Word: soyer
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...tighter restrictions on who could buy property in the community, and it barred Jews and looked askance at Catholics. East Hampton, on the other hand, had originally been settled by artists, and now has been rediscovered by the abstract expressionists and realists, notably Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb and Moses Soyer, who were not interested in membership in the Maidstone Club or in its challenging 18-hole golf course. East Hampton has also been invaded by a sizable force of well-heeled industrialists, merchant princes and young executives, who want a pleasant place for their families to spend the hot summer...
...stranger and stranger. Freed from the chore of sticking slavishly to the surface likeness, the artist today is free to probe more than skin-deep. The result often produces a psychological study in depth that eludes even the roving camera's eye. Or, in the instance of Raphael Soyer's Homage to Thomas Eakins (opposite), it can bring to life a whole galaxy of familiar figures, bound together by the unifying vision of one man who knew and admired them...
Biographer as Surgeon. Soyer's group portrait is essentially a salute to the past, an evocation of his fellow realists and their combined debt to Eakins as the greatest painter in the American realist tradition. Soyer unabashedly searched the past for precedent, modeled his composition on Fantin-Latour's 1864 Homage to Delacroix. He prepared himself by making separate portraits of each figure from life, except for the late Reginald Marsh, whom Soyer had painted 24 years earlier; he simply copied the old portrait into the final 6-ft. 8-in. by 7-ft. 4-in. canvas...
...final painting is Lloyd Goodrich, director of Manhattan's Whitney Museum of American Art, who was included for his definitive biography of Eakins. He stands behind a table, paralleling the posture of the surgeon in Eakins' The Gross Clinic, over his shoulder. "To relieve the grimness," Soyer posed his only daughter bringing in a tray of drinks...
While working on the Homage, Soyer was constantly worried that he might fail. He jotted in his progress notes: "Will I be able to capture the tremor in the temples of Jack Levine's portrait, the anxious face of Moses [Soyer's twin brother], or the aura of aloneness about Edward Hopper?" In the end, he largely succeeded, but says Soyer: "The secret of doing big group paintings has been lost. Portraits painted today are fragmentary, personal, capricious, nervous, tentative, incomplete, accidental, at times full of inaccuracies. But they are fascinating-revealing of the artist more than...