Arts and Letters

When you lose a friend like Raphael Soyer, you lose half of your body, half of your mind. We were friends, and we were very good friends since 1921 when I had arrived in America. I was seventeen years old and studying art when I met Moses Soyer at the Educational Alliance Art School.

At that time, there was a break from the academic art school, the National Academy of Design. The younger students wanted to do more interesting work besides drawing only with a pencil. Among the radical, younger artists at the Educational Alliance Art School were Saul Baizerman, Adolph Gottlieb, Peter Blume, and Barnett Newman. Raphael Soyer decided to go to Cooper Union and later the Art Students League. Moses was the only one in my class who spoke Yiddish. My only language was Yiddish. We took many walks together, and he taught me English. The Soyer family had come from Russia in 1912. Their first home in New York was in the Bronx. They were very poor.

Moses brought me home to his house on Boone Avenue, in the Bronx; and I became friends with his twin brother, Raphael, his sisters, his brother Isaac, his mama and papa, and grandmother; I was just one of them. I could come up any time and have a meal.

When we had free time, on Saturdays or Sundays, Raphael, Moses, Isaac, and I would go to Coney Island, or Sea Gate or the Manhattan piers, or we would go all over the Bronx, every street. We drew and painted.

I had my first little studio on Fourteenth Street. It was four feet by eight feet. Raphael Soyer gave me the mattress, and I got some apple boxes; this was my bed. Raphael had a little studio nearby, and he would come to visit me every week to see me and to see how I was doing.

One day, a young artist we knew, Abraham Goldberg, came from Paris. Every year he would spend the summer in Paris, then return to New York and work at the "bonus embroidery" trade. "Bonus embroidery" is done by machine; you copy the drawing. Goldberg suggested that Raphael and I go to the school. We paid our fifteen dollars, and learned the trade. After two weeks the head of the school sent us to a shop where we could work. The man gave us work to do, and we worked there the whole day. When it came to the evening, he said, "You're fired! You spoiled all the goods that's worthwhile!" We went to another shop. We worked the whole day. In the evening, the boss said, "You're fired! The work is no good. I can't give you any money," and tore our work up into pieces. We didn't do well. This was going on all week. By the sixth day we became lucky: someone was a little sympathetic toward us, and said we would learn. He started us off on cheap work and we received ten dollars. Later we received a little more, and then a little more. After three months we saved up $400, and we had enough to live on for the winter. We never went back to the shop again.

We had a friend by the name of Jack Friedlander; he was the only one who had money among our group of eight or ten artists, including Raphael, Moses, Louis Rebach, Harry Zitter, Saul Berman, and myself. We used to get together after sunset and go to Jack Friedlander's studio. One fellow would buy the cabbage, a few carrots, and other things to make a soup; another would cook it; the other wash the dishes, another sweep the floor. After dinner, we would draw one another and play chess for money.

Raphael was the only one who was left in the studio to paint in the daytime. He would get fifteen dollars a week and leave a painting for Friedlander every so often.

We used to go sometimes to the famous Vaudeville House at Astor Place. We made some drawings, then we would go to Jack Friedlander's lithography shop, where he had a small press. We did our first lithographs there; most of the subjects were vaudeville and circus scenes. Some still exist; Raphael and I had a few.

In the summer, the group of friends would go to Coney Island. It wasn't like it is now. There were a lot of little squatters' shanties along the water, and we used to love to sketch them, sometimes make watercolors.

One Sunday, our group went to Coney Island. We could see Sea Gate. So, Peter Blume tried to swim there, but the tide was so strong he had a hard time, and almost couldn't come back. One of the painters in our clique, Saul Berman, used to deliver newspapers. He got me a job on the weekend delivering newspapers, it didn't last very long. While Berman was delivering newspapers on Riverside Drive, he met a man, Hymie Cohen, who used to take his little dog for an airing. They started talking, he asked Berman what he was doing, and Berman said he was an artist. "Oh, you're an artist! Tell me, I was recently at the Downtown Gallery, and I saw a piece of sculpture by a fellow, name sounds like Chaim Gross." "Oh," Berman says, "he's a good friend of mine. We don't know what happened to him." So, Raphael Soyer and Sol Berman broke into my studio, and sold a piece of sculpture for a hundred dollars. When I came back from washing dishes in Atlantic City, I called Jack Friedlander. "Hello, Jake," I said. "Chaim, you must commit suicide." I said, "Why?" He told me the story of them selling my sculpture on the basis that I was dead. My first sale. Later I met Hymie Cohen. He visited me on Fourteenth Street. He took another sculpture, and paid me a hundred dollars. I became friends with him. I said, "I have a good friend, he's a wonderful artist. He's nearby on Fourteenth Street. Let's go over and look at his paintings." Raphael sold him a beautiful big painting for thirty-five dollars.

Raphael was a very good student, exceptionally talented among the artists. He talked about Miller, his teacher at the Art Students League. After Miller, he didn't go back to school. He painted for himself.

