x 9 3/4 in. 

#4742 

Moses Soyer was born on December 25th, 1899 in Borisoglebsk, Tambov, a southern province of Russia. He and his identical twin brother, Raphael, were born with the last name Schoar, children of a Hebrew scholar, writer, and teacher. Although they were an intellectual and artistic family with good connections in the area, they faced the pogroms with the rest of the Jewish population, and were forced to immigrate to the United States in 1912, whereupon they adopted their Anglicized last name. They settled in the Bronx, where Moses continued to be exposed to art as well as changing political and social philosophies. Soyer married Ida Chassner, a dancer, in 1922, and together they had one son, David. Soyer studied art in New York with Raphael, first at Cooper Union and then at the National Academy of Design. He diverged from his twin and attended Educational Alliance, then studied at the Ferrer Art School under the Ashcan painters Robert Henri and George Bellows. He had his first solo exhibition in 1926 and began teaching art the following year at the Contemporary Art School and The New School. During the Great Depression Moses and his brother Raphael both gravitated to Social Realism, demonstrating empathy with the struggles of the working class. In 1939, the twins worked together with the Works Project Administration, Federal Art Project (WPA-FAP) mural at the Kingsessing Station post office in Philadelphia. Soyer also wrote a weekly column for a Yiddish newspaper called “In the World of Art.” Soyer died in the Chelsea Hotel in New York on September 2th, 1974, while painting dancer and choreographer Phoebe Neville. His works can be found around the country in the Brooklyn Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and many more galleries and institutions.