| Moses Soyer: My Message
is People is an exhibition of more than forty drawings,
prints, and sketchbooks by one of America's most noted figurative artists.
The exhibition was curated by Fletcher/Copenhaver Fine Art under the auspices
of the Museum of Arts & Sciences, Daytona Beach, Florida, where it
was first shown in April of 1996. |
Moses Soyer, Dancers and Chairs, lithograph, ca. 1950. |
Moses Soyer: My Message is People, Museum of Arts & Sciences, Daytona Beach, Florida, April-September, 1996. |
Moses Soyer, Dancer, Arms Akimbo, blue and brown ink, ink wash, conté crayon, ca. 1944. |
| Moses Soyer (1899-1974), born in Russia, emigrated to the United States in 1912. He came of age artistically about the time of the Great Depression, and much of his early work was influenced by this cataclysmic event. Soyer was employed as a muralist by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s, but he soon realized that his gifts were not well suited to large public works, and found himself drawn instead to more private and intimate expression. Early on he discovered his primary subject: the human figure, and today Moses is recognized, in the words of one museum director, as "unquestionably one of the important figurative painters of this century" "My Message is people," Moses often said, and the people he painted and drew came mostly from the artistic world of New York City which he observed and depicted from the 1930s until his death in 1974. His models were the people he found around him: his family, dancers who were colleagues of his dancer wife, the seamstresses who made their costumes, other artists, writers, and actors. It was a rich and interesting scene which he put down on canvas and paper. Drawing was always an important discipline for Moses, and he diligently practiced it throughout his life. He worked in a variety of media and sketched everywhere he went. The richly expressive drawings and lithographs he left for posterity are a vivid record, depicted with great skill and sensitivity, of his particular world. |