Raphael Soyer's Seamstress II Lithograph >><< WPA <<>> Social Realism

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Raphael Soyer

Born: Dec 25, 1899 · Borisoglebsk, Russia

Died: Nov 04, 1987 · New York, United States

Siblings: Moses Soyer · Isaac Soyer

Education: Cooper Union · National Academy Museum and School · Art Students League of New York

Periods: Social realism

Timeline

1912: Due to Russian oppression, the Soyer family was forced to emigrate in 1912 to the United States, where they ultimately settled in the Bronx.

1930: Soyer's teaching career began at the John Reed Club, New York, in 1930 and included stints at the Art Students League, the New School for Social Research and the National Academy.

1940: Soyer was hired in 1940, along with eight other prominent American artists, to document dramatic scenes and characters during the production of the film The Long Voyage Home, a cinematic adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's plays.

1953: In 1953 Soyer co-founded the magazine Reality, published by figurative artists as a response to the prevailing influence of non-objective art.

1967: In 1967 the Whitney Museum of American Art exhibited a retrospective of his work.

1987: He died in New York in 1987 from cancer.

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Raphael Soyer

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Raphael Soyer was a Russian-born American painter, draftsman, and printmaker. Soyer was referred to as an American scene painter. He is identified as a Social Realist because of his interest in men and women viewed in contemporary settings which included the streets, subways, salons and artists' studios of New York City. He also wrote several books on his life and art.

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphael_Soyer

 

Early life[edit]

Raphael Soyer and his identical twin brother, Moses, were born in Borisoglebsk, Tambov, a southern province of Russia in 1899. Their father, Abraham Soyer, a Hebrew scholar, writer and teacher, raised his six children in an intellectual environment in which much emphasis was placed on academic and artistic pursuits. Due to Russian oppression, the Soyer family was forced to emigrate in 1912 to the United States, where they ultimately settled in the Bronx.

 

Education as an artist[edit]

Raphael pursued his art education at the free schools of the Cooper Union where he met Chaim Gross, who became a lifelong friend from that time. He continued his studies at the National Academy of Design and, subsequently, at the Art Students League of New York. While there, he studied with Guy Pene du Bois and Boardman Robinson, taking up the gritty urban subjects of the Ashcan school. After his formal education ended, Soyer became associated with the Fourteenth Street School of painters that included Reginald Marsh, Isabel Bishop, Kenneth Hayes Miller, Peggy Bacon and, his teacher, Guy Pene du Bois. Soyer persistently investigated a number of themes—female nudes, portraits of friends and family, New York and, especially, its people—in his paintings, drawings, watercolors and prints. He was adamant in his belief in representational art and strongly opposed the dominant force of abstract art during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Defending his position, he stated: "I choose to be a realist and a humanist in art." He was an artist of the Great Depression.

 

Career[edit]

Beginning in the early 1930s, he showed regularly in the large annual and biennial American exhibitions of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Carnegie Institute, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the National Academy of Design, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He had a series of solo exhibitions in New York galleries, and also worked in the WPA Federal Arts Project in the 1930s.

 

Soyer's teaching career began at the John Reed Club, New York, in 1930 and included stints at the Art Students League, the New School for Social Research and the National Academy. His work is in numerous museums including the Museum of Modern Art; The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; The New York Public Library, New York; Tel Aviv Museum, Israel; Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy and Los Angeles County Museum, California.[2] Victor Ganz started collecting art in his teenage years with the purchases of watercolors by Louis Eilshemius and Jules Pascin and an oil painting by Raphael Soyer.

 

Among Soyer's portrait subjects were artists and writers who were his friends; these included Allen Ginsberg, Arshile Gorky, Chaim Gross and Edward Hopper. In 1967 the Whitney Museum of American Art exhibited a retrospective of his work.[3]

 

Soyer was hired in 1940, along with eight other prominent American artists, to document dramatic scenes and characters during the production of the film The Long Voyage Home, a cinematic adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's plays.[4]

 

He died in New York in 1987 from cancer.

