i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

Pictures of PeopleAlice Neel’sAmerican Portrait GalleryPamela AllaraBrandeis University PressPublished by University Press of New EnglandHanover and London

Brandeis University PressPublished by University Press of New England, Hanover, NH 03755© 1998 by the Trustees of Brandeis UniversityAll rights reservedPrinted in the United States of AmericaISBN for paperback edition: 978–1–61168–513–8ISBN for ebook edition: 978–1–61168–049–2library of congress cataloging-in-publication dataAllara, Pamela.Pictures of people : Alice Neel’s American portrait gallery / by Pamela Allara.p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0–87451–837–71. Neel, Alice, 1900– —Criticism and interpretation. 2. United States—Biography—Portraits. I. Neel, Alice, 1900–. II. Title.ND1329.N36A9 1998 97–18403759.13—DC21Throughout this book, “Estate of Alice Neel” includes worksin the collections of Richard Neel, Hartley S. Neel,their respective families, and Neel Arts, Inc.5432

NOTE TO EREADERSAs electronic reproduction rights are unavailable for images appearing inthis book’s print edition, no illustrations are included in this ebook. Readersinterested in seeing the art referenced here should either consult this book’sprint edition or visit an online resource such as aliceneel.com or artstor.org.

CONTENTSillustrations included in the print editionacknowledgmentsixxvIntroduction: The Portrait GalleryxviiPART I: THE SUBJECTS OF THE ARTISTChapter 1: The Creation (of a) Myth 3Chapter 2: From Portraiture to Pictures of People: 13Neel’s Portrait ConventionsChapter 3: Starting Out from Home, 1927–1932 29vii

viii / ContentsPART II: NEEL’S SOCIAL REALIST ART:1933–1981Chapter 4: Art on the Left in the 1930s 45Chapter 5: The Cold War Battles: 1940–1980 67Chapter 6: El Barrio: Portrait of Spanish Harlem 90PART III: THE NEW YORK ART NETWORK:1960–1980Chapter 7: A Gallery of Players: Artist-Critic-Dealer 111Chapter 8: The Women’s Wing: Neel and Feminist Art 127PART IV: THE EXTENDED FAMILYChapter 9: Truth Unveiled: The Portrait Nude 147Chapter 10: Shifting Constellations: The Family (Dis)Membered 162notes 177bibliography 213photography credits 233

ILLUSTRATIONS INCLUDEDIN THE PRINT EDITIONFrontispiece: Jonathan Brand, Alice NeelFig. 1. Anon., Mae WestFig. 2. Alice Neel, Annie SprinkleFig. 3. Alice Neel, Beggars, HavanaFig. 4. Alice Neel, Woman in Pink Velvet HatFig. 5. Otto Dix, The Journalist Sylvia von HardenFig. 6. Robert Henri, Eva GreenFig. 7. Alice Neel, Two Black Girls (Antonia andCarmen Encarnacion)Fig. 8. Norman Rockwell, Richard Milhous NixonFig. 9. Alice Neel, Sol AlkaitisFig. 10. Alice Neel, Fuller Brush ManFig. 11. Alice Neel, GinnyFig. 12. Alice Neel, Richard in the Era of the CorporationFig. 13. Alice Neel, Benny and Mary Ellen AndrewsFig. 14. Edgar Degas, Edmondo and Therese MorbilliFig. 15. Alice Neel, Bessie BorisFig. 16. Alice Neel, Last Sicknessix

x / Illustrations in the Print EditionFig. 17. Alice Neel, The FamilyFig. 18. Alice Neel, Helen Merrell LyndFig. 19. Anon., “Cross-Section of a Parisian House”Fig. 20. Alice Neel, The IntellectualFig. 21. Alice Neel and Fanya Foss outside of Foss’s GreenwichVillage bookstoreFig. 22. Charles Demuth, Scene after Georges Stabs Himself withthe ScissorsFig. 23. Alice Neel, Well-Baby ClinicFig. 24. Alice Neel, RequiemFig. 25. Edvard Munch, The ScreamFig. 26. Alice Neel, Futility of EffortFig. 27. Alice Neel, Suicidal Ward, Philadelphia General HospitalFig. 28. Alice Neel, Symbols (Doll and Apple)Fig. 29. Alice and Isabetta, February 2, 1929, Sedgwick Avenue,The BronxFig. 30. Frida Kahlo, Henry Ford HospitalFig. 31. Carlos Enriquez, Alice NeelFig. 32. Carlos Enriquez, IsabettaFig. 33. Alice Neel, IsabettaFig. 34. Ben Shahn, The Passion of Sacco and VanzettiFig. 35. Alice Neel, Snow on Cornelia StreetFig. 36. Alice Neel, Uneeda Biscuit StrikeFig. 37. Alice Neel, Nazis Murder JewsFig. 38. Alice Neel, T. B. HarlemFig. 39. Alice Neel, Sam PutnamFig. 40. Anon., Sam Putnam, c. 1933Fig. 41. Alice Neel, Max WhiteFig. 42. Alice Neel, Joe GouldFig. 43. Alice Neel, Joe GouldFig. 44. Alice Neel, Kenneth FearingFig. 45. Alice Neel, Pat WhalenFig. 46. Nahum Tschacbasov, DeportationFig. 47. Alice Neel, Childbirth or, MaternityFig. 48. “Canvases . . . Are Sold for Junk”Fig. 49. Alice Neel, A Quiet Summer’s DayFig. 50. Alice Neel, A Bird in Her HairFig. 51. Alice Neel, Judge MedinaFig. 52. Alice Neel, Angela CalomarisFig. 53. Alice Neel, The Death of Mother BloorFig. 54. Alice Neel, Eisenhower, McCarthy, Dulles

Illustrations in the Print Edition / xiFig. 55.Fig. 56.Fig. 57.Fig. 58.Fig. 59.Fig. 60.Fig. 61.Fig. 62.Fig. 63.Fig. 64.Fig. 65.Fig. 66.Fig. 67.Fig. 68.Fig. 69.Fig. 70.Fig. 71.Fig. 72.Fig. 73.Fig. 74.Fig. 75.Fig. 76.Fig. 77.Fig. 78.Fig. 79.Fig. 80.Fig. 81.Fig. 82.Fig. 83.Fig. 84.Fig. 85.Fig. 86.Fig. 87.Fig. 88.Fig. 89.Fig. 90.Fig. 91.Alice Neel, Save Willie McGee (detail)Shurpin, The Morning of Our FatherlandAlice Neel, SamAlice Neel, SamAlice Neel, Mike GoldAlice Neel, Art ShieldsAlice Neel, Bill McKieAlice Neel, Alice ChildressAlice Neel, Allen GinsbergAlice Neel, Mike Gold, In MemoriamAlice Neel, David GordonAlice Neel, Virgil ThomsonAlice Neel, Jar from SamarkandAlice Neel, The Soyer BrothersLida Moser, Alice Neel and Raphael Soyerat the Graham galleryAlice Neel, Gus HallKomar & Melamid, Stalin in Front of a MirrorAlice Neel, Call Me JoeAlice Neel, Fire EscapeAlice Neel, JoséAlice Neel, José (Puerto Rico Libre!)Alice Neel, Alice and JoséAlice Neel, José and GuitarAlice Neel, Puerto Rican Mother and Child(Margarita and Carlitos)Alice Neel, The Spanish FamilyDan Weiner, Morris Levinson, The President of Rival DogFood and His Family Outside Their Home in ScarsdaleAlice Neel, Black Spanish-American FamilyAlice Neel, Richard and HartleyAlice Neel, Two Puerto Rican BoysAlice Neel, Three Puerto Rican GirlsAlice Neel, James Farmer’s Children (Tami andAbbey Farmer)Alice Neel, Georgie ArceAlice Neel, Georgie ArceAlice Neel, Georgie ArceAlice Neel, Ballet DancerAlice Neel, Harold CruseAlice Neel, James Farmer

xii / Illustrations in the Print EditionFig. 92. Alice Neel, Abdul RahmanFig. 93. Edward Hopper, Early Sunday MorningFig. 94. Alice Neel, Fire EscapeFig. 95. “Broader Horizons,” 1920s; advertisement for A. T. & T.Fig. 96. Alice Neel, Rag in WindowFig. 97. Robert Frank, Parade, Hoboken, New JerseyFig. 98. Alice Neel, Sunset in Spanish HarlemFig. 99. Alice Neel, SnowFig. 100. Alice Neel, 107th and BroadwayFig. 101. Alice Neel in Pull My DaisyFig. 102. Alice Neel, Milton Resnick and Pat PasloffFig. 103. Alice Neel, Frank O’Hara, No. 2Fig. 104. Alice Neel, Randall in ExtremisFig. 105. Alice Neel, Hubert CrehanFig. 106. Alice Neel, Walter GutmanFig. 107. Alice Neel, Red Grooms and Mimi Gross, No. 2Fig. 108. Alice Neel, The Family (John Gruen, Jane Wilson, and Julia)Fig. 109. Larry Rivers, O’HaraFig. 110. Alice Neel, Christopher LazareFig. 111. Charles Demuth, Distinguished AirFig. 112. Alice Neel, Paul KuyerFig. 113. Alice Neel, Henry GeldzahlerFig. 114. Alice Neel, Andy WarholFig. 115. Alice Neel, Duane HansonFig. 116. Alice Neel, Robbie TillotsonFig. 117. Alice Neel, Gerard MalangaFig. 118. Alice Neel, Jackie Curtis and Rita RedFig. 119. Alice Neel, David Bourdon and Gregory BattcockFig. 120. Christopher Makos, Andy WarholFig. 121. Alice Neel, John PerreaultFig. 122. Thomas Eakins, Bill Duckett in the Roomsof the Philadelphia Art Students LeagueFig. 123. Alice Neel, Kate MilletFig. 124. Alice Neel, Marxist Girl (Irene Peslikis)Fig. 125. Alice Neel, Jack BaurFig. 126. Alice Neel, Nancy and the Rubber PlantFig. 127. Alice Neel, Cindy Nemser and ChuckFig. 128. Alice Neel, June BlumFig. 129. Alice Neel, Bella AbzugFig. 130. June Blum, Betty Friedan as the ProphetFig. 131. Alice Neel, Linda Nochlin and Daisy

