Art: Talk in a Low Voice

The young Jewish twins, whose family had been exiled from imperial Russia, knew hardly any English when they went to their first American school, but Moses and Raphael Soyer were accomplished in another kind of language that quickly endeared them to their teachers. Whenever a holiday approached, they were set to work decorating the halls and classrooms, for no one else in the school could paint a livelier Easter rabbit, a jollier Santa Claus or a spookier Halloween witch than the Soyer boys. Today, at 62, the twins—as well as their younger brother Isaac—are noted artists whose quiet and moody paintings change little but never date.

Raphael is perhaps slightly better known, but last week Moses was in the spotlight.

A book about him—Moses Soyer, by Charlotte Willard (World; $12.50)— has just been published, and Manhattan’s ACA gallery has on display a handsome exhibition of his latest work, chiefly a rich array of nudes.

In the book, Soyer lists his cherished qualities in painting as “love, tenderness, intimacy.” His portraits are almost always of friends or family, and in one unusually dramatic canvas showing a group of people awaiting the end of the world, he painted himself surrounded by those he loves. He likes to paint lovers and young married couples, and if there is pain, he will lay that bare too. He painted one woman over a number of years, starting when she was 18, and then at various milestones and crises in her life from her marriage through her pregnancy and divorce. On his painting of women—seamstresses, ballet dancers, actresses, and nudes—he lavishes all his tenderness. In such a painting as Young Girl, subtlety of pose, the position of only a hand, can express as much emotion as the expression on the face.

Of his teachers, Soyer remembers vividly George Bellows and Robert Henri, and most especially he remembers the night that Henri introduced him to a Daumier drawing of hungry men and women and their sad-eyed children. He immediately felt the “sympathy with which the artist drew this group.” Soyer has always had this same sympathy for his own sad-eyed figures. They often seem overwhelmed by their own thoughts, caught in a moment of reverie when, while most turned in upon themselves, they reveal themselves the most. Of his style, Soyer says: “I like an artist who talks with a low voice.” And of his content: “Henri and Bellows taught me many things, but most important of all, they taught me that the theme of man is the noblest theme of art, man in his universe, man in his landscape, man at his work. I believed it then and I still do.”