09/25/2026
Forum Gallery is pleased to participate in Independent 20th Century, with a special presentation of paintings by Raphael Soyer (1899-1987). Please visit us on the 5th Floor of the Breuer, 945 Madison Avenue. Independent 20th Century continues through Sunday, September 27th.
Raphael Soyer began painting his artist friends in the 1930s just as he arrived at his signature style. The practice may have served the Artist as an antidote to his innate bashfulness and enabled him to express heartfelt camaraderie to his peers and admiration towards his older artist acquaintances. Soyer also produced many self-portraits which, along with his portraits, offered him intermittent hiatuses from the subject matter to which he was dedicated and brought him national acclaim: New York’s poverty-stricken vagabonds and its lower-class proletariat.
In 1945, Soyer painted a conceptual work called "Imaginary Wall in My Studio" in which he incorporated the portraits of five artists that were dear friends to him. Nikolai Cikovsky in the upper right, brother Moses Soyer lower right, David Burliuk center, Chaim Gross lower left, and Raphael himself upper left. In the upper central portion of the canvas Soyer painted a postcard image of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin at the recently held Yalta Conference (February of 1945, a prelude to the allied victory in World War II), a drawing which his daughter Mary had made of her pet cat, and a small black and white photograph of his wife Rebecca smiling as she upholds their infant daughter and only child. Bottom middle is a rendering of one of his own drawings which depicts a couple embracing, framed behind broken picture glass. The imagery is a sketch for his intimately scaled painting, "Lovers in the Park", c. 1945 (on view now at Forum Gallery, New York) first owned by Juliana Force, founding director of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Raphael and Moses knew Chaim Gross from their days of study together at Cooper Union (1914-18). There’s little doubt that Raphael met Nicolai Cikovsky at Charles Daniel’s gallery at West 47th Street, where the former had a one-man show in 1929 and the latter in 1930. Cikovsky and Burliuk were particularly close friends who painted side-by-side in Southampton, Long Island (1942). And all would have visited the Whitney Studio Club on West 8th Street prior to its 1931 expansion and conversion into a museum.
Still, Cikovsky, Burliuk, Gross, Moses, and Raphael had more in common than shared interests and mutual respect. All five were from Eastern Europe: Cikovsky from Pinsk, in present-day Belarus, Russia; Burliuk from the Ukraine; Gross from the Carpathian Mountain region of what used to be known as Austrian Poland but is now Western Ukraine; Raphael and Moses from the city of Borisoglebsk in the latter-day province of Voronezh Oblast some four hundred miles Southwest of Moscow. All except Burliuk were Jewish and spoke Yiddish as well as English. Moreover, all five of them were active members of the New York chapter of the John Reed Club, which was founded in October of 1929 at the onset of the Great Depression.
Spread about the nation from Boston to San Francisco and numbering thirty at their peak, the John Reed Clubs were a federation of local Marxist organizations under the umbrella of the United States Communist Party, whose mission it was to increase political influence by engaging intellectuals, writers, and artists. It was named after the Oregon native, Harvard graduate, and activist journalist who, while working for the Socialist magazine The Masses, covered the Mexican and Russian Revolutions (in regard to the latter, writing the famed book Ten Days that Shook the World), and who perished at thirty-three of Typhoid Fever in the newly-born Soviet Union. What may seem imponderable in current times is the appeal, breadth, and force of a Depression Era movement which offered a radical alternative to the harshness and hypocrisy of American Corporate Capitalism.
While Raphael Soyer refrained from direct political references in his canvases, those with a social conscience like him, who related experientially to the peripatetic homelessness of indigence and the humiliating terror of subjugation, found fraternity in the John Reed Clubs. Nor did Soyer or his friends create artwork directly reflective of their common religion. While a few Jewish artists like Max Weber and Ben-Zion at times did pictorially reference Judaism, it was not usual. American Jews’ devotion to humanism, derived from their longstanding record of involvement in European labor movements, was given a voice in a pro-Communist creative world which asserted the dogma that art must both portray reality for what it is and convey an ameliorative message. While Raphael Soyer, his brother, and band of brothers conformed to the first tenet and not the latter, their esprit de corps really was their “wine of life”.
Images:
Raphael Soyer, "In the Studio", 1943, oil on canvas, 24 x 20 inches
Raphael Soyer, "Imaginary Wall in My Studio", 1945, oil on canvas, 27 x 26 inches
John Reed Club, protest march, New York City, 1934
(photograph, coll: Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.)
Arnold Newman (1918-2006), Raphael Soyer, 1941
Gelatin silver print; printed no later than 1962, 9 1/4 x 7 5/8 inches
Image courtesy of the Arnold and Augusta Newman Foundation and Howard Greenberg Gallery
“Raphael Soyer”, Forum Gallery at Independent 20th Century, New York
