Arts and Letters

This is a personal memoir about Moses Soyer during the period of 1921-1924 when we were art students together. There are, inevitably, frequent references to myself, for which I ask your indulgence.

I was fifteen years old when I first met him. He was seven years older, but in terms of knowledge and experience it might have been eons. He was the dominant figure at the Educational Alliance Art School. Already an artist of authority, he was using the facilities of the school—the easel and the model—as a temporary convenience, before he moved on to a professional career.

While I had some previous training, for two years, in a neighborhood art class in Brooklyn, and had learned some technical skills, and considered myself quite advanced, I knew that I would need more solid training before I could become an artist. Thus, I came to the Educational Alliance, on the lower East Side.

According to the prevailing custom of the place, students criticized each other's work, gratuitously, and without mercy. The remarks Moses made about my work were devastating. He told me, among other things, that I had a "great deal of manual dexterity" (a phrase I had never heard before) which, I gathered, was very bad indeed. However, he must have found something redeeming in me, as he subsequently became my closest companion, my guide and mentor.

I learned about his scale of values—the virtues and the vices. The principle virtues were, "Simplicity," "Directness of Vision," and "Honesty." The vices were "Sophistication," "Cleverness," and "Mannerism.'' As I look back upon it now, it seems clear that he had maintained these principles, without compromise, as he developed throughout his long career as an artist.

We used to haunt the galleries and museums together and I knew his likes and dislikes. His favorite old master was Rembrandt, while Degas and Renoir were his acknowledged modern masters. His feeling about Picasso was somewhat ambivalent. While he admired the early periods, both "the Blue" and "the Rose" as well as the most recently emerging "Classic" period, he by-passed the Cubist period, out of sheer indifference. The emphasis on formal construction as an end in itself bothered him, in view of his passion for the human form. Nothing, to him, was more fascinating than the infinite variety and movement of the human being, so rich in marvels, compared to the rendering of an abstraction. His interest in Picasso was intense nevertheless, as they appeared to share some physical characteristics, which Moses was not unaware of. They were both short men, with broad brows and large heavy-lidded brown eyes. Moses parted his hair, way over on one side, which he tended to pull down over his forehead on the other.

We at the Alliance had more in common as a group than our fervor. We were all Jewish immigrants, and all of us were poor. No time had been given to us, we had to earn it, and we all managed somehow to work for our living in a way that gave us the maximum time for art for a minimum of labor. I worked as a part-time letterer in an engraving house. Chaim Gross helped deliver groceries on the upper West Side. Isaac, Moses' younger brother, taught Hebrew to children in a local seminary. He used to close his paint box at a given moment in the afternoon, put his canvas in the rack, and dash off to his class. Moses worked from 5 P.M. to 10 A.M. on the Jewish Morning Journal. I would drop in to see him occasionally as he took classified ads over the counter. He seemed rather severe and short of patience with the people who came in, confused and incapable of expressing their needs. Moses would articulate the ads for them concisely and economically, writing it all out rapidly, in Hebraic script, in a large round hand. He would move upstairs, later, and to the roar of the presses, read proof for the morning edition.

We lived in various corners of the city. I lived in the East New York section of Brooklyn, the Soyers up in the Bronx. We spent hours on the trains going back and forth, and since we had all curtailed our educational processes because of our determination to become artists as quickly as possible, we tried to make up for this deficiency by reading, which we did in transit. I remember how Moses flipped the fat book I had under my arm to see what I was reading. "Oh, Anna Karenina, are you reading it for the first time? How I envy you."

Raphael Soyer, in his autobiographical sketches, refers to his twin brother Moses as having a more aggressive character than his. It is a subtle distinction which may be overlooked by those who have not known them well. They both seemed like lambs, but very wise lambs, who never lost their way, who knew all the pitfalls and who would not be led to the slaughter.