Raphael Soyer (1899-1987) American, Signed and Numbered Lithograph. Depicts a female figure absently fingercombing her hair on a bed, with her back reflected in a mirror over her shoulder. Signed in the plate bottom right. Signed in pencil below that. Numbered 15/125 in pencil bottom left. Framing label on the back.
Condition: Excellent.
Overall Size: 20 x 17 1/4 x 1 in.
Sight Size: 11 1/2 x 9 in.
Raphael Zalman Soyer was born December 25th, 1899 in Borisoglebsk, Tambov, a southern province of Russia. He and his identical twin brother, Moses, were born with the last name Schoar, children of a Hebrew scholar, writer, and teacher. The family was forced to immigrate to the United States in 1912, settling in The Bronx, whereupon they adopted their Anglicized last name. Raphael pursued his art education at the free schools of the Cooper Union between 1914 and 1917, studying alongside his twin Moses. He continued his studies at the National Academy of Design from 1918 until 1922, then studied intermittently at the Art Students League of New York between 1920 and 1926, influenced by Guy Pene du Bois and Boardman Robinson to take up the gritty urban subjects of the Ashcan school. Soyer became associated with the Fourteenth Street School of painters that included Reginald Marsh, Isabel Bishop, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and Peggy Bacon. Soyer routinely focused on female nudes, portraits of friends and family, New York and, especially, its people in his paintings, drawings, watercolors, and prints. He also painted a vast number of self-portraits throughout his career, and was adamant in his belief in representational art, strongly opposing the dominant force of abstract art during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Soyer’s first solo exhibition took place in 1929, and beginning in the early 1930s he showed regularly in the large annual and biennial American exhibitions of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Carnegie Institute. Soyer’s teaching career began at the John Reed Club in 1930, and included stints at the Art Students League, the New School for Social Research, and the National Academy. In 1931 he married Rebecca Letz, with whom he had one daughter. During the Great Depression he and his twin brother engaged in Social Realism, demonstrating empathy with the struggles of the working class. In 1939 they worked together with the Works Project Administration, Federal Art Project (WPA-FAP) mural at the Kingsessing Station post office in Philadelphia. He also illustrated two books for Isaac Bashevis Singer, entitled A Little Boy in Search of God and Love and Exile, and wrote several books of his own about his life and art. In 1953 Soyer co-founded the magazine Reality: A Journal of Artists’ Opinions, published by figurative artists as a response to the prevailing influence of non-objective art. He was awarded the Founders Medal by the James Smithson Society and the Gold Medal by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, both in 1981. Soyer died from cancer in his home in New York City on November 4th, 1987. His work is on permanent display in many collections, including the Butler Institute of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Hirshhorn Museum, among others.
Excellent.