He had a studio on Canal Street, near Essex Street. He saw Seward Park, and he saw the people on the street; he used to paint it from his window. At the same time, he went to the waterside and made sketches; then he would come back and paint a canvas from the sketches. Then he rented a room near the water, near the river, where he painted many more sketches and a large painting of the East River. He painted views of Delancey Street facing the Williamsburgh Bridge and the front and the back of the Williamsburgh Bridge.

He brought his paintings to Guy Pène du Bois, who encouraged him. He showed the paintings at his first exhibition in 1929 or 1930 at the prestigious Daniel Gallery. Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, and John Marin were among the very good artists there.

One of Raphael's favorite paintings from this exhibition (which I still have) was "The Dance" (1926). His own family: Moses dancing with his sister Rebbi, with his mother and father, his grandmother and grandfather, and great grandmother all in the background.

He always sketched and painted from life. He always had two or three models in his studio. They would walk around, or sit or lie on his couch. He used to make drawings and paintings. Some of his models liked being in the studio; they used to come and visit even when he didn't paint them; just hung around.

Raphael had a lot of friends, and a lot of admirers. He had a lot of young artists come in and ask advice; he was always encouraging.

He moved his studio, from downtown to uptown. I used to visit him regularly, without calling first. I would sit and talk with him. We used to talk about all sorts of things, often about the art of today.

He painted several portraits of me, one of the most interesting in 1929. I made a portrait of Raphael, and of Moses Soyer; and of Moses's son David when he was eight years old, and of his grandchildren; and of Raphael's daughter Mary and his grandchildren when they were younger.

Raphael and I exchanged many works, and we each made many exchanges with other artists. Everybody has collections. He had a very beautiful collection from different painters, and many of his own self-portraits. He had many drawings by Pascin, one of his favorite artists; he admired and was influenced by him in the early days.

Raphael used to love nineteenth century painters. He would always talk about Degas, Delacroix, Gericault, and especially Thomas Eakins.

Starting in the early forties, he painted several large group portraits of artists. In one exhibition at the Associated American Artists Gallery in the 1940s, he showed twenty or twenty-five portraits of contemporary artists. He knew everybody; but he was very close friends with Alexander Brook, Kuniyoshi, Reginald Marsh (they shared a studio together on Union Square), Philip Evergood, Nicolai Cikovsky, Marsden Hartley, Joseph Stella, Joseph Floch, Max Weber, William Gropper, Jack Levine, also with Arshile Gorky and Mark Rothko.

He knew a lot of writers and did portraits of some of them. In late years he did a portrait of Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Raphael Soyer was the last of his generation who was a great modern American painter, the period that bridged European traditional painting with American painting. He was on his own, he always stuck with what he was interested in. He survived the generation breaking with traditional past, and he survived to enjoy the renewed recognition as a forerunner of the youngest generation of realist painters.

For the last five or eight years he went to Europe every summer with his wife, Rebecca. They went to see museums in Europe and found inspiration from his favorite masters Delacroix, El Greco, Rembrandt, Degas. He would revisit his favorite paintings, in Holland, France, Italy, and England.

He always had his sketchbook. We all had sketchbooks. For everything we saw, we would do a sketch of it. He did the same thing. Everywhere he went, to the museum or in the streets. While he traveled, he met many artists and sketched them. Eventually, the sketchbook with his autobiography was published.

In the last ten or fifteen years, there was a great change in his paintings. The colors became stronger and better, clearer, very beautiful blues and grays and yellows. His paintings were always mellow and beautiful.

He often would say to me, "Why did Moses have to die before me?"

After Moses died, we became a lot closer.

In the last few summers Raphael came to Provincetown but in the last year, 1987, he was not quite himself. In past years, he would paint all the time. He didn't feel like painting. He felt like sitting, reading, drawing a little bit. We saw each other almost every day. I would go and pick Rebecca up to go to the market: Raphael helped Rebecca get out of the car, he held her hand, and they would go to the store. He never complained about anything. When he left Provincetown he was in perfect health. A few days later, he took sick. He went to the hospital. When I visited him a few days later, he was an entirely different person. I went to visit him at the hospital almost every day. When he came back home, I visited him at his house.

He would take me for a walk, and show me his collection. He would show me a drawing, and say, "Remember this drawing by Friedlander?" or "Remember when you made this drawing…" he had the drawing on his wall for so many years. I had my sketchbook, he said, "No, no, no." He would fall asleep. When he woke up, I would have a drawing.

Anybody who came to his bed, he would take them by the hand, press their hand, and tell them good bye. He knew what was going on. Someone called from California, "Tell her the truth," he said—just like his paintings, always truthful.

When you lose a friend, you lose half of your body, half of your mind; and the other half, you don't know what happens: Raphael Soyer was really my best friend. When you have a very close friend, he knows your secrets, and you know his secrets. This is how friends get along. He was on his own, different from all the others, always himself, always unique. It was really wonderful to have been with him.