Illustrations in the Print Edition / xiiiFig. 132. Alice Neel, Portrait of Ellen JohnsonFig. 133. Alice Neel, MarisolFig. 134. Alice Neel, Louise Lieber, SculptorFig. 135. Alice Neel, Mary D. GarrardFig. 136. Alice Neel, Faith RinggoldFig. 137. Alice Neel, Sari DienesFig. 138. Alice Neel, KanuthiaFig. 139. Alice Neel, Self-PortraitFig. 140. Alice Neel, Ethel AshtonFig. 141. Alice and Nadya in Greenwich VillageFig. 142. Alice Neel, Nadya OlyanovaFig. 143. Alice Neel, Nadya NudeFig. 144. Alice Neel, Nadya and NonaFig. 145. Alice Neel, Kenneth DoolittleFig. 146. Alice Neel, Kenneth DoolittleFig. 147. Alice Neel, Kenneth DoolittleFig. 148. Alice Neel, Joie de VivreFig. 149. Alice Neel, untitled (Bathroom Scene)Fig. 150. Alice Neel, AlienationFig. 151. Raphael Soyer, NudeFig. 152. Alice Neel, Pregnant MariaFig. 153. Alice Neel, Blanche Angel PregnantFig. 154. Cover, Ms. magazine, 1972Fig. 155. Alice Neel, Pregnant WomanFig. 156. Alice Neel, Margaret Evans PregnantFig. 157. Edvard Munch, PubertyFig. 158. Alice Neel, HartleyFig. 159. Alice Neel, Drafted NegroFig. 160. Alice Neel, ThanksgivingFig. 161. Alice Neel, Dead FatherFig. 162. Alice Neel, The SeaFig. 163. Alice Neel, Cutglass SeaFig. 164. Alice Neel, Sunset, Riverside DriveFig. 165. Alice Neel, Dr. James DineenFig. 166. Alice Neel, Georgie NeelFig. 167. Alice Neel, Annemarie and GeorgieFig. 168. Alice Neel, The FamilyFig. 169. Alice Neel, Pregnant Julie and AlgisFig. 170. Alice Neel, SubconsciousFig. 171. Alice Neel, The Flight of the MotherFig. 172. Salvador Dali, The Architectonic Angelus of Millet

xiv / Illustrations in the Print EditionFig. 173.Fig. 174.Fig. 175.Fig. 176.Fig. 177.Fig. 178.Fig. 179.Fig. 180.Fig. 181.Fig. 182.John Graham, Head of WomanAlice Neel, Sam and RichardAlice Neel, Richard at Age FiveAlice Neel, MinotaurAlice Neel, PeggyAlice Neel, LonelinessAlice Neel, Mother and Child (Nancy and Olivia)Alice Neel, Nancy and VictoriaAlice Neel, Nancy and the Twins (5 months)Alice Neel, The Family

ACKNOWLEDGMENTSThis project began while I was teaching at Tufts University, and for their helpwith organizing the exhibition Exterior/Interior: Alice Neel, I thank my colleaguesthere: Erika Ketelhohn, then acting curator at the Tufts University ArtGallery, Elizabeth Wylie, the gallery director, Chris Cavalier, Fine Arts Departmentphotographer, and my graduate research assistants Nancy Chute,Renata Hedjuk, and Catherine Mayes. I also thank Prof. Margaret HendersonFloyd for her continuing support of my research.At Brandeis University, I received the Mazer Grant for Faculty Researchand the Marver and Sheva Bernstein Faculty Fellowship for a semester’s leaveto complete the manuscript. Among my colleagues at Brandeis, Nancy Scottin the Fine Arts Department and Erika Harth in the Romance Languages Departmenthave provided helpful critiques of my arguments. Kathryn Hamill, agraduate student at Massachusetts College of Art, helped to compile sitters’ biographies.My student Sarah Shatz has been an invaluable help in all phases ofthe manuscript preparation.The research for this book was completed under a senior postdoctoral fellowshipat the Research and Scholars Center of the National Museum of AmericanArt, Smithsonian Institution, where I received valued imput from curaxv

xvi / Acknowledgmentstors Virginia Mecklenburg and Harry Rand, as well as from Judy Throm, chiefarchivist for the Archives of American Art, and Carolyn K. Carr, deputy directorof the National Portrait Gallery. A number of colleagues in the ƒeld havekindly read and commented on speciƒc sections of this book, and I would liketo thank in particular Patricia Hills, Susan Platt, Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt,Mary Garrard, Andrew Hemingway, Juan Martinez, and Trevor Fairbrother.I am especially grateful to my friend and colleague in the Fine ArtsDepartment at Brandeis, Prof. Lynette Bosch, for patiently reading and commentingon all of the initial drafts.Among those people who consented to be interviewed for the book, MayStevens, Rudolf Baranik, Margaret Belcher, Philip Bonosky, and Peggy Brookshave been especially generous with their time and information. Central to theentire project, of course, has been the Neel Family—Neel’s sons, Richard andHartley, and her daughter-in-law Nancy. Nancy was invaluable as Neel’s assistantduring the artist’s lifetime, and my gratitude for her un„agging assistanceon this project could never be adequately acknowledged. Adam Sheffer andthe staff at the Robert Miller Gallery has also been unfailingly helpful in providinginformation and reproductions. John Cheim, at the Cheim and ReadGallery, was especially supportive in the early phases of this project.John Hose, executive assistant to the president of Brandeis and governor ofthe Brandeis University Press, has guided the manuscript through to publicationwith consummate professionalism. To Paul Schnee, formerly at the UniversityPress of New England, and Phyllis Deutsch, who took over the project,I give thanks for insightful editorial comment.Finally I thank my family, especially my grown children Mark and AnnMarie, for their love and support. This book is dedicated to the memory of mylate husband, Michael.P.A.

IntroductionThe Portrait GalleryAlice Neel made her ƒrst mature paintings in 1927 and continued paintinguntil her death in 1984. A realist whose primary genre was portraiture, she consideredherself fortunate to have been active from the early to the late twentiethcentury and to have recorded the changes and continuities within thatspan of time as they were registered in the faces and bodies of her sitters. In1960, she described herself as a collector of souls, a phrase ground into a clichéby critics in the 1970s. But because her work did not begin to sell until she waspast seventy, she was most certainly a collector of her own work; her sittersmaintained their presence in her apartment long after their physical departure.Her home was thus a portrait gallery of vivid likenesses stacked togetherlike geological strata marking the various “epochs” of the century. I have chosenthe portrait gallery as the dominant metaphor for this thematic discussionof Neel’s work because it suggests the collective, historical nature of her art.However, this public monument is the product of an idiosyncratic, individualvision.Cumulatively, Neel’s paintings of people provide an artist’s interpretation ofsigniƒcant social, political, and intellectual trends in twentieth-century Americanculture, as exempliƒed by three overlapping populations in New York City:the left-wing artists and political activists in Greenwich Village during the Dexvii

