Antiques for Sale > Paintings & Drawings

Pablo Picasso’s iconic painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), had an enormous impact on many artists working early in the 20^th century. Picasso’s biographer, John Richardson, has written of it: The most innovative painting since Giotto…it established a new pictorial syntax; it enabled people to perceive things with new eyes, new minds, new awareness…the first unequivocally twentieth century masterpiece, a principal detonator of the modern movement, the cornerstone of twentieth-century art. (Richardson, John, A Life of Picasso, Volume I, 1881-1906,  Random House, New York City, 1991, p. 475)

Although Soyer, as is seen here, was aware of modernist trends in art in the early 20^th century, he usually resisted the temptation of innovation for the sake of innovation. While American art was going in many different experimental directions, a desire to follow the latest fashions in art was not something in which he was interested. He preferred to work in the earlier tradition of figurative art to express his own personal and unique vision. Even this figure, appropriated from Picasso, has been transformed into a work that is characteristically and identifiably a Moses Soyer.