Raphael Soyer (1899-1987)

“Village East Street Scene” – 1965-66 – Raphael Soyer – oil on canvas – 60 ins x 60 ins – courtesy the Seattle Art Museum

Raphael Soyer aged 85, Los Angeles, 1984 – photo (detail) by Allen Ginsberg – courtesy Stanford University Libraries / Allen Ginsberg Estate

Allen Ginsberg (with Peter Orlovsky) – Raphael Soyer – oil on canvas – courtesy The National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC

Our focus today is the great Russian-born American painter, draughtsman, and printmaker, Raphael Soyer (twin-brother of the equally-accomplished Moses Soyer – and indeed, Isaac Soyer – three brothers –  they were a remarkable painting-family)

Raphael arrived in the United States in 1912.  His first solo show was in 1929. He was, to use the language of the art historians, a committed and  avowed “Social Realist” (i.e. his sympathies were with the underdog – understandable, as having arrived in the country as a child and having lived through the Great Depression).

In subsequent decades he continued to be identified with democratic, socialist, humanitarian, “left-wing”, perspectives  (notably through his alliance with the so-called  Fourteenth Street School of painters).

As a portrait painter he was drawn to depiction of his artist friends (among them Chaim Gross, Alice Neel – and Arshile Gorky – and Allen)

Allen Ginsberg – Raphael Soyer – pencil, pastel on paper, 14 1/4 x 12 inches, undated, courtesy Forum Gallery, New York

In 1967, in perhaps the highpoint of his career, the Whitney Museum in New York presented  a retrospective show on him.

His life-long commitment was to representational art, (unfashionable as the years went by,  counter to the prevailing modernist taste for abstraction).

His hero was the great 19th Century American “realist” painter, Thomas Eakins 

Raphael’s sympathy for his subjects (some have argued, at times, an almost sentimental attention) – is palpable – and moving.

“I always was a non-parochial painter and I painted what was I saw in my neighborhood in New York City which I call my country rather than my city…”

“I paint people. To me the people are the important subject of my art…I painted street scenes but there were always people there, always kind of.. . My streets were always inhabited..”

“Village East Street Scene” – Writing on the piece, in 1969,  some three years after its completion

“”The Village East..” is the result of my seven years’ living and working on lower Second Avenue. I had become acquainted with some of the artists and writers… I wanted to convey a feeling of energy and life in an atmosphere of deprivation and drabness….”..Village East..” is a painting composed of portraits, some of them well known, for example, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso  Diane di Prima. . . . Diane is a sensitive poet, impatient with anything that is not avant-garde. . . Diane is the main character, aimlessly walking out of the painting. . . It was she who first brought Allen Ginsberg to my studio. . . . She also tried to get  (Amiri Baraka) LeRoi Jones to pose, but he was too busy and I had to use a photograph to paint his head in “..Village East”.

“Studies of Diane di Prima”, 1965 – Raphael Soyer – oil on canvas – 38 ins x 28 ins

Further images from Lloyd Goodrich’s 1967 Whitney Museum catalog:

 

signed catalog reproduction of Raphael Soyer lithograph image of Allen Ginsberg

Here’s Raphael Soyer interviewed (in 1979)  by Barbaralee Diamonstein

 

From  Diary of An Artist (1977), his entertaining and invaluable memoir:

“First Allen came by himself, shabby, unshaven, but beardless, his black hair long and curly on his balding head, with a few strands clinging to his forehead. Under a dark blue jacket he wore a scarlet slipover on a blue denim shirt. He had the hollow cheeked look of a young European-Jewish intellectual, and his lips seemed inordinately red in his pale face. As the panting progressed however, his hair and beard grew, covering the hollowness of his cheeks, and his white teeth sparkled. He was beginning to look like a Hindu. He posed, standing, patiently, and his warm, brown eyes behind the heavy horn-rimmed spectacles had a heavy gaze.