xviii / Pictures of Peoplepression, the residents of Spanish Harlem during the McCarthy era, and theNew York artworld during the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. Herportrait gallery is a personal chronicle, a means of deƒning her life in terms ofthe people who entered it, a necessarily contingent sample of American culture.A visual novel, Neel’s multilayered narrative is held together by the consistentthread of her family life. In the course of seeking answers to her centralinvestigation of the parameters of personal identity at a given moment, Neelneglected few disputed terrains of American culture in her art—whether ofrace, class, or sex.Her sprawling gallery, some three thousand works long, was a means of freezinglife’s „ux in order to acknowledge the potential signiƒcance of even themost trivial or „eeting of human interactions. “Every person is a new universeunique with its own laws emphasizing some belief or phase of life immersed intime and rapidly passing by,” 1 Neel said. She examined any and all evidencefor what it might yield; for as a con„uence of history’s forces, no person couldbe uninteresting or insigniƒcant. Only a small proportion of her sitters belongedto the artistic elite who made lasting creative contributions to Americancultural life; the rest she rescued for history simply by recording their visagesas witnesses to their time.Neel referred to herself as an old-fashioned painter of portraits, still lifes,and landscapes. It was not merely her realistic subject matter that can be consideredanachronistic, however. In an age of mechanical reproduction, Neelused the medium of oil paint rather than photography to make her portraits. Inan era of mass communication, she made objects that had virtually no audienceat the time and have only a very limited audience today. A realist in theage of modernism, Neel based her efforts on the faith that her representationswould be consonant with an external reality. She held to realism’s fundamentaltenet that painting’s function was to mirror or re„ect reality, and because inher view individuals best re„ected the age, portraiture was the most appropriategenre for her realist art. Neel’s contribution to American art history wasthus not formal innovation but rather her ability to use a genre that was consideredexhausted and to invest it with renewed relevance. Because these subjectswere tied to the speciƒc instance—poverty as an Hispanic male suffering fromdisease, pregnancy as the physical discomfort and anxiety of a white woman—Neel’s realism claimed by implication a documentary authority. The daringwith which she poured new wine into old bottles has given me permission tolink old-fashioned content analysis with cultural history. To address the work, toanalyze what appears there, and then to open it out to the larger cultural patternof which it is a piece is to initiate a process that I believe parallels Neel’s own.Neel provided her own pedigree for her approach. The model to which shereferred continually in her lectures was Honoré de Balzac’s Comédie Humaine:

Introduction: The Portrait Gallery / xix“That’s really what life is—The Human Comedy. And put together, that’s whatmy paintings are.” 2 If this nineteenth-century French novelist seems a ratherremote point of origin, Neel, in referencing Balzac, located her own positionwithin the spectrum of American cultural life. In the late 1920s and early1930s, when Neel’s aesthetic ideas were being formulated, Balzac was cited inbroad terms as a precedent for a socially concerned art by radical writers. Neel’sadmiration for Balzac is indicative not simply of her personal taste but of theliterary criticism of the period. With Georg Lukacs, for instance, she wouldhave insisted that realist art, to properly depict the “forces” of history, must beabout “individuals and individual destinies.”During the 1930s, the signiƒcance of popular culture as the artistic expressionof the masses was also recognized. An interest in the study and exhibitionof folk art, for instance, was paralleled by an interest in the oral traditions of theworking class. Neel’s visual history, like the oral histories collected by the FederalWriter’s Project of the Works Progress Administration, served as a voice forthose segments of society unacknowledged in previous histories. This approachentered mainstream historical writing during the 1970s. As the Italianhistorian Carlo Ginzburg wrote in his Preface to the Cheese and the Worms(1976):In the past historians could be accused of wanting to know only about the greatdeeds of kings, but today this is certainly no longer true. More and more they areturning toward what their predecessors passed over in silence, discarded, or simplyignored. “Who built Thebes of the seven gates?” Bertolt Brecht’s “literate worker”was already asking . . . The sources tell us nothing about these anonymous masons,but the question retains all its signiƒcance . . . [W]e have come to recognize thatthose who were once paternalistically described as “the common people in a civilizedsociety” in fact possessed a culture of their own . . . Even today the culture ofthe subordinate class is largely oral. 3The portrait, however anachronistic it seemed as a genre to Neel’s own contemporaries,is in fact ideally suited to a project modeled on oral history. Weare introduced to individuals, one on one, and to their history as told to a narrator/translator.Visualizing history as it is embodied in people who at one andthe same time may be academics and revolutionaries, Black Muslims and taxidrivers, is a means of understanding it as shaped by human action rather thanby abstract forces.As a woman artist working in the retrograde medium of portraiture, Neeloccupied a marginalized position in the New York artworld, a position replicatedin her living and family arrangements. In order to pursue a professionalcareer, the artist fashioned herself as a rebel, adapting the pre-existing persona

xx / Pictures of Peopleof the bawdy woman in order to “create her own world” rather than replicatingexisting social constructs. Her antisocial behavior created the autonomy ordistance necessary for her cultural critique. Alone in her own domain (herhome and the genre of portraiture), she could create a body of work that by remainingon the periphery could lay claim to the avant-garde tradition withinmodernism.Because I believe that Neel’s working method and its premises were inseparablefrom the product, I have tried to organize this text in a manner thatwould be faithful to her method. I conceive of her method, her modus operandi,as piecework. Neel did not start from a grand design; rather, she startedfrom what was available, at hand, lodging the work in the proximate. Picturesof People is also piecework, constructed from thematic blocks: radical politics,the artworld, and the family. The historian cannot move from the work to theartist “behind” it, as that being is so clearly a construct. The Neel referred to inthis text is not, then, Neel the person, whom I never met. “Neel” is an inferencemade from the work, and built from the visual evidence it offers. I havechosen a thematic rather than a chronological approach because, althoughthreaded into the New York artworld from 1927 to 1984, Neel’s art was inmany ways out of its time. As I have put it together, Neel’s art is both antiquatedand prophetic, drawing from nineteenth-century realism while anticipatingmany of the concerns of feminist art of the 1970s. The umbrella of culturalhistory has provided the space to examine literary as well as visual parallels inorder to substantiate my argument that Neel was not alone in her thinking,and that comparable critiques can be found in the artists and writers who wereher peers.In using the metaphor of the portrait gallery, I have deliberately differentiatedNeel’s painting from other works of high art destined for a museum. In anart museum, the portrait is important only as an example of a famous artist’swork. Within the art museum world, the portrait gallery’s status is compromisedby its valuation of the historical importance of the portrait’s sitter overthe painting’s “aesthetic” qualities. Neel’s portrait gallery is her world and theviewer acknowledges each painting as “a Neel,” but the viewer is also chargedwith identifying the sitter, if not speciƒcally, at least as a product of a given era.In asking “who is it?” we must frame the answer in terms of what the subjecttells us about his or her history, and, by extension, that of American culture.The portrait gallery permits the viewer to question the scheme of things, toview the individual in and as history. Neel’s accumulative approach, one plusone, becomes for the viewer a one on one, an imaginary conversation.The result of this conversation is a metaphor created by relating personalityto historical context. Neel’s approach required that she remain open to theinterpretive possibilities of each generation’s dress and pose. The individual

Introduction: The Portrait Gallery / xxiin/as history represents a con„uence of constantly shifting and changingforces, without a stable continuity provided by specious “bloodlines” or questionable“great deeds.” But because each portrait is a synecdoche, the part substitutingfor the whole, the viewer must recreate, however provisionally, thehistorical situation the portrait represents. According to George Lakoff, the“[m]etaphorical imagination is a crucial skill in creating rapport and in communicatingthe nature of unshared experience. This skill consists, in largemeasure, of the ability to bend your world view and adjust the way you categorizeexperience.” 4 Neel was a feminist and a political radical, but her abilityto grow artistically over a period of a half century was tied to her openness toexchange.Like all great portrait artists, Neel’s pictures create the compelling illusionof a human presence. Her metaphors are not abstractions. In his essay on metaphor,Paul Ricoeur quotes Aristotle: “The vividness of . . . good metaphorsconsists in their ability to ‘set before the eyes’ the sense that they display.” 5 Justas the mind makes metaphors on the basis of embodied experience, so Neel’sportraits are metaphors for a concept of identity that is characterized by a continualtraversing of boundaries between public and private, interior and exterior.Her vivid portrayals help us to see American cultural history from varyingperspectives. The individual was her focus, but framing her vision as shepainted was the person’s place on the social ladder and in the historical moment.These deƒning terms, these frames of reference, were never absent fromNeel’s “peripheral” vision. Her portraits open out in many directions: to culturalconcerns as expressed in literature, politics, and visual art. All of thesewill overlap in this text to create a broad-based reading.

