Raphael Soyer

At Independent 20th Century at The Breuer, Forum Gallery presents an exceptional selection of important paintings by American social realist painter
Raphael Soyer (1899-1987).

Forum Gallery has represented the Artist and his estate since its founding in 1961, and proudly facilitated a major retrospective honoring Raphael Soyer, organized and first presented by the Whitney Museum of American Art at The Breuer Building in 1967. The exhibition traveled to six museums across the country. Important one-person solo exhibitions for Raphael Soyer were later presented in Washington, D.C. by The National Collection of Fine Arts in 1977, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 1982.

Raphael Soyer immigrated to the United States in 1912 at the age of 12. His family settled on New York’s Lower East Side, and Raphael Soyer went on to become a central figure of the Fourteenth Street School and a beloved American artist whose contribution is a vital and irreplaceable component of American figurative art in the 20th Century.

Reception for "Raphael Soyer" Whitney Museum retrospective, the Breuer building, 1967, courtesy of the Smithsonian Archive

“My art is representational by choice. In my opinion, if the art of painting is to survive, it must describe and express people, their lives and times. It must communicate…I consider myself a modern artist or rather an artist of today…because I am influenced by the thoughts, the life and the aesthetics of our time. I am also an inheritor of many great painters who proceeded me and made tradition living, on-going and ever renewable like nature itself, by finding dynamic, contemporary and personal ways to depict and interpret their life and their time.” _Raphael Soyer

Raphael Soyer - at Independent 20th Century 2026 - Viewing Room - Forum Gallery Online Viewing Room

Raphael and Rebecca Soyer with Lloyd Goodrich at the Whitney Museum, The Breuer Building, c.1969

Lloyd Goodrich, the Whitney Museum’s Director, wrote the catalogue for the 1967 Raphael Soyer retrospective and included this quote from Soyer, noting, “This philosophy has guided Soyer’s art for over forty years.” In fact, Soyer remained committed to this philosophy for the rest of his life. The catalogue was expanded and published in 1972 by Harry N. Abrams as a monograph.

Humanity was Raphael Soyer’s subject, and the language by which he chose to express it was his own unique, painterly realism. From within the epicenter of the heated debates about what art is and is not, and how art should and should not look that took place in New York throughout the 20th Century, Raphael Soyer became famous for his unwavering commitment to humanist representation, leading him to be dubbed the “Dean of Realists” by John Canaday writing for The New York Times in 1972.

Soyer’s dedication to the simple and direct depiction of a person placed the emphasis on character, humanity, and individuality. The results are paintings that probe and explore the depths, feelings and complexities of each subject, each genuine person. Perhaps Soyer’s greatest gift was the ability to capture the emotion and personality of normal people, and this he did. Along the way, Raphael Soyer captured the spirit of a century of challenge and change through the image of its living inhabitants.

Under the Bridge, 1932

Raphael Soyer was born on Christmas Day in 1899 in Borisoglebsk, Russia. In 1912, at the impressionable age of twelve, Raphael Soyer left Russia with his family, traveling to the United States to settle in Manhattan. Raphael and his twin brother, Moses, enrolled in drawing lessons at Cooper Union in 1914. Four years later, Raphael enrolled in the National Academy of Design and later, studied with Guy Pène du Bois at the Art Students League. Pène du Bois encouraged him to be himself and paint what he knew, his family and his environment. Raphael Soyer took this to heart, rejecting the strict academic style of the time for a more personal pictorial language, rooted in the people and locations of New York, the city Soyer once described as “my country.”

In the Studio, 1943

With the endorsement of Pène du Bois, Soyer brought his paintings to the celebrated Daniel Gallery and soon had his first solo exhibition there in 1929, the year of the stock market crash. Incredibly, some sales were made, and the exhibition was reviewed favorably. During this year, Soyer made the commitment to give up his day job, rent a studio in Lower Manhattan, and paint full-time.

Soyer took a studio at 240 West Fourteenth Street, a building that became a hub of social realist painting in the 1930s when a group of artists loosely affiliated with the Art Students League began renting studios there. Stepping off from the work of the Ashcan School painters, the artists known as the Fourteenth Street School combined an interest in social realism and modern urban subjects with their expansive knowledge of Renaissance painting. Raphael Soyer emerged as a central voice in the informal group, which included Kenneth Hayes Miller, Reginald Marsh, Isabel Bishop, and Moses Soyer.

Love Story (Sentimental Girl), 1933

Raphael Soyer’s work of the 1930s focused on the immediate surroundings of his Fourteenth Street address, a center of shopping and entertainment for average and working-class New Yorkers. As the suffering economy of the Great Depression began to impact people’s lives, Soyer’s response was to paint the workers (employed and unemployed), the shop girls, dancers, tailors, and entertainers of Union Square. Those he came to know soon became recurring models for Soyer in empathetic paintings depicting the lives of the working class with great dignity. These included Under the Bridge, c. 1932, Cafeteria, 1933, and Back Stage, 1935. As he made these populated, genre paintings, Soyer painted intimate portraits and self-portraits reflective of his sensitivity to the personal experiences of his subjects. He often combined narrative elements with portraiture to great effect, as seen in the striking Love Story (Sentimental Girl), 1933.

