Moses Soyer
American, 1899 – 1974
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Moses Soyer was an American social realist painter.
He was born as Moses Schoar and both he and his identical twin brother, Raphael, were born in Borisoglebsk, Tambov, a southern province of Russia on December 25, 1899. Their father, Abraham Shauer, a Hebrew scholar, writer and teacher, raised his six children in an intellectual environment in which much emphasis was placed on academic and artistic pursuits. Their mother, Bella, was an embroiderer. Their cousin was painter and meteorologist Joshua Zalman Holland. The difficulties faced by the Jewish population in the late Russian Empire forced the Soyer family to emigrate in 1912 to the United States, where they ultimately settled in the Bronx. The family name changed from Schoar to Soyer during immigration.
Soyer married in 1922 to Ida Chassner, a dancer. Together they had one son, David Soyer. Dancers were a recurring subject in Soyer's paintings.
Soyer studied art in New York with his twin Raphael, first at Cooper Union, and continued his studied at National Academy of Design. He diverged from his twin and attended Educational Alliance. He later studied at the Ferrer Art School under the Ashcan painters Robert Henri and George Bellows.
He had his first solo exhibition in 1926 and began teaching art the following year at the Contemporary Art School and The New School.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Moses and his brother Raphael engaged in Social Realism, demonstrating empathy with the struggles of the working class. In 1939, the twins worked together with the Works Project Administration, Federal Art Project (WPA-FAP) mural at the Kingsessing Station post office in Philadelphia.
Soyer wrote a weekly column for a Yiddish newspaper called "In the World of Art".
Soyer died in the Chelsea Hotel in New York on September 2, 1974, while painting dancer and choreographer Phoebe Neville. He was buried in Acacia Cemetery in Queens County, New York.