Raphael Soyer
The Mission
1933
Not on view
Date
1933
Classification
Prints
Medium
Lithograph
Dimensions
Sheet: 15 3/4 × 22 3/4in. (40 × 57.8 cm) Image: 12 1/8 × 17 11/16in. (30.8 × 44.9 cm)
Accession number
36.59
Edition
Ed. 25
Publication
Printed by George C. Miller
Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase
Rights and reproductions
© 1987, Raphael Soyer Estate
The Mission, like Raphael Soyer’s related lithograph Bowery Nocturne, was executed in preparation for a painting. It was inspired by a visit to a mission in New York City that Soyer took with Walter Broe, a homeless man whom the artist employed as a model. In The Mission, five impoverished men share a table, but that is the extent of their social interaction. Each drinks his coffee and munches his bread in a self-imposed isolation that accentuates his individual face, gestures, and actions. Soyer was not unsympathetic to the human plight during the Great Depression, but his approach is devoid of propaganda or Social Realist commentary. Instead, his ability to draw our attention to a range of physical types and responses takes his images beyond the boundaries of the 1930s into a timeless world of human emotions.