Train Station (Soldier's Farewell), 1943

When the United States joined World War II, Soyer spent days at New York’s Pennsylvania Station observing emotional scenes of soldiers saying goodbye to wives, sweethearts, and mothers. Soyer made very few paintings on the subject of World War II, a testament to the apolitical nature of his art. Soyer instead preferred subjects describing the human experience, with none more heart-wrenching than Train Station (Soldier's Farewell), painted in 1943. In Waiting at the Station, Soyer combines the subject of wartime farewells with the theme of people sitting and waiting, a subject that fascinated him: the variety of human beings, and their weariness, impatience or resignation. The astute observer will discover another element that Soyer enjoyed – his own cameo appearance identified by his diminutive stature, hat, and glasses, staring directly at the viewer from the center of the crowd in the cinematic scene.

Imaginary Wall in My Studio, 1945

Soyer was known to say that he couldn’t paint a person he didn’t know and consequently, over the years he featured his friends and family in many paintings and drawings. Leonard Baskin, Edward Hopper, Lloyd Goodrich, Reginald Marsh, Jack Levine, John Koch, Edwin Dickinson, Henry Vernum Poor, John Dobbs, Soyer’s daughter Mary, and brother Moses, all posed for Soyer for a poignant group portrait completed in 1965 titled Homage to Thomas Eakins. The painting resides in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, D.C.

An earlier painting from 1945 conjured from within the walls of Soyer’s own studio, Imaginary Wall in My Studio, depicts personal photographs of Raphael and Moses Soyer, Chaim Gross, David Burliuk, and Nikolai Cikovsky pinned to a notice board along with a postcard of the 1945 Yalta conference attended by Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin; a drawing Raphael's daughter Mary made of her pet cat, and a drawing of an embracing couple by Raphael. Represented is not just the image of Soyer’s inner artistic circle, but symbols alluding to the profound emotional, philosophical, and intellectual bonds Soyer shared with his friends.

Later in the 1950s, Soyer took a studio on Second Avenue in the East Village of Manhattan where he met an inspiring cast of characters - the Beat poets and writers, artists, musicians, single mothers holding biracial babies, working women, and the youth and hippies of a new decade of social change whom Raphael came to know as he frequented the streets outside his studio. Douglas C. McGill’s obituary in The New York Times in 1987 notes “Mr. Soyer was known to his friends as a quiet and gentle man of firm resolve. His long devotion to realism in no way lessened his lifelong interest in the art and issues of his time. He was a friend of vanguard artists and writers ranging from Arshile Gorky to Red Grooms and Allen Ginsberg, and it was a hallmark of his career that Mr. Soyer was frequently found at the center of New York’s artistic and cultural ferment.”

Young Woman, c.1945

Street scenes featuring the youth of the times walking the village streets emerged from Soyer’s palette, including Eighth Avenue, 1977. But across the decades, remaining consistent were Soyer’s sensitive, unpretentious portrayals of everyday women whom he often knew well, painted in the setting of the Artist’s studio. These included Young Woman, c. 1945, Nude with Self-Portrait, c. 1955-61, and Miriam in Studio, c. 1980.

Following the opening of Soyer’s retrospective at the Whitney, Jeanne Paris wrote for the Long Island Press: “The dynamism of his work is such that even those who choose to withdraw from society, whether they be the derelicts caught up in the depression or the Hippies of today, all are swept into the maelstrom of the living…Because he cherishes life in all its forms, he frequently beautifies that which is most sorrowful…The inhabitants of the East Village become bohemian intelligentsia and a simple girl of the East Side, a madonna. The true greatness of Raphael Soyer lies in his overwhelming sensitivity. When he paints, one sees the paint on the canvas, but behind the canvas there is something greater, his feeling and responsiveness.”

Raphael Soyer in Studio
photo by Alfred Puhn, Courtesy of the Smithsonian Archives

The appetite for Soyer’s humanist representations over the decades of a century dominated by abstract and conceptual experimentation is clear from the regular inclusion of his work in the large annual and biennial American exhibitions of the Whitney Museum, The Carnegie Institute, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the National Academy of Design, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. His work is now in the public collections of these institutions, as well as many more public collections, including Bezalel National Museum, Jerusalem; Cleveland Museum of Art, OH; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; Philadelphia Museum of Fine Art; The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Jewish Museum, NY; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; and Fogg Art Museum, MA. Most recently, The Jewish Museum, NY; Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; Denver Art Museum, CO; Crystal Bridges Museum, AR; Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, NY; and the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C., have included Soyer’s work in thematic exhibitions and in 2022 the Saint Louis Art Museum, MO, acquired an important Depression-era painting by Raphael Soyer to anchor the museum’s collection of American Social Realism.

at Independent 20th Century 2026

Raphael Soyer at Independent 20th Century 2026

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