Word: soyer
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...produced almost as many self-portraits as Rembrandt, who painted himself 60 times. The first face of Raphael Soyer is dated 1917. The artist printed it on a sheet of cheap paper with engraving plates he heated on the gas burner in the family kitchen in The Bronx. Though coarsely crosshatched, its composition a tad askew, the engraving is a riveting reflection of the artist at 18, staring at the mirror with the same unswerving, enigmatic gaze that he would cast upon the world for the next 60-odd years of self-portraiture. By 1920 Soyer had a lithographic crayon...
...beauty of the self-portraits would scarcely endure a decade. Soon Soyer was accenting the oddities of his features, while adding elements of costume that gave some of the pictures an air of caricature. His ears stood out more boldly and grew pointier, while a cone-shaped hat made him look like a solemn-eyed Chico Marx. When Soyer produced vast New York City street scenes in the late 1950s, he painted himself in a business suit, shirt and tie and posed, immobile, amid the crowds that passed through his pictures. In 1959 he pulled his glasses onto his forehead...
...Vadis? The question is superfluous. Where Raphael Soyer is going has never been in doubt. His self-portraits have been emblematic of both his personal detachment from his subjects and the lonely course he has undeviatingly pursued in an era that was long dominated by abstract art. How steadfast he has remained is demonstrated by the show of 17 paintings, "Soyer Since 1960," currently at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., together with a 146-piece exhibit of engravings and lithographs entitled "Sixty-Five Years of Printmaking." Judging from the paintings, Soyer, who is 82, has spent the past...
...magisterial Homage to Thomas Eakins exemplifies the boldness, not to say the rashness, with which Soyer has reached into the past for forms that have faded away after a century or more of desuetude. His picture is modeled after Hommage à Delacroix by Henri Fantin-Latour, who in 1864 lined up seven artists, including Manet and Whistler, and three writers, including Baudelaire, who had been Delacroix's admirers. Fantin-Latour then judiciously posed them beside a portrait of the great French Romantic painter. The composition is as simple as the relationships. Soyer, on the other hand, chose a much...
...Soyer's most successful pictures are his portraits and figure studies. Among the most impressive paintings at the Hirshhorn is his 1980 Paula Hondius, a portrait of old age. This painting of a shapeless body seated in an angular director's chair at the light-struck center of the canvas is a triumph of Soyer's unsentimental realism...