Unhappy Angels

Have you ever sat in a railway station and watched people killing time? Do they not sit a little like crestfallen angels--with their broken arches and their fallen stomachs?

--Henry Miller

Raphael Soyer is a shy little artist who would rather paint such crestfallen angels than anything else. His models, he says, are not professionals, but "mostly young girls who are interested in dancing or writing or philosophy. Usually they are not very happy."

On exhibition in a Manhattan gallery last week, Soyer's painted models showed their unhappiness by their slouching poses, and the drab color of their flesh and their surroundings. What made gallerygoers look at them twice, and also made museum directors from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Manhattan's Metropolitan and Pittsburgh's Carnegie Institute buy up the best, was a familiar (and faintly angelic) detachment in their expressions: the off-guard pensiveness of girls who think themselves alone and unobserved--dressing and undressing, yawning, idly reading, or waiting for a train or subway.

Born in Russia on Christmas Day 48 years ago, Soyer came to the U.S. at twelve, left high school after his sophomore year to work and study painting at night. Like his less well-known brothers Moses and Isaac Soyer, who also paint, Raphael grew up with the notion of painting what he knew as skillfully and unpretentiously as he knew how. Last week's show was his first in five years, and for it he had painted 23 new oils.

Raphael reaches his Broadway studio by subway at 9 each morning, bringing with him, stored in his mind, some of the life of Manhattan's streets and of the lonely apartments high above the streets. By the time he catches the uptown subway to return to his wife and daughter at 5:30, the chances are that a little of that same disordered life has been transferred to canvas. "My work is factual," says Soyer. "So much art that's exhibited nowadays has nothing to do with life. I go to see the new painters. I know what's going on, but I deliberately choose to paint in this way."

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