Part IThe Subjects of the Artist

1The Creation (of a) MythI lived in the little town of Colwyn, Pennsylvania, where everything happened, butthere was no artist and no writer. We lived on a street that had been a pear orchard.And it was utterly beautiful in the spring, but there was no artist to paint it.And once a man exposed himself at a window, but there was no writer to write it.The grocer’s wife committed suicide after the grocer died, but there was no writerto write that. There was no culture there. I hated that little town. I just despised it.And in the summer I used to sit on the porch and try to keep my blood from circulating.That’s why my own kids had a much better life than I had. Because boredomwas what killed me.Thus opens “Alice by Alice,” Alice Neel’s autobiography, published the yearbefore she died. 1 Neel was a painter: her strong visual sense pervades herspeech. In her old age, the images from her childhood, indelibly painted inher mind, carried with them all of the emotional weight of their initial impression.Colwyn, Pennsylvania was a sight, but there was no one there to record itsbeauty or its perversity. Neel’s words suggest that as a child she knew that shehad to become an artist in order to record that life in all its aspects. But ofcourse, these are the words of an adult at the end of a long and productive artisticcareer. In the manner of any good storyteller, Neel has created a parable to3

4 / The Subjects of the Artistexplain her choice of an artistic vocation and to justify the direction it wouldtake.Like many American women artists, Alice Neel (1900–1984) painted in relativeobscurity for many years before achieving artistic prominence in the1970s. During that time, she began to compensate for the years of artistic neglectby crisscrossing the United States to deliver slide lectures on her work. Awitty and intelligent woman, Neel developed an enthusiastic following, eachlecture spawning new invitations. The cumulative effect of these popular lectureswas that her art was and continues to be accepted as she presented it: asan illustration of her life, as extended autobiography.The art historian, however, is bound to ask what place Neel’s art occupiesin American art and culture. I will argue that Neel’s work presents a paradigmof the course of socially concerned art in the twentieth century. We mustexamine the anecdotal version of Neel for what it is: a particular instance ofthe complex relationship between art and biography that troubles any monographicstudy of an artist’s work. My objection to a biographical approach toher work, which she instigated as a means of bringing her art to the widest possibleaudience, is not that the account of her life is untrue—it is not any moreor less “true” than any biography—but that it has obscured her work.Trained at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women from 1920 to1925, Neel aligned herself with the Ashcan School artists of the previous generationand with the legacy of the unsparing depiction of urban life establishedin Philadephia by its founders, Robert Henri and John Sloan. Neel took theAshcan School’s premises literally. Her nascent interest in a socially concernedart was reinforced by the year she spent in Havana (1925–1926) with the earlymembers of the Cuban avant-garde.During the 1930s, while living in Greenwich Village, Neel participated inthe WPA’s programs, joined the Communist Party, and was strongly in„uencedby the communist call for a proletarian art. However, as a portrait painter,she only occasionally peopled her art-for-the-millions with the masses. Instead,she insisted on depicting each representative of a given class as an individualand, in doing so, created an alternative version of social realism. A basic assumptionof the work is that the quotidian reality of twentieth-century Americansof all classes was centered in family life. There, Neel identiƒed such physicaland psychological consequences of poverty as disease and child abuse,recording them long before they were thought to be germane to an activist art.After World War II, when she had settled with her two sons in SpanishHarlem, Neel retained her realist style, resisting the centrist political forcesthat were branding it as anachronistic. Not only did her portraits from theseyears redeƒne the notion of family, but they also reconƒgured urban space interms of the experiences of those in poverty. By the early 1960s, having moved

The Creation (of a) Myth / 5to 107th Street on the Upper West Side, the two worlds that had intersected inher art, the creative and intellectual on the one hand and the marginalizedand impoverished on the other, began to diverge. She subsequently concentratedalmost exclusively on her own family and on members of the New Yorkartworld. Nonetheless the core of her artistic philosophy—her belief that anindividual’s body posture and physiognomy not only revealed personal idiosyncracies,but embodied the character of an era—remained unchanged.Neel’s career and the critical reception of her work—painting in her homewithout institutional recognition—are representative of the situation of manywomen artists and part of a cultural pattern of devaluating women’s work.When broken, this pattern has often resulted in the overcompensation of adulation.Yet the critical extremes of the darkness of obscurity and the glare ofpublicity can hardly be expected to shed an even light on an artist’s work, asNeel’s career attests. Between 1926 and 1962, she was given six one-persongallery exhibitions; between 1962 and her death in 1984, she had sixty. Publishedreviews and articles also increased exponentially, but remained biographicallybased.Just as the career trajectory of women artists in the twentieth century hasbeen a belated and dizzying climb from the valleys of obscurity to the peaks offame, so too the critical reception of their work has been based on the anachronisticassumption that art by men explains the world, whereas art by womenexplains their life. Neel’s lectures served to reinforce that familiar cliché. Forexample, in her 1989 essay “Tough Choices: Becoming a Woman Artist, 1900–1970,” art historian Ellen Landau found the careers of the ƒrst generation ofwomen modernist artists to be marked by emotional con„ict. Enumeratingtheir psychological problems—their suicide attempts, alcoholism, and depressions—Landauimplies that their personal difƒculties were due to the con„ictsthe women experienced between their desire to be mothers and to be artists;their careers thus present a “pattern whose implications should not be ignored. . . Work was not always enough to satisfy these women, and it often took ahigh psychic toll.” 2 Without question the con„icts of motherhood and careerexacted a high toll from many artists, including Neel, but it does not followthat art making was unrewarding without the compensating fulƒllment of familylife. Perhaps the lack of support they received in trying to balance careerand motherhood was a cause of stress, or, again, a lifetime of personally rewardinglabor that remained unrecognized.In 1958, Neel recognized that, if her art were to enter history, she would notonly have to create it but participate in developing its audience. During theƒfties, close friends who were also frustrated by the critical neglect of her workencouraged her to develop a slide presentation. One of her ƒrst venues was theWestchester Community Center in White Plains, where she spoke to an art

6 / The Subjects of the Artistclass at the invitation of another friend, the socially concerned painter RudolfBaranik. Beyond their ready wit and broad range of knowledge, Neel’s lecturesconsistently beguiled their audience with the contrast between her grandmotherlyappearance and her provocative language. With the arrival of theWomen’s Movement in the late 1960s, Neel was constantly in demand.Driven by the desire to bring her art to the public, Neel appeared at almostevery one of the openings of her solo exhibitions, no matter how remote theirlocation, and invariably her lecture would be part of the opening night festivities.Her artistic reputation thus became inextricably bound up with her talks,and unfortunately the journalistic press, sensing the broad popular appeal ofa juicy life story, enthusiastically bought into it, adding their own decorative„ourishes.The format of the newspaper and magazine articles on Neel forms an unvaryinglitany into which passing reference to her work is made to ƒt. The ƒrstfew paragraphs invariably contain a sexist description of Neel’s grandmotherlyappearance and its con„ict with her “unladylike” personality:Alice Neel is like an old pagan priestess somehow overlooked in the triumph of anew religion. Indeed, with her shrewdly cherubic face, her witty and wizard eyes,she has the mischievous look of a maternal witch whose only harm lies in her compulsionto tell the truth. (Jack Kroll, Newsweek, 1966)Seated in front of a [canvas] in her blue smock, her bright little green eyes squintingand blinking behind her glasses, her plump legs spread forcefully apart and herspace-shoed feet planted solidly on the „oor, she picked up her brush gingerly andwailed, “I’m just scared to death . . .” While she formed our torsos . . . she chatteredon incessantly . . . but when she came to our faces, she became transformed; herface became ecstatic, her mouth hung open, her eyes were glazed and she neveruttered a word. (Cindy Nemser, catalog essay, Georgia Museum of Art, 1975)Such patronizing descriptions are the content of a newspaper’s “Living”pages, to which the reviews of Neel’s work were frequently relegated. Althoughsuch extended attention to physical appearance is unlikely to be found in thecritical discussion of art by men, the cliché of the creative artist who is seizedwith “ecstasy” while painting is as old as art history itself. Its relentless repetitionin the literature on Neel revives that stereotype for the purpose of establishinga myth of origins for the women’s movement. Such a myth, of course,requires a narrative of triumph against all odds. The highlights of Neel’s genuinelydifƒcult life story inevitably followed the journalist’s establishment ofthe persona: The hypersensitive child in a parochial Philadelphia suburb;marriage to an “exotic” Cuban artist, Carlos Enríquez de Gomez (1925); the

The Creation (of a) Myth / 7death of their ƒrst child, Santillana (1927); the break-up of their marriage andloss of custody of their second child, Isabetta, followed shortly therafter by anervous breakdown (1930); the post-recovery move to the bohemian world ofGreenwich village (1931); the destruction of over 300 of her paintings and watercolorsby her jealous lover, Kenneth Doolittle (1934); the move, with José,to Spanish Harlem, where her two sons, Richard (1939) and Hartley (1941),were born; years of poverty in Spanish Harlem (1939–1962); the beginnings ofher own professional success as her sons entered their careers; and ƒnally,fame, and ƒnancial and critical success (1974–1984).This narrative, repeated in all of the newspaper reviews of her exhibitions,culminated in Patricia Hills’s judiciously edited autobiography from 1983. AliceNeel is Neel’s life as she wanted it told, the grand summation of her lecturesand interviews. Indeed, it reads like a psychological novel of the 1930s such asher friend Millen Brand would have written. Lively and engaging, the book isa testimony to Neel’s prodigious and vivid memory for people and events, andto her exceptional storytelling abilities. Her life’s traumas are not at all irrelevantto her artwork, but it is important to recognize that Neel was fashioningthe recounting of her life as if it were a piece of ƒction. In a true stroke of “genius,”she did not write her own autobiography, even though she was a ƒnewriter; she let others use the material she supplied in interviews to write it forher, so that the recounting conveyed a sense of objectivity.Yet, the traumatic events thus transcribed can help elucidate her art onlywhen lodged in the social and intellectual milieu of which she was a part, asLawrence Alloway noted in his review of Hills’s book in Art Journal:In Patricia Hills’ Alice Neel . . . the hand of the artist seems a bit heavy to me. Thebulk of the book, “Alice By Alice” . . . is the artist’s oral history of herself, and Hills ispresent only as the author of an eight-page, unillustrated Afterword. This disparitywould matter less if a solid core of critical discussion on Neel had already existed,or if her monologue were more interesting. Anyone who has heard the artist’s garrulouslectures will recognize many of the anecdotes printed here . . . [T]he artistshould have realized that if she is to move off the lecture circuit and enter art history,the cooperation of people like Hills should not be abused. 3The anecdotes and observations so familiar from Neel’s lectures are bestunderstood in their art historical context, where they provide clues to thesources of her intellectual development. Although isolated in terms of herexclusion from exhibitions, she was highly visually and critically literate. Althoughshe professed disinterest in other artists and used her lectures as a vehiclefor reinforcing the notion that her art stemmed directly from her personallife rather than from any outside in„uence, her extensive knowledge of art andliterature permitted her to forge her art from a very broad base.

