Men at the Mission

1935
Oil on Canvas

A study in pencil for Men at the Mission is in a private collection.  Related works include one of Soyer’s best-known black and white prints, titled The Mission and another graphite drawing c. 1933, How Long Since You Wrote to Mother? also bears a close resemblance to Men at the Mission.

Raphael Soyer and his twin Moses were born in the southern Russian city of Borisoglebsk, Russia in 1899.  The Soyer family was forced to immigrate to the United States in 1913, due to Soyer Pere’s progressive politics and the anti-Semitism of the Russian Tsar’s regime.  The family settled in Manhattan’s Lower East Side and by 1915 Soyer was attending art classes at the Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design; later he studied at the Art Students League.  Soyer’s immediate surroundings provided him with great inspiration and subject matter from the beginning of his career; like members of the so-called Ashcan School, he strove to capture the bustle of the immigrant neighborhood and its attendant poverty.  

In the late 1920s, while studying at the Art Students League, Soyer’s teacher Guy Pène du Bois introduced him to Charles Daniel, who gave Soyer his first solo exhibition in 1929.  By the early 1930s he was an established artist, often referred to as a member of the Social Realist movement.  But unlike other Social Realist artists, Soyer’s politics were subtler; his interest’s lay more with the realistic evocation of his subjects’ world rather than with the expression of a political ideology.

Painted in the midst of the United States’ Great Depression, Men at the Mission is an outstanding example of Soyer’s ability to capture a mood.  Soyer focuses on the two figures at right by casting a somber light upon them, and rendering the other men with less definition. The physical features of the men at right are a study in contrast.  The half-collapsed face of the older man, with his sad eyes, the deep furrows of his forehead and his shrunken posture are made all the more melancholy by the younger man beside him, with his strong jaw and assertive posture.  And yet the somber tone of destitution is suffused throughout the painting.  The artist uses a palette of varying browns to sustain the mood, and he places at the center the painting the paltry meal for these men:  three slices of bread.  The young man’s eyes convey despair as well, yet they also suggest a sense of hunger, perhaps even ambition.  By concentrating on these two men, one young and one old, Soyer effectively communicates the devastating breadth of the Depression.