The painter Raphael Soyer emigrated from the Russian Empire to the United States with his parents and siblings in 1912. He studied painting in New York and lived there for the rest of his life. He was a staunch social realist, painting scenes of immigrant and city life, as well as portraits of family, friends, and fellow artists. In addition to working in a representational style, he defended it in print against the rising fashion of abstractionism. His brothers Moses and Isaac were also painters.
Soyer’s informal family portrait, Dancing Lesson, has become an iconic image of the American Jewish experience, appearing on many book covers and exhibition catalogs. It was painted about thirteen…
Jacques Brandon set his painting of a heder, a traditional Jewish elementary school for boys, in a Mediterranean or Near Eastern location or in an imagined distant past. The boys are dressed in white…
In The Travelers, one of a series of “Mother Paintings,” Marie-Louise Motesiczky depicts herself and her mother, Henrietta (the white-haired woman at right), escaping from Nazi-occupied Austria…