Contrary to expectations from rumors about him, Allen was pretentious, sensible, and pleasant. At the very first sitting we touched upon many subjects in our conversation. He found similarities between my background and that of his father. He mentioned his mother. “Do you know De Kooning’s “Woman”? That was my mother.  Is it surprising that I am a homosexual?”. He told me about a vision in which William Blake appeared to him. He recited some anonymous, precious medieval poems with quiet simplicity. He talked about his recurring emotional breakdowns which sent him from one “nuthouse” to another.He referred to his moments of ecstasy and wanted me to include in the painting a button on his lapel – “Legalize Pot”

Later Allen brought to the studio his friend Gregory Corso, and I made a small painting of both of them. “I want to be in a picture with Allen”, Corso said affectionately. Since meeting Allen I have noticed that young poets and writers speak of him fondly, with respect, as if he were a teacher. I’ve learned that he’s very helpful, gives a lot of time to them, and is liberal with his money. When he fist came to pose I offered to pay him like other models. He asked, “How much do you pay?”. When I told him he said, “That’s a lot of money. When I need it I’ll let you know.” He never has.

“Two Poets – Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, 1965 –  Raphael Soyer –  watercolor on paper 13 1/2   x 16 3/4 in. – courtesy Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, University of North Carolina

At the time Allen posed for me.I was still working on the large “Homage..” which was always on the easel, with the individual portrait studies around it .He would look anthem in passing, and once when I caught him at it I said was more satisfied with the small studies than with the large paintings. To which he replied directly and simply, “But the large painting has an overall melancholy”. When he happened to glance at the sketched-in composition of “Village East” he said, “Why don’t you do something unusual and startling in this painting, like an erection on one of these fellows?

One day he announced, “I won’t be able to come for a while because William Burroughs‘s in town. He’s my good friend and I want to spend all my time with him.

Gregory Corso posed twice for the small painting I call “Two Poets”. I liked Gregory’s face, at once saturnine and gentle, his shaggy tufts of hair, the changing expressions from moodiness to cheerfulness.This charming fellow, I was told, becomes obstreperous and belligerent when drunk.”I have to be careful not to get tight”, Gregory told me himself, “I’m liable to get into fights, and am often beaten up.” The second time he appeared it must have been after a night out, or some weekend brawl.He was disheveled, tired looking, unshaven, and untidy, as if he had slept in his clothes

(returning from a trip to Europe and his native Russia)

In a London bookshop, I picked up a slim volume of poetry containing selections from Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg and I’ve been reading it on the boat going home. I wonder how they are judged by the more accepted poets, how they measure up in their ability to express and convey feelings, in their technique and imagery. I know little about poetry but I am moved by the plainness of Gregory Corso’s “Marriage”, “Man”, and “Writ on the Eve of My 32nd Birthday, by Ferlinghetti’a “In Goya’s Greatest Scenes”, and by his evocative poem to Allen Ginsberg entitled “He”. I regret that his “Autobiography” ends  so soon, I could read on and on. Allen Ginsberg’s outpourings in “Europe, Europe”, “America” and “Magic Psalm” encompass  much of our time and our world. I like these compassionate blasphemous, hallucinatory poems; these poets, in truth, reveal themselves.

I once said to Allen Ginsberg, “Your style, the way you talk to yourself in your poems, and the way you mention your friends, Kerouac, Burroughs by name, reminds me of Walt Whitman, or Mayakovsky, or Esenin.But their poetry, even the melancholy Esenin’s, is so affirmative compared to yours. You know Mayakovsky’s poem about the sun coming in to have tea with him.How full of life, how energetic it is! But you begin, “You are rotting Allen Ginsberg” – and you go on to describe your deterioration. I smell death, decaying flesh when I read your poems.” – “What’s wrong with that?”, Ginsberg answered.”I traveled in India, all over, not just where the tourists go. They don’t bury their dead as we do, they burn them. Not in crematoria but in the open. These funeral fires never cease. I saw burning corpses. I saw what happens to flesh, skin, eyes. People pass by these fires, children pass by them, without so much as looking at them. It’s normal – death, mortality, decay of flesh, are real like life. Why not write about them?” ….

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