Oil on canvas, circa 1964. 670x763 mm; 26x30 inches. Signed lower right.
Provenance Forum Gallery, New York (label). Purchased from the above by private collector, New York, November 1964. Thence by descent to current owners, New York
The present painting is related to, and possibly a study for, one of Raphael Soyer's largest paintings, Village East Street Scene (1965-66), in the collection of the Seattle Art Museum (accession number 2012.15.35).
During the late 1950's and 1960's Soyer and his family lived on Second Avenue in the East Village, which was then the heart of New York's avant-garde scene. In Soyer's Diary of an Artist (published in 1977), his diary entry from April 2, 1966 concerned Village East Street Scene: "It is the result of my seven years living and working on lower Second Avenue... I became acquainted with some of the artists and writers. I tried to get the feeling of that area, the bearded, long-haired men, the loose-haired blue-jeaned girls with ecstatic faces, white mothers with Negro babies— on the background of drab walls bearing Fall-out Shelter signs above indecent and sentimental scribblings, barrages of green and red lights, and arrowed one-way street signs. I wanted to convey a feeling of energy and life in an atmosphere of deprivation and drabness... Village East [Street Scene] is a painting composed of portraits, some of them well known, for example, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Diane di Prima." Village East Street Scene and Soyer's Homage to Thomas Eakins were exhibited at the Forum Gallery in April 1966, ahead of the Whitney Museum's retrospective.