 

Publications[edit]

In 1953 Soyer co-founded the magazine Reality, published by figurative artists as a response to the prevailing influence of non-objective art.[5] Soyer wrote and illustrated the following books:[6]

 

A Painter's Pilgrimage: An Account of a Journey with Drawings by the Author, Crown, 1962

Homage to Thomas Eakins, etc., Thomas Yoseloff, 1966

Raphael Soyer, Self-Revealment: a Memoir, Random House, 1969

Diary of an Artist, New Republic Books, 1977

 

 

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Artist Raphael Soyer (1899-1987), whose Russian Jewish family settled in Manhattan in 1912, was devoted to painting people in their everyday urban lives. He came to be known especially for his representations of city workers and the down-and-out, and for his portraits of himself and his friends. Although Soyer never identified himself as a "Jewish artist," Samantha Baskind, in the first full-length critical study of the artist, argues that his work was greatly influenced by his ethnicity and by the Jewish American immigrant experience.

 

Baskind examines the painter's art and life in the rich context of religious, cultural, political, and social conditions in the twentieth-century United States. By promoting an understanding of Soyer as a Jewish American artist, she addresses larger questions about the definition and study of modern Jewish art. Whereas previous scholars have defined Jewish art simply as art produced by people who were born Jewish, Baskind stresses the importance of an artist's cultural identity when defining ethnic art. As Baskind explains how Soyer negotiated his Jewish identity in changing ways over his lifetime, she offers new strategies for identifying and interpreting Jewish art in general. Her analysis of Soyer's work places the artist in a necessary context and provides a valuable new approach to the study of modern Jewish art.

 

Works Progress Administration

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration

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Works Progress Administration / Work Projects Administration (renamed 1939)

 

Agency Overview

Formed April 8, 1935

Preceding AgencyFederal Emergency Relief Administration

DissolvedJune 30, 1943

Employees3.3 million in 1938 (peak). Provided almost 8 million jobs between 1935 and 1943

Annual budget$1.4 billion (1935)

Key documentEmergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935

 

The Works Progress Administration (renamed in 1939 as the Work Projects Administration; WPA) was the largest and most ambitious American New Deal agency, employing millions of unemployed people (mostly unskilled men) to carry out public works projects,[1] including the construction of public buildings and roads. In a much smaller but more famous project,

the The WPA's Federal Art Project, known as Federal Project Number One, employed musicians, artists, writers, actors and directors in large arts, drama, media, and literacy projects.

 

Almost every community in the United States had a new park, bridge or school constructed by the agency. The WPA's initial appropriation in 1935 was for $4.9 billion (about 6.7 percent of the 1935 GDP), and in total it spent $13.4 billion.

 

Archives of American Art - Employment and Activities poster for the WPA's Federal Art Project - 11772

 

At its peak in 1938, it provided paid jobs for three million unemployed men and women, as well as youth in a separate division, the National Youth Administration. Headed by Harry Hopkins, the WPA provided jobs and income to the unemployed during the Great Depression in the United States. Between 1935 and 1943, the WPA provided almost eight million jobs. Full employment, which was reached in 1942 and emerged as a long-term national goal around 1944, was not the WPA goal. It tried to provide one paid job for all families in which the breadwinner suffered long-term unemployment. Robert D. Leighninger asserts that “The stated goal of public building programs was to end the depression or, at least, alleviate its worst effects. Millions of people needed subsistence incomes. Work relief was preferred over public assistance (the dole) because it maintained self-respect, reinforced the work ethic, and kept skills sharp."

 

The WPA was a national program that operated its own projects in cooperation with state and local governments, which provided 10–30% of the costs. Usually the local sponsor provided land and often trucks and supplies, with the WPA responsible for wages (and for the salaries of supervisors, who were not on relief). WPA sometimes took over state and local relief programs that had originated in the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) or Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) programs.

 

It was liquidated on June 30, 1943, as a result of low unemployment due to the worker shortage of World War II. The WPA had provided millions of Americans with jobs for 8 years. Most people who needed a job were eligible for at least some of its positions. Hourly wages were typically set to the prevailing wages in each area

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