My favorite work of Jewish art has to be
Raphael Soyer's Dancing Lesson.
She is also the author of
Raphael Soyer and the Search for Modern Jewish Art (2004) and Encyclopedia of Jewish American Artists (2007).
The exhibition focuses on the years of 1900-1955, a period of great social and artistic activity, and includes more than 70 works--painting, sculpture, photographs and works on paper--by 46 artists such as Theresa Bernstein, Ilse Bing, Albert Bloch, Adolph Gottlieb, Jacques Lipchitz, Morris Louis, Robert Motherwell, Elie Nadelman, Arnold Newman, Larry Rivers, Ben Shahn, Aaron, Siskind,
Raphael Soyer, Alfred Stiglitz, Max Weber and Weegee.
He early admired the work of American painters such as Edward Hopper, Reginald Marsh and
Raphael Soyer. He also came to admire the work of such photographers as Walker Evans, Edward Steichen and Man Ray, although his own photographic style became very different from theirs.
In the 1920s when there were few women artists and art educators, Temima Gezari began her career as an artist studying at Parsons New York School of Fine and Applied Arts, studying with
Raphael Soyer, and in the 1930s painting with Diego Rivera and studying at Columbia University, the New School for Social Research, and Hunter College.
Raphael Soyer addressed the problems and Isabel Bishop the possibilities of feminized occupations.
Indeed, in 1960, he, along with such artists as Edward Hopper and
Raphael Soyer, took part in protests against the Whitney Museum's exclusion of figurative art from its shows.
Also on the walls overlooking the dining area are a painting by Alfred Maurer of twin female heads and one by
Raphael Soyer depicting a dancer in leotard and tights.
Horowitz was raised in Sunnyside Gardens, a ten-block development in Long Island City he remembers as a kind of Communist outpost of Greenwich Village colonized by party activists who included a sprinkling of creative types like the painters Moses and
Raphael Soyer. Horowitz's parents were teachers, forced from their jobs in 1952 for refusing to answer questions about their party membership.
She would have us believe that, once deciphered,
Raphael Soyer's images illustrate the psychological stresses of being an alienated Jew in twentieth-century New York.
Other American prints achieving record prices included
Raphael Soyer's "The Mission," which sold for $20,700; and Hans Hofmann's "Composition in Blue," which sold for $17,250.