Winter Art Show

Raphael Soyer’s Village East Street Scene (left) is a kind of group portrait of New York writers in the mid-1960s, including, left to right, the playwright LeRoi Jones and the poets Gregory Corso, Diane di Prima, and Allen Ginsberg. Born in Russia, Soyer came to the United States in 1912 and studied at Cooper Union. During the late 1950s and 1960s, he lived on lower Second Avenue. In this painting, he once wrote, he tried to “capture the feeling of that area—the bearded long-haired young men; the loosehaired, blue-jeaned girls with ecstatic faces, white mothers with Negro babies.…” Soyer himself appears in the painting, touching his hand to his hat.