The Fine Art of [Raphael Soyer] // 10.30.2023

Unless someone motivated takes it upon themselves to go looking, it’s rare for artist’s models to lose their veil of anonymity. “Woman Bathing”, “Two Sisters”, “Dancer with a Fan”—the history of art is littered with with the unnamed. Raphael Soyer, though, keen on portraying individuals rather than generalities, decided in a 1933 portrait to write out his model’s name—“Walter Broe”—right there on the paper. The two had known each other a little while at that point: Broe was a homeless man Soyer had met one night in the early ‘30s a few blocks from the Whitney Museum. The artist was so taken with Broe’s visage and demeanor that he asked him to sit for a painting at his studio. Then he asked him back again, and again, until at some point, Broe just never left. Soyer eventually invited him to move into the studio; he remained there until his death.

As their friendship deepened, something funny started happening in Soyer’s art: the portraits he made of Broe took on an striking resemblance to his own self-portraits. (It should be noted the two looked alike, but not that much alike). The similarities in their painted faces were so uncanny that people began to ask why Soyer had inserted himself into scenes of bread lines and flophouses. The artist, after all, had a home to call his own, and his career in the city was well on its way to established: just two years before he made this particular portrait of Broe, a work of his was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the first time.

Yet in speaking of Transients, his 1936 painting of a group of homeless men seeking shelter for the night, Soyer remarked: “I sympathized with them, identified with them.” While the other artists named on Soyer’s portrait of Broe (Reginald Marsh and Isabel Bishop) also used Broe’s image in their work, in their hands his features were less specific, morphing him into something like a universal symbol of the unhoused man. Soyer kept all the details in, blurring only those he himself shared with Broe (the deep-set cheeks, the thin face, the pointed chin) so the distinctions between the two became fewer and fewer. But why?

Samantha Baskin looks to the Jewish concept of tikkun olam as a potential explanation. Translated to “repairing the world,” the phrase’s connotations run a little deeper—more akin to a sense of obligation to the welfare of all people. Broe wasn’t Jewish (and Soyer wasn’t particularly religious), but still he saw a mirror of himself in Broe’s face and situation. In 1912, when Soyer was just thirteen, he and his family were forced to emigrate from Russia to New York because of their Jewish identity. Soyer and Broe, then, shared narratives of dispossession. In melding their features into a single portrait, Soyer made the interconnectedness of those struggles explicit without being heavy-handed. 

In a Life magazine article from 1939 about an art show held for Broe’s benefit, he’s quoted as saying: “On the merry-go-round of life at last I’ve grabbed the brass ring.” It was likely a nod to having people looking out for him, finally getting those basic survival needs met. But more than that, I’d wager, it stemmed from a sense of being witnessed as an individual possessing value both inherent and intractable, no matter his circumstance.

To inquire about this piece, head here.