Word: soyer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Raphael Soyer is a shy little artist who would rather paint such crestfallen angels than anything else. His models, he says, are not professionals, but "mostly young girls who are interested in dancing or writing or philosophy. Usually they are not very happy...
...exhibition in a Manhattan gallery last week, Soyer's painted models showed their unhappiness by their slouching poses, and the drab color of their flesh and their surroundings. What made gallerygoers look at them twice, and also made museum directors from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Manhattan's Metropolitan and Pittsburgh's Carnegie Institute buy up the best, was a familiar (and faintly angelic) detachment in their expressions: the off-guard pensiveness of girls who think themselves alone and unobserved-dressing and undressing, yawning, idly reading, or waiting for a train or subway...
Born in Russia on Christmas Day 48 years ago, Soyer came to the U.S. at twelve, left high school after his sophomore year to work and study painting at night. Like his less well-known brothers Moses and Isaac Soyer, who also paint, Raphael grew up with the notion of painting what he knew as skillfully and unpretentiously as he knew how. Last week's show was his first in five years, and for it he had painted 23 new oils...
...with $4,000 in cash prizes-$800 more than Carnegie offers. The jury, imported from New York, included Juliana Force, doughty duenna of Manhattan's Whitney Museum of American Art, and two divergent painters of Manhattan life: Reginald Marsh, who paints it like a carnival barker, and Raphael Soyer, who paints it like a soft-hearted social worker. As happens with artist-dominated juries, the prizes at Chicago's Art Institute went to technically excellent paintings. Artists, who know about means, apparently care less about each others' ends...
...immaculate conceptions which for untutored eyes might just as well have hung upside down. There were shaky, stuttering labors-in-oil by artists known chiefly to their immediate families, friends and critic-sponsors. There were also sober, estimable paintings by artists like Alexander Brook, John Carroll, Walt Kuhn, Raphael Soyer. Sample critics and choices...