Moses Soyer, Social Realist Lithograph Moses Soyer WPA Artist Hudled Refugees

Moses Soyer (December 25, 1899 – September 3, 1974) was an American social realist painter. Soyer was born in Borisoglebsk, Russian Empire, in 1899. His father was a Hebrew scholar, writer and teacher. His family emigrated to the United States in 1912. Two of Soyer’s brothers, Raphael (his identical twin) and Isaac were also painters. Soyer’s wife, Ida, was a dancer, and dancers are a recurring subject in his paintings. Soyer studied art in New York, first at Cooper Union and later at the Ferrer Art School, where he studied under the Ashcan painters Robert Henri and George Bellows. He had his first solo exhibition in 1926 and began teaching art the following year at the Contemporary Art School and The New School. He died in the Chelsea Hotel in New York while painting dancer and choreographer Phoebe Neville.
He was included in the show “American Modernism – Paintings from the Dr. and Mrs. Mark S. Kauffman Collection,” along with 30 leading masters of American modernism, which captured the essence of a revolutionary era in American art. As the 20th century began, American painters became increasingly involved in avant-garde developments in Europe. Different styles from international sources developed concurrently, making the years between the World Wars a dynamic period of artistic exchange and cathartic change. Faced with the fast-moving, machine-driven technology of the 20th century, American artists began to explore different ways of representing the world: through the influences of Cubism, structurally fracturing the picture plane into angular prisms, and through the expressionist application of bold, unnaturalistic color. Collectively, these first American modernist experiments with abstraction were to change the direction of the art world. Artists included were Stuart Davis, Lyonel Feininger, William Gropper, Robert Gwathmey, Jack Levine, William Meyerowitz, Abraham Rattner, Ben Shahn, Moses and Raphael Soyer, Konrad Cramer, Charles Sheeler, Abraham Walkowitz, and Max Weber. The exhibition also showed at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota and the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio.
The Brooklyn Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, DC), the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art (New York City), the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Phillips Collection (Washington, DC), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, Minnesota), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York City) are among the institutions holding works by Moses Soyer. The untitled painting in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art is an example of his intimate and psychologically penetrating portraits of ordinary people, for which he is best known.