Defending his position, he stated: "I choose to be a realist and a humanist in art." He was an artist of the Great Depression. He was adamant in his belief in representational art and strongly opposed the dominant force of abstract art during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Soyer persistently investigated a number of themes-female nudes, portraits of friends and family, New York and, especially, its people-in his paintings, drawings, watercolors and prints. After his formal education ended, Soyer became associated with the Fourteenth Street School of painters that included Reginald Marsh, Isabel Bishop, Kenneth Hayes Miller, Peggy Bacon and, his teacher, Guy Pene du Bois. While there, he studied with Guy Pene du Bois and Boardman Robinson, taking up the gritty urban subjects of the Ashcan school. He continued his studies at the National Academy of Design and, subsequently, at the Art Students League of New York. Raphael pursued his art education at the free schools of the Cooper Union where he met Chaim Gross, who became a lifelong friend from that time. Due to Russian oppression, the Soyer family was forced to emigrate in 1912 to the United States, where they ultimately settled in the Bronx. Their father, Abraham Soyer, a Hebrew scholar, writer and teacher, raised his six children in an intellectual environment in which much emphasis was placed on academic and artistic pursuits. Raphael Soyer and his identical twin brother, Moses, were born in Borisoglebsk, Tambov, a southern province of Russia in 1899.
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