8 / The Subjects of the ArtistThe role Neel’s lectures and interviews played in the creation of a myth ofher life story is hardly exceptional. Art in general, and the artistic personality inparticular, have always been bound up with mythmaking. If Neel understoodthat a successful career would have to involve the “marketing” of a public personality,from which sources did she create her artistic persona? In this area,Neel, like other women artists, would have lacked role models. Women artistshave endured strong social pressure to construct their identity as “female,” toemphasize their womanliness despite their artistic talent. Yet without an image,an artist lacks substance. Without a myth, no fame validates one’s art. Womenartists have long understood that these strictures against unconventional behaviorhave served as a means of assuring that women would never fully be acceptedas artists. Because the breaking of rules of social behavior has been consideredsince the Renaissance to be a means of freeing oneself from outmodedartistic conventions, then women’s acceptance of conventional roles wouldperforce constrain the creative impulse. Virginia Woolf’s need to kill “TheAngel in the House”—the domestic self that is required to be sympathetic,charming, self-sacriƒcing—in order to become an effective writer has by nowbecome a feminist truism. During the 1920s, when Neel came of age, theAmerican poet Louise Bogan described the repercussion of women’s socializationas docile dependents: “Women have no wildness in them, / They areprovident instead, / Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts, / To eat dustybread.” Neel’s writing during this decade reveals that she had adopted thisfeminist view: “Oh, the men, the men, they put all their troubles into beautifulverses. But the women, poor fools, they grumbled and complained andwatched their breasts grow „atter and more wrinkled. Grey hair over a greydishcloth ...” 4 In her lecture at Bloomsburg State College in 1972, Neel putit even more directly. “In the beginning, I much preferred men to women.For one thing I felt that women represented a dreary way of life always helpinga man and never performing themselves, whereas I wanted to be the artistmyself!” 5Although one can hardly hope to assess the effect of Neel’s nervous breakdownat age twenty-nine on the subsequent course of her art and career, biographicalaccounts by Marcelo Pogolotti, the Belchers, and others suggest achange from a rather naive if rebellious young woman to a conƒrmed bohemian.6 After her total collapse, Neel adopted a stance of resolute oppositionto virtually everything that smacked of middle-class propriety or politics. Shecould have returned to her parents’ home to complete her recovery but choseinstead to summer in New Jersey with her friend Nadya Olyanova, throughwhom she had met Kenneth Doolittle. When, at the end of the summer, shemoved to Greenwich Village to live with the drug-addicted seaman who, as amember of the IWW, was also left-wing, Neel claimed citizenship in a “coun-

The Creation (of a) Myth / 9try” that John Sloan and Marcel Duchamp had once mockingly declared hadseceded from the United States. Although the Greenwich Village of the early1930s had lost the revolutionary fervor of the prewar years, it remained the locusof alternative life-styles as well as of much important creative activity. Theutopian visions of a socialist activist like Polly Holliday may have been replacedby the barbed commentary of the essayist Dorothy Parker; nonethelessthe Bohemia of Greenwich Village could still be counted on to remain a thornin the side of polite society.The artistic and literary example of New York’s bohemia in these years providedrather „imsy material on which to construct an identity, however. Neelcame to maturity during the great age of ƒlm, and as Robert Sklar has observed,many men and women learned about social relations, and male-female relationshipsin particular, from what they saw on the screen. A prototype enjoyingwide popularity in media culture—the bawdy comedic type personiƒed by MaeWest—may have provided the most compelling topos for the construction ofNeel’s persona.Although the stereotypical virgin-whore opposition that dominated ƒn-desiècleart was perpetuated in the roles played by early ƒlm stars such as LillianGish and Theda Bara, a ƒgure such as Mae West could irreverently mock theentire system with her outrageous screen behavior (ƒg. 1). Aggressive and loudmouthed,but with her hair dyed platinum and her hourglass ƒgure swathed insequined gowns, West was part temptress, part truck driver. Like the transvestiteshe appeared to be, she could at once play and parody female sex roles.Perhaps for males, her homeliness and sexual ambiguity allowed them tolaugh at her jokes without feeling threatened by her professed voracious sexualappetite, but for women, her lack of concern for male opinions or approbationmust have provoked a different kind of awe. Here was a woman whose dedicationto her own sensual pleasure was so strong that she would refuse to conƒneherself by giving her hand in marriage to even the most cinematically desirablescreen bachelor. For young women, including Neel, who watched her asthey reached the age of consent, West offered the possibility of saying “no” tosociety’s expectations by insisting on putting her own needs ƒrst.According to June Sochen, bawdy comediennes such as Mae West andvaudevillian Eva Tanguay used bathroom humor and sexual jokes to takethe Eve image and turn it around; no longer was woman’s sexuality viewed as evil. . . They also displayed, as all iconoclasts do, a marked irreverence for sacred subjects.Nothing was out of bounds. No gesture, no thought, no action had to be selfcensoredor controlled . . . The female rebel performer would not ever becomea comfortable part of popular culture because she was too avant-garde, too outrageousin her words and actions. 7

10 / The Subjects of the ArtistBecause such sexual freedom has long been the purview of the male avantgardeartist, Neel could easily have linked the two realms—high art and popularculture—in terms of image making. Both aimed to épater les bourgeois, themiddle-class consumer, providing the common ground for West’s irreverentwit and that of the artistic avant-garde. Neel’s outrageous stories, then, weregeared to adding lustre to her role as the quintessential bohemian. Neel wantedto perform—Neel wanted to be the artist, and so at the end of her life she performedher life and art. 8By using bawdy humor to reduce the powerful and the famous to the basestcommon denominator, Neel’s naughtiness demystiƒed the artworld’s elites,thereby also pointedly rebuking those who for so long ignored her work. Theedge to Neel’s humor, like West’s, stemmed ultimately from anger—her mockinglaughter and outrageous language perhaps the only effective means for expressinggenuine outrage and exposing the artiƒciality, if not the devastatingpsychological consequences, of the conventional constructs of woman and ofartist.Her lecture at Harvard University’s “Learning From Performers” series atthe Carpenter Center on March 21, 1979, exempliƒes her ƒne-tuned presentations,and although her humor is considerably dulled in my summary, her violationof every rule of feminine decorum should be evident. Her chronologicalsurvey began with her early training at the Philadelphia School of Designfor Women. She went on to express her disdain for many of the in„uential realistpainters of her generation, for example the Art Students League’s EugeneSpeicher and his “cow-like women.” Having summarily dismissed the artisticcontext in which she worked, she began a chronological sequence of slides ofher work. When she came to her Ethel Ashton of 1930, herself a bovine womanprofoundly ashamed of her naked body, she asked the audience to “look at allthat furniture she is carrying around.” With reference to Nadya and the Wolf(1931), Neel claimed that her friend, the handwriting expert, could not havechildren because “she used drugs for douches,” while her portrait of NadyaNude could not be photographed because in 1933 “you could not make a slideof pubic hair.” Symbols (Doll and Apple), one of the artist’s most wrenchingworks, is described as “sexy,” and the outrageous triple genitals in the 1933 portraitof Joe Gould “look like St. Basil’s domes upside down.” 9 Near the end ofthe Harvard lecture, when she showed her double portrait of the artists RedGrooms and Mimi Gross, and described Grooms as “ready to jump up andperform,” she openly acknowledged her belief that contemporary artists had ofnecessity become “performers.” 10Neel was far from the only female artist-rebel of her generation, but she wasone of only a few who rebelled through both an unconventional life-style and a

The Creation (of a) Myth / 11biting wit, actions and words that indicated an absence of self-censorship, a determinationto disrupt polite society. Neel joins the ranks of those writers andpainters—among them Gertrude Stein, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and RomaineBrooks—who ignored their physical appearance and/or permitted themselvesthe comfort and convenience of male garb. It was not until the 1970s thatNeel’s unfashionable persona was adopted by younger feminist performanceartists. Annie Sprinkle (ƒg. 2), whom Neel painted in 1982, pushed the MaeWest image even further toward outrageous camp, which Neel captured perfectlyin Sprinkle’s blowsy expression, tacky feathered hat, overblown breasts,and pussy ring. Flaunting sexuality was the means for all three women to gaincreative as well as economic autonomy. By refusing sexual subservience, theybecame sufƒciently threatening to be let alone, and perhaps to gain a grudgingrespect. In a culture that restricted women’s options, the strategy worked.Much as Neel’s autobiography has obscured her art, it is essential to it andinextricable from it. Were it not for her efforts to narrate her life, her workmight have remained unknown. She realized this when she was in her ƒfties,and spent the rest of her life insuring that her work would not be lost to history.“When Sleeping Beauty wakes up / she is almost ƒfty years old,” 11 wrote poetMaxine Kumin, brilliantly pinpointing the moment when many women realizethat a passive life is a lost life. To conserve her transgressive art, created atgreat emotional cost, she had to translate it into another medium, whose formwould make clear how „agrantly she had violated the unspoken rules of theappropriate in realist art and in real life. According to the feminist psychologistNancy K. Miller, “To justify an unorthodox life by writing about it is to reinscribethe original violation, to reviolate masculine turf.” 12Neel’s lectures were part of her battle to secure a well-earned piece of arthistorical turf. Having recognized the futility of waiting passively for recognition,Neel admitted to Hills in 1983 that she had had “a block, I still have it,against publicity . . . I reached the conclusion that if I painted a good picture, itwas enough to paint a good picture . . . I didn’t know how to go-get, so I just putit on the shelf.” 13 In her ƒfties, after her children were in college, Neel tookcharge. Although hardly a wall„ower previously, she was now ofƒcially off theshelf. In Writing a Woman’s Life, Carolyn Heilbrun has identiƒed this “awakening”as the key moment in a woman’s artistic career: “[A] woman’s selfhood,the right to her own story, depends upon her ‘ability to act in the public domain.’”14To take one’s life into the public domain, one must write it as narrative.Neel chose the genre of satire, the female equivalent of modernist irony. Yet itis important to remember that Neel “wrote” her long life well after she had begunto paint it. She created her autobiography twice, with the later version di-

12 / The Subjects of the Artistrected toward popular consumption, and the creation of a market and a publicspace for efforts long conƒned to her studio/home. Her talents as a raconteurput her work into the public domain. The art historian’s task is to situate itwithin the matrix of American culture.

2From Portraiture to Pictures of People:Neel’s Portrait ConventionsThe Portrait TraditionThe career obstacles Neel faced as a woman in the artworld were compoundedby her choice of genre: portraiture. Just as Neel had to create an artistic personathat would bring her work into the public realm, so, basing her art in the representationof the human ƒgure, she had to rethink the outworn conventionsof the genre and to provide it with renewed relevance to modernist artisticpractice. One route, taken by artists such as Andy Warhol and Philip Pearlsteinafter 1960, would have been to invert the premises of the tradition of selfportraitureas expressive of personal identity and to question the very existenceof a private realm. Neel’s art remained rooted in the modernist faith that theportrait could represent individual psychology, but she revitalized the legacyof psychological portraiture from Degas to van Gogh by reinvesting it with itssocial and political aspects. Both her work and her words indicate that RobertHenri’s The Art Spirit served as an important source of ideas that remainedfundamental to her concept of portraiture as metaphor. By analyzing the conventionsshe developed to elaborate the metaphorical dimension of the portrait,it will be possible to understand the means she used to create an image ofan individual qua era.13

14 / The Subjects of the ArtistIt is a truism that after the invention of photography in 1839 portrait paintinglost much of its raison d’être and nearly all of its prestige. Painters who specializedin ofƒcial portraiture and who worked for ƒrms such as Portraits, Inc.,were excluded from serious consideration as artists. In turn, artists who did notmake portraits for hire but whose work consisted primarily of portraiture werefound guilty of commercialism by association, and their reputations suffered.By the mid-1950s, American critics had declared the tradition of portrait paintingdead. Writing in Reality magazine in 1955, the social realist painter GeorgeBiddle lamented: “Yes, portrait painting as an art—rather than as a debasedform of chromolithography—is very nearly a lost tradition.” 1 Four years later,at the height of abstract expressionism, Frank O’Hara conƒrmed portraiture’sdemise: “And the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all . . . You suddenlywonder why in the world anyone ever did them.” 2The curator Henry Geldzahler provided an explanation for the decline ofportraiture: it was the result, he declared, of a lack of enlightened patronage:“As curator in a museum, I get the question about once a month from the wifeof a Supreme Court justice or from a governor, from somebody who has tohave an ofƒcial portrait done . . . It seems to me that Larry Rivers, Jim Dine,and Andy Warhol are the natural portraitists of our age, but most of the institutionsof government haven’t gotten around to understanding that yet.” 3 Withboth artist and patron wary of each other, portrait painting fell into the gulf betweenmodern art and its public. From the mid-nineteenth century on, thatgulf was spanned by the art photographer, whose role in the demise of portraitpainting was at least as important as the lack of sophisticated patronage.The history of modern portraiture is inextricable from the history of photography.Signiƒcantly, art photographers have played a central role in the representationof ƒne artists. From Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen to ArnoldNewman, Hans Namuth, and Richard Avedon, these practitioners have conƒrmedthe cultural myth of creativity with as much authority as Joseph Karshhas formulated the image of leadership for a business elite. Their work evidencesthe symbiotic relationship between art photography and modernism:a portrait by an art photographer (rather than a commercial photographer)helped to validate the historical importance of the artist, while at the sametime verifying (by metonymy), the photographer’s own artistic status. Stieglitz’sphotographs of Georgia O’Keeffe and Namuth’s of Jackson Pollock werecrucial to the establishment of the painters’ careers. That hybrid entity, the artphotographer, has been a bridge between the artist, isolated in the impracticalrealm of creativity, and the visually literate public. 4The liaison between artist and art photographer thus serves as a support tothe artist-critic-dealer network that constitutes the artworld; in turn, the artworldshapes our concept of the art historical signiƒcance of an artist’s work. It

From Portraiture to Pictures of People / 15is a liaison that Neel had to overcome as a portrait painter, for her own strugglefor recognition was unquestionably hampered by the fact that she could nothitch her portraits of fellow artists to their stars. Since her portraits were notpublished in the mass media, which was the realm of photographic reproduction,but remained instead within the boundaries of the artist’s production, thestatus of the portraitist’s sitter could not augment by re„ected radiance herown reputation. No painting of an artworld ƒgure, no matter how in„uential,could assure artistic recognition.Neel acknowledged portrait painting’s ambivalent artworld status when respondingto a critic’s question about why she, as a serious artist, concentratedon the genre:. . . actually portraits are where more crimes are committed than in any other formof art. I mean, witness college professors that hang on walls in petriƒed form. I thinkthey are frightful . . . they are portraits of so-called distinguished people; but I breakthese rules. 5Because the term had become thoroughly pejorative, Neel winced when shewas called a portrait painter, preferring to distance herself from the corpse ofofƒcial art by calling her paintings “pictures of people.” The linguistic feintdid not convince her contemporaries, however, who remained uncomfortablewith her seemingly exclusive preoccupation with the genre. Neel’s defensewas equivocal: rather than attempting to argue that she was transforming thetradition of realist and expressionist portraiture within modernism, she simplydefended the portrait as a legitimate subject in a period that nominally grantedthe artist complete freedom of choice. “I think that you can make just as greata painting of a person as you can of anything else . . . After all, the human creature—that’sit.” 6This statement was published in an interview Gerrit Henry conducted in1975 with ten contemporary artists working primarily in portraiture: Elaine deKooning, George Segal, Alex Katz, Philip Pavia, Alfred Leslie, George Schneeman,Sylvia Sleigh, Hedda Sterne, Chuck Close, and Neel. In explaining theresurrection of a genre only recently declared dead, Henry credited the “newpluralism” of the 1970s with having renewed interest in artists who had persistedin making portraits over the previous thirty years. 7 In the 1970s, with therigid doctrine of Greenbergian modernist formalism under siege, abstractpainting yielded its dominance to a diverse variety of trends, from photo realismto feminism to postmodernism. With renewed interest in realism in generaland portraiture in particular, Neel’s art could ƒnally be released from itssecond-class status. Her late success thus owes as much to the seismic shifts inthe New York artworld of the 1970s as it does to the speciƒc support of feminist

16 / The Subjects of the Artistartists and art historians. Neel told Henry that “I do feel vindicated by the returnof realism. Wouldn’t you? . . . I have all this backlog of all these years . . .” 8Neel’s deƒnition of “the human creature” as an individual re„ecting in aunique way the “Zeitgeist” of a given era must nonetheless have continued tosound old-fashioned in a decade when humanistic concepts of individualismand identity were questioned. The decade when ƒgurative art gained acceptancecoincided with the problematizing of individual identity in postmoderntheory. Although admired by her younger contemporaries, Neel never acknowledged,as they did, the dominating presence of photography, which hadforced a reconsideration of the very nature of personal identity.Instead, Neel was at her most radical in the choice of the subjects of herportraiture, and in her insistence that identity was inseparable from publicrealms of occupation and class. As with her contemporaries, many of her sitterswere connected to her personal life, either family or friends in the artworld.But Neel’s democratic sweep included examples from all segments of Americansociety, from middle-class professionals to people on the margins of Americanculture because of race, class, political afƒliations, or sexual orientation.Her inclusivity was an insistence that American culture could no longer bedeƒned as white middle class, and that modern art must shift its focus from theprivate and insular to the public.When, in reviewing her 1974 exhibition at the Whitney, Hilton Kramer accusedNeel of an inability to record anything but a direct response to a sitter,he paid her an unintended compliment, for it is precisely in her knowledge ofthe conventions of psychological portraiture and her ability to manipulatethem to convey the illusion of a direct record of empirical observation thatNeel’s artistic intelligence resided. Established in France by Edgar Degas andin America by Thomas Eakins, this realist tradition was transmitted to Neel inlarge measure through the art and writings of Robert Henri. This she combinedwith the expressionist tradition of Edvard Munch, Oskar Kokoschka,and in particular, the German new realists, Otto Dix and George Grosz, whoseportraits bridge individual and collective psychology.Neel was ƒrst exposed to that tradition during her training at the PhiladelphiaSchool of Design for Women from 1921 to 1925. Although the teachingat the PSDW had become thoroughly conventional when Neel studied there, 9the founder of the Ashcan School, Robert Henri, who had taught at the PhiladelphiaSchool in the 1890s, remained the school’s most admired artist. Withher friends Rhoda Medary and Ethel Ashton, the most adventurous membersof the student body, Neel set out to renew the now moribund legacy of theAshcan School. The three supplemented their training at the Graphic SketchClub where the models were “real people, including old, poor and city people.”10 According to the Belchers, Medary, the ringleader, “encouraged them

From Portraiture to Pictures of People / 17to sneak out . . . without the required gloves and hats, to take their easels to theReading Railroad yards or to the Italian market on South Ninth Street ...” 11Adopting the macho stance of the Eight, Neel bragged that she “was too roughfor the Philadelphia School of Design,” painting sailors with cigarettes insteadof girls in „uffy dresses. 12After her graduation, when she moved to Havana with Carlos, she had ampleopportunity to extend Henri’s painterly style to the ethnic populace there.Her Beggars, Havana (ƒg. 3) from 1926 shows a student adapting the broadtreatment and strong light/dark contrast of the paintings reproduced in Henri’sThe Art Spirit. Neel’s portrayal of her sitters is so generalized that the work canbarely be considered a portrait, and it is likely that in the end her approach toportraiture was in„uenced more strongly by Henri’s writings than by his painting.Indeed, The Art Spirit (1923), his widely read book, could serve as a statementof Neel’s aesthetic principles if not of her artistic conventions. It waspublished during Neel’s third year at the Philadelphia School of Design, andshe no doubt read it shortly thereafter, for while in Havana she gave a copy as agift to the novelist Alejo Carpentier. 13Henri’s biographer, William Innes Homer, has observed that “Every generation,it seems, requires its artist’s bible; the eager acceptance of The Art Spiritleaves no doubt that Henri satisƒed this need.” 14 As with any important bookthat one reads when approaching intellectual maturity, Neel may well have sointernalized the ideas of this most widely published of art manuals that theybecame her own, beginning with Henri’s deƒnition of realism. EchoingFrench critics from the previous century, he emphasized “truth” over “beauty,”often repeating Zola’s famous dictum that art is “nature seen through a temperament”(although he attributed the phrase to Corot). The goals of realism,he felt, were best achieved through the human ƒgure. 15 Like Eakins, Henriconsidered the model on the stand to be “a piece of history”: “It is the study ofour lives, our environment . . . They are real historical documents . . . Ordinaryhistories estrange us from the past . . . works of [art] bring us near it.” 16The concept of a “readable” urban physiognomy, transmitted to Henrithrough his study of Manet and Degas in Paris at the turn of the century, hadbeen articulated as early as 1876 in Edmond Duranty’s review of that year’s impressionistexhibition: “With one back, we desire that a temperament shouldbe revealed, the age, the social class; with a pair of hands, we must express amagistrate or a merchant; with one gesture, a whole series of sentiments . . .Hands sunk in pockets could be eloquent...” 17 For Neel as well, portraits werethe truest expression of culture and history. In her doctoral address at theMoore College of Art in 1971, Neel stated that “people’s images re„ect the erain a way that nothing else could. When portraits are good art they re„ect theculture, the time and many other things ...” 18 She later elaborated to Hills:

18 / The Subjects of the Artist“Art is a form of history . . . Now, a painting is a [speciƒc person], plus the factthat it is also the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age.” 19In an effort to emulate the intuitive response we have on ƒrst meeting a person,Henri argued that recording the individual-as-history was less a matter ofdeliberation than of unpremeditated action. In order to respond directly to thesubject, to the life that is the source for all art, Henri believed that the artistshould paint quickly and cultivate a strong visual memory:Realize that your sitter has a state of being, that this state of being manifests itself toyou through form, color and gesture . . . Work with great speed . . . the most vitalthings in the look of a face or of a landscape endure only for a moment. Workshould be done from memory. The memory is of that vital moment . . . The memoryof that special look must be held, and the “subject” can now only serve as an indifferentmanikin [sic] of its former self. The picture must not become a patchworkof parts of various moods. 20Neel also claimed credit for spontaneity: “When I paint . . . I deliberately crosseverything out . . . and just react, because I want that spontaneity and concentrationon that person to come across.” 21 She also paraphrased Henri’s emphasison memory in her description of Woman in Pink Velvet Hat (1944, ƒg. 4):You can’t paint any good portrait unless you have a good memory, because thereare tiny changes all the time. You know what the Chinese say: “You never bathe inthe same water twice.” [sic] And if you follow those changes you just have nothing.I deliberately set out to memorize, even in art school. 22In its crudeness, Woman in Pink Velvet Hat certainly appears spontaneous,as if it were executed at the greatest possible speed in order to maintain the inexplicablesense of fear and revulsion we occasionally feel when passing apedestrian on a city street. Yet, the ideal of a direct, one-shot, unmediated recordingof experience, so central to American artistic mythology via Henri orPollock, is in fact attained through reference to pre-existing visual models. Thepedestrian’s look of distraction—unfocused eyes and the gaping mouth—isfound, for instance, in portraits by Neel’s contemporary, the caricature artistPeggy Bacon. The painting’s distortions also recall German expressionist portraitssuch as Otto Dix’s The Journalist Sylvia von Harden (1926, ƒg. 5), whoselong, pointed face and nose, red-rimmed eyes, and downturned mouth createan impression of decadence similar to Neel’s portrait. Memory, then, is not amatter of retaining a single impression long enough to translate it into paint;the “direct response” of Woman in Pink Velvet Hat is doubly coded, by establishedvisual conventions and by written text. Artistic spontaneity has been littlemore than a consciously cultivated look, part of the modernist ideology ofindividual expression.

From Portraiture to Pictures of People / 19One ƒnal legacy to Neel from Henri’s teaching may have been the modelof the politically radical artist. Henri did not express his political beliefs in TheArt Spirit, but in his painting his radicalism was implied by his choice of subjectmatter. As Annette Cox has argued, Henri “was one of the ƒrst Americanartists to suggest that there could be a clear connection between art and socialreform.” 23 Henri’s portraits of blacks, in particular, are an important precedentfor Neel’s Spanish Harlem work. At the turn of the century blacks were sociallyand artistically invisible, 24 and Henri’s portraits can be credited with liftingthem from the realm of stock players in genre scenes. Yet Henri seems to havehad little concern either with referring to the actual economic and social conditionsin which blacks lived or with truly probing character. His former studentRockwell Kent questioned the depth of Henri’s commitment to social reform:“if Henri turned to . . . underprivilege . . . it was merely because, to him,man at this level was most revealing of his own humanity.” 25In extending Henri’s legacy in her mature work, Neel moved from generalizedpainterly impressions to incisive linear depictions. In his portrait of a vivaciousyoung girl, Eva Green (ƒg. 6), Henri seems to have followed his own exhortationto “feel the dignity of the child.” 26 Yet, we are given too little visualinformation to recognize in Eva any individual characteristics beyond those ofan accommodating cheerfulness. Moreover, by concentrating on black childrenin his portraits, Henri reinforced the stereotype of the black as “childlike.”Neel’s Two Black Girls (Antonia and Carmen Encarnacion) (1959, ƒg. 7)could be considered as an homage to Henri. They are painted with Henri’s attentionto individual facial expression and with a vigorous painterly stroke that,as in Eva Green, aids in conveying a sense of their vitality. The differences liein her greater attention to their speciƒc features and expressions, and to theeloquence of their body language and dress, which are conveyed through herdrawing. Like Degas before her, Neel grants to children the same psychologicalcomplexity as adults. The children’s tilted heads, and their awkward, angularposes suggest a combination of shyness, insecurity, and curiosity, whereastheir too-short dresses suggest tightened circumstances and its attendant vulnerability.The poignancy of pose and dress is offset by one girl’s patience (theleft-hand ƒgure) and the other’s inquisitiveness (the child on the right). Neel’sportrayal of childhood vulnerability and curiosity thus emerges from the matrixof a speciƒc confrontation across age and race.In a comment that is revealing of the unquestioned assumptions of his era,Henri said that “in the great [men], of which a nation may be proud, the racespeaks.” 27 By making “race” little more than one attribute inseparable from acomplex of others, Neel mitigated its difference and undercut stereotypes. Hersubjects are depicted as “two black girls who are probably sisters who grew upin difƒcult circumstances in Harlem in the 1950s and who are both curious

20 / The Subjects of the Artistand understandably uncomfortable in a white woman’s apartment”—“black”being but one word in a complex sentence. Wedged into the conƒning pictorialspace, the girls confront, in the unseen person of the artist, the unmarked,unexamined norm of whiteness against which they, even now, must begin tomeasure themselves. The potentially demeaning cliché—the childlike Negro—that served as Neel’s point of departure is revealed as the very stricture thatobstructs the childrens’ self-deƒnition.Inspired, along with several generations of American students, by Henri’sartistic principles, Neel put them into practice in creating visual codes sufƒcientlybroad and „exible to slip around stereotype and to create, with eachportrait, a complex layering of expressive codes. She intersected with the traditionof psychological portraiture at an historical moment when a new territoryhad been identiƒed but not adequately explored. For despite his genuine concernfor people of all classes, Henri had not succeeded in extending psychologicalportraiture successfully to marginalized groups. This Neel achieved.The Portrait as MetaphorPortrait paintings are most compelling when we feel that we are seeing past thefacial expression, pose, and dress to an imagined zone of privacy. Yet how dowe discriminate between the exterior and the interior person when all that isavailable for the artist’s use and for our interpretation is surface appearance?How do we know what character traits and/or emotions are being represented?Ofƒcial portraiture provides the simplest example. In recent history, governmentofƒcials who might have commissioned a Rivers, Dine, or Neel to“immortalize” a dignitary more often turned instead to a stable of competent,highly paid professionals, among them Andrew Wyeth, Norman Rockwell,and Gardner Cox, who conƒned their portraits within the narrow bounds ofpropriety and „attery. In his 1968 portrait of Richard Milhous Nixon (ƒg. 8),for instance, Rockwell took a face whose forbidding features had been thenewspaper cartoonists’ dream, softened the mouth and jowls, and used an uncharacteristicallyinformal pose, so that Nixon assumes the attributes of a kind,thoughtful teacher or clergyman. Rockwell provides no hint of the complexitiesand contradictions of the politician’s personality, but instead, through patientaccumulation of detail, provides convincing visual reassurance of a moral,high-minded individual. Far more potent than a written record, such portraitsmaintain patriarchal authority by physically embodying a society’s mostvalued ideals. As Sheldon Nodelman pointed out in his study of Roman portraiture,such “realistic” portraits assemble “a set of conventions dictated byideological motives . . . [and formed] into an interpretative ideogram.” 28 It is

From Portraiture to Pictures of People / 21through the consumption of such images—and Rockwell’s work has long beena staple of our cultural diet—that ideology is internalized. Neel’s choice ofthose very elements of society that were most resistant to the pressures of conformitythus takes on increased importance.Obviously, in her anti-establishment, noncommissioned portraiture, Neelwas not limited by governmental requirements but was free to experimentwith the repertoire of modernist portraiture’s poses, gestures, and facial expressionsso that the range of cues to character could encompass both the variedterrain of individual types and the different levels of our social hierarchy. Nonetheless,the gulf between professional and artistic portraiture is not as wide aspainters wished it to be. Each had to learn conventions for representing character,and this acquired knowledge could be used either honoriƒcally or “psychologically.”Neel’s portraits of Helen Merrell Lynd, Virgil Thomson, andLinus Pauling, and even her own nude self-portrait, are thus at home in thecollection of the National Portrait Gallery alongside their ideological opposite,the Nixon portrait.Those researchers who have studied facial expression and body languagehave argued that our physical appearance—posture, gesture, the set of one’sfeatures—communicates powerful messages that are universally, if not alwaysaccurately, interpreted. 29 When looking at a portrait painting, viewers respondre„exively to facial expression, gesture, and pose as they have been conditionedto do to a human presence: they marshall a fund of knowledge based onprevious interpersonal interaction. Viewers’ identiƒcation of both permanentcharacter traits and transitory emotions is habitual rather than systematic, anddifƒcult to either verbalize or quantify. And if we have no knowledge of theperson or situation, our interpretations of that “deeper reality” can be spectacularlywrong. Although numerous branches of science and social science, includinganthropology, linguistics, psychoanalysis, clinical psychology, socialpsychology, and sociology, continue to study facial expression, gesture, andbody language, no consensus has been reached concerning the meaning ofthe varying positions of the face or body, nor has “an invariant relation betweenexpressed behavior and internal motive” 30 been discovered.Moreover, as the artist well knows, the painting is not the equivalent ofdirect human contact, as it lacks the factor both of motion, which permits aninitial separation of permanent character traits from temporary feeling, and ofdepth, which provides a fuller sense of bodily proportion and the set of thefeatures. The artist must devise, therefore, a set of conventions that will evoke aresponse comparable to that of human interaction, but on the delimited, twodimensionalplane of the canvas.Throughout her life’s work Neel created and modiƒed a database of schemata,modifying established artistic precedent as well as inventing some con-

22 / The Subjects of the Artistventions of her own. Common to all of her subjects is their awareness of beingobserved. It is not easy to be scrutinized for hours at a time, and so each sitterhas to set his or her visage in neutral and to relax the body sufƒciently to let themind wander, to leave Neel’s apartment for the world of private thought. Sittersmay be more or less open or guarded, more or less interested or bored,more or less obliging or resistant, but their pose is ƒrst and foremost the resultof their relationship to the task at hand and to Neel. Yet, no matter how theymay choose to position their body or set their face, the reading of that pose isNeel’s: she determines how much or how litle of the body to present and fromwhat angle. What we see is Neel’s point of view, so that, while if we were tomeet the sitters we might well recognize them, they are likely to create a quitedifferent impression in our minds. While the sitter’s task is to pose—and by sittingto yield one’s carefully crafted façade up to someone else, Neel’s task is toprovide strong enough cues to character to convince us of her interpretation ofthis person as an accurate representative of the time.Because the meaning of a given pose resides not in the individual detailsbut in the relationship of each detail to the other, proportion plays a centralrole in Neel’s portraiture, providing the core element around which the meaningsof the other elements are built. Neel’s backgrounds are never more thanschematically rendered; she is not concerned with the physical setting butwith the manner in which the ƒgure occupies pictorial space. The relationshipbetween the proportions of the ƒgure and the proportions of the canvasform the fundamental proposition, the thesis that will be further argued in facialexpression and gesture. These proportions of body to frame create a dominantparadigm, which the viewer can interpret metaphorically. The body islegible, but not until the dominant metaphor has been established will physicaldetail gain signiƒcance. The successful portrait does not so much look likethe sitter (in the sense of replicating the features precisely) as it looks like anobject that serves as a metaphor for that person’s character.The literature on metaphor suggests that it is not simply a ƒgure of speechbut is central to all thought processes. In Metaphors We Live By (1980), linguisticphilosophers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that the metaphorswe use to discuss concepts do not simply elaborate but actually construct themeaning of those concepts. 31 In orientational metaphors, our bodies’ physicalorientation to the environment organizes a system of abstract concepts aroundspatial ones. In ontological metaphors, concepts are structured in terms of physicalentities. 32 Lakoff and Johnson claim that “we typically conceptualize thenonphysical in terms of the physical—that is, we conceptualize the less clearlydifferentiated in terms of the more clearly differentiated.” 33 I would argue thatmetaphorical thinking structures both speech and visual art, and that orientationaland ontological metaphors intersect to create meaning in Neel’s portaits.

From Portraiture to Pictures of People / 23As in personal interactions, when one views a portrait one attends ƒrst to theface, then to hand gestures, and then to body language. The artist, however, beginswith the stretched canvas, and its proportions as well as the relationship ofthe ƒgure to the framing edge create the initial metaphor from which others areelaborated. Neel confessed to Hills: “You know what I enjoy almost the most ofanything? Dividing up the canvas. When I was in high school I was very goodat mathematics...” 34 The fundamental pictorial metaphor, then, is an orientationalone: the vertical or horizontal orientation of the rectangular plane is ametaphorical body against which the represented body is measured. What arethe proportions of the canvas and what is the relation of the ƒgure to the framingedges? Neel’s “deductive structure,” the relationship of ƒgure to frame,provides preliminary characteristics of expansion, constriction, harmony, andtension from which to deduce metaphors for the depicted personality.Having established the proportional relationship of ƒgure to canvas, Neelcan be very free with anatomy, and expand, truncate, or torque the body as herpurposes require. For instance, the 1965 portraits of Sol Alkaitis (ƒg. 9) andFuller Brush Man (ƒg. 10) are vertical rectangles of equal size, 40" x 27". However,their physical proportions in relation to those of the canvas are completelydifferent. Sol is an elongated rectangle, so tall that his head pressesagain the canvas’s upper edge. Sol is “up,” and he is going to stay that way becausethe diagonal of the table top pins him there. The erect body and headsignal alertness, but the secondary diagonal framing edge, cutting off the legsand feet (potential motion), signal