At the outset of her study on Soyer and Jewish identity, Samantha Baskind acknowledges the knotty complications of her venture: “Raphael Soyer did not want to be known as a Jewish artist…. So why am I … writing a book on Soyer and Jewish art” (1–2)? Despite the urban realist’s persistent denial that his religious and cultural heritage influenced his art, this book makes a compelling case for its primacy. While the artist preferred and promoted the labels “American” and “New York” in association with himself and his art, Baskind digs deeper to show how Soyer’s works were informed by his Jewishness, even if in coded, subtle ways.

Soyer (1899–1987) was born into an educated, politically liberal family in Tombov, Russia. Victims of czarist pressure and anti-Semitism, the family was deported in 1912 and ultimately settled in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Soyer studied at the Cooper Union, the National Academy of Design, and the Art Students League, and, like many artists during the interwar years, he focused his attention on realist scenes of the city, becoming especially known for his depictions of workers and the poor.

Baskind’s text is a welcome and much-needed addition to extant scholarship on Soyer and twentieth-century American art. It is the first book-length study on the artist since the 1970s and the first substantive scholarly discussion of his work since Ellen Wiley Todd’s The “New Woman” Revised (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), in which he was considered in the context of gender and the Fourteenth Street School. Straying from recent trends in the history of American art, Baskind focuses primarily on biography and little on social and historical context, but this approach is fitting for an artist so consumed with the exploration of his own identity. Her collateral images are few, and those included are from the art-historical canon rather than the wider field of visual culture. Despite this traditional appearance, Baskind’s method is clearly informed by revisionist scholarship. In arguing against Bernard Berenson’s claim that a significant Jewish art did not exist, she makes it known that her intent is not to repeat earlier scholars’ search for an inherent and essentialist Jewishness based on biology or birthright. Neither, she states, does she aim to replicate the work of modernist critic Harold Rosenberg, who attempted to identify a distinct yet general Jewish style that transcends era and nationality.

Soyer’s ongoing struggle with and search for his own identity is mirrored in the four autobiographies and the numerous self-portraits he completed throughout his career; it is with these materials that Baskind appropriately begins her exploration. The artist’s inscription on one 1927 self-portrait that he was a “New York” painter leads her to discuss how the young Soyer masked his difference in an attempt to gain professional success and to blend in with his artistic mentors and colleagues. Soyer greatly admired painters such as Thomas Eakins, Robert Henri, and John Sloan and yearned to be a part of the “American” realist tradition. At a time when the art world was deeply nationalistic, and Thomas Hart Benton railed on Alfred Stieglitz for being a “Hoboken Jew” who could not possibly produce a true American art, Soyer’s reticence is understandable.

Yet, as Baskind effectively shows, Soyer “was neither able to claim nor escape his Jewishness” (78). After exploring the artist’s own struggle with the public acknowledgment of his art as “Jewish,” she critically examines the ways in which art historians and critics have used—or rather misused—the term. Her point of focus for this discussion is Soyer’s Dancing Lesson (1926), a painting persistently included in general histories of Jewish art and often cited as an example of the intrinsic Jewishness of Soyer’s work. Baskind explains that many of these discussions are faulty, based simply on the fact that Soyer was born a Jew or on a vaguely defined, “instinctive understanding as to what constitutes Jewishness” (4). The author suggests that what makes art Jewish is not birthright or an overarching, generic “Jewish” style, for “ ‘Jewish artist,’ just like ‘American artist,’ says nothing about style” (63). Rather, Jewish art can be distinguished because it addresses Jewish themes and “says something about Judaism through its content and/or the influence of its creator’s Jewish values,” whether religious or cultural (64).

Baskind makes a compelling case that Soyer revealed his Jewish identity in his art not only through inclusions of recognizable Jewish iconography (such as the Yiddish newspaper his grandmother holds in Dancing Lesson), but also through subtler means as well. She suggests that the artist was attracted to themes of homelessness, for example, because of his own identification, as a Jewish immigrant, with displacement and isolation. In light of this argument, it is particularly intriguing that many critics and historians mistakenly identified Soyer’s depictions of Walter Broe, a homeless man who often posed for Soyer, as the artist himself. Certainly, as Baskind acknowledges, there is some physical similarity between the two men, but what else was it about Soyer’s portrayal of Broe that made critics consistently mistake one man for the other? Soyer depicted Broe in much the same way he pictured himself, with the same vacant yet questioning gaze and sense of isolation, which Baskind proposes may be the root of the mistaken identification. Although alienation and isolation were key themes for many urban realists during this era (think Edward Hopper), and this context, while mentioned, could be enriched, Baskind provides ample evidence of Soyer’s personal sense of displacement to make her interpretation convincing.

In his elder years, Soyer ultimately accepted his Jewish identity and expressed it openly. The last two chapters look at the artist’s lesser-known works dating from the late 1950s until his death in 1987. It is testimony to the author and her approach that she treats them with equal interest and seriousness as Soyer’s earlier works, rather than shrugging them off because they do not fit in with Soyer’s better-known paintings. Baskind first examines a series of group portraits Soyer completed from the late 1950s through the mid-1970s, in which the artist places himself, statically posed and staring blankly at the viewer, in the midst of a bustling urban crowd. The people surrounding him are often younger and wearing updated (for the time) dress and hairstyles, in contrast to the gray-haired, wrinkled Soyer in brown suit and hat who stands in the background or on the margins of this activity. Like many other interwar realists, Soyer stubbornly clung to a representational style despite the rise of abstract painting after World War II, and Baskind suggests that these works could stand as Soyer’s own acknowledgment of his outmoded style of painting. Yet, as she points out, the artist was questioning not only his style, but also his long held mindset about his heritage. In Village East Street Scene (1965–66), he obscures his own image in the background while that of Allen Ginsberg, the Beat poet who dealt openly with his Jewishness in his work, stands prominently in the foreground. Here, Ginsberg represents a new age in which masking one’s identity is no longer necessary or even desirable.

In the final chapter, Baskind examines Soyer’s book illustrations completed during the 1970s and 1980s for publications by the famed Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer. She frames these works as a sort of a homecoming, in which the artist finally comes to terms with the open expression of his religious and cultural heritage by representing subject matter that is explicitly Jewish in nature. She explains that this pattern of youthful disavowal and elderly acceptance of one’s heritage was common for many Jewish immigrants of Soyer’s generation, as the cultural climate of the 1970s was significantly more tolerant of difference than that of the 1920s. What is fascinating about these images is that they are rendered in a completely different style than Soyer’s earlier, better-known works. Further, for each illustration project, Soyer adopted a new style, one he apparently thought appropriate for the topic at hand or the mood of the text. For example, he used a Chagallesque style for a story about Jewish folk life and sketchlike reportorial drawings in the manner of Jacob Epstein to illustrate a story about Jewish daily life. While there may not be a singular, overarching Jewish style, this suggests that, for Soyer at least, style and form were key to communicating a sense of his religious and cultural identity.

Ultimately, this book is more about Soyer’s cultural identity than about his religious practice, as there remains little evidence of the latter. Regardless, Baskind makes a convincing case for viewing Soyer’s art as a visual proclamation of his Jewish identity, an aspect of the artist’s life that, in spite of his own denials, should not be overlooked when considering his art.