Raphael Soyer

American painter and lithographer, 1899–1987

BiographyBorn in Russia, Raphael Soyer emigrated with his family to the U.S. in 1912, and they settled in the Bronx. Alongside his twin brother Moses, Soyer studied art the Cooper Union. He continued to study at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League (with Guy Pene du Bois and Boardman Robinson).

Like many artists of his generation, he took up the urban subject matter of the Ashcan School, as well as painting many portraits of his artist-friends and nudes. In the 1930s, he worked in a Social Realist mode, exploring the struggles of working-class Americans. Soyer was associated with the Fourteenth Street School of painters that included Isabel Bishop and Reginald Marsh. He was committed to representational art, even as the art world increasingly art world turned toward abstraction. In 1953, he cofounded the magazine Reality: A Journal of Artists' Opinions, featuring the work and ideas of likeminded figurative artists.

Beginning in the 1930s, Soyer exhibited widely at galleries and museums in New York and across the US. He taught at the John Reed Club, the Art Students League, the New School for Social Research, and the National Academy.

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