La Cienega Area

Back in the 1930s, urban American scene painters Raphael and Moses Soyer were part of the New York art scene serving up a realist art that promoted traditional American values to an economically depressed nation on the brink of world war. Looking for a sense of identity that was strictly American, these artists appropriated the Ash Can School subjects of everyday scenes and people. However there is little in this collection of figure studies by the Soyer brothers to indicate how deeply they were involved in American Scene painting or the politics of social realism.

These are modest figure drawings and paintings, carefully executed from a model. Both artists’ drew well and rendered the figure with quiet assurance. Strangely, their prints and drawings, favoring energetic, liquid line, are almost indistinguishable from one another. Color or tone is routinely used to form interestingly shaped masses balanced carefully against the empty space of the composition.

But there is nothing in the subject or execution of these pieces that is especially American. Indeed the artist’s use of academic illusionist techniques of foreshortening and perspective, which at the time must have formed a modest backlash against the abstraction of modernism, now feels particularly staid and European in tradition. (Heritage Gallery, 718 La Cienega Blvd., to Nov. 25)