Moses Soyer
American, 1899 - 1974
Moses Soyer, his twin brother, Raphael Soyer, and younger brother, Isaac Soyer, were among the direct esthetic heirs of Robert Henri, George Bellows, John Sloan and their colleagues who portrayed in a realistic manner the growing urbanization of American society. The Soyers, born in Russia, immigrated to the United States in 1912. Moses came of age artistically around the time of the Great Depression and much of his earlier work was influenced by this cataclysmic event. While he was still very young, Moses discovered his primary subject: the human figure. Today Moses is recognized, in the words of one museum director, as “unquestionably, one of the important figurative painters of the 20th century.” Most of the people he painted and drew came from the artistic world of 1930s to 1970s New York. His models were the people he found around him: dancers who were colleagues of his dancer wife, the seamstresses who made their costumes, other artists, writers, and actors. It was a rich and interesting scene which he observed and put down on canvas and paper. In order to paint the human figure, Moses knew he first had to learn to draw, and drawing became for him an important discipline which he practiced diligently throughout his life. He worked in charcoal, conté crayon, pencil, pen & ink, watercolor and pastel. According to his son, David, “Moses sketched everywhere he went.” The richly expressive drawings he left for posterity are a vivid record, depicted with great skill and sensitivity, of his particular world. His teachers were not only those Realist artists who came immediately before him, but also earlier master, especially Rembrandt, Courbet, Daumier and Degas – artists whose visions were intimate and personal. Moses Soyer studied at the Cooper Union, National Academy of Design, Ferrer Art School, and at the Educational Alliance School of Art, where he later taught. He was one of the Works Progress Administration-Federal Arts Project artists, commissioned to do a series of murals dealing with child life. In 1963 he was elected to the National Academy of Design, and in 1966 to the National Institute of Arts & Letters. His awards include: Childe Hassam Fund of the American Academy of Arts & Letters Thomas B. Clarke Award, 1964 Henry W. Ranger Purchase Prize, 1965 Salmagundi Club Award, 1964 Frank C. Kirk Memorial Award, 1966 Award of Merit, Audubon Artists, 1966 Samuel Finley Breese Morse Medal, 1967 His work is found in many important private and museum collections, including: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Museum of Modern Art, New York Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Detroit Institute of Art, Michigan Newark Museum, New Jersey Montclair Museum, New Jersey Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C. Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C. National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. City Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut Springfield Museum of Art, Ohio Museum of Arts & Science, Daytona Beach, Florida (partial listing) Most of the works by Moses Soyer in the inventory of Fletcher/Copenhaver Fine Art have come directly from the estate of the artist, and have been carefully chosen after years of study and close collaboration with the artist’s son, David Soyer. Fletcher/Copenhaver Fine Art has curated several exhibitions devoted to the work of Moses Soyer. The first was Moses Soyer: The Message is People in 1996 at the Karshan Center of Graphic Art at the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Daytona Beach, Florida. In 2002, Fletcher/Copenhaver curated the exhibition Moses Soyer, Drawings and Watercolors: From Social Realism to Romantic Realism at the Ridderhoff-Martin Gallery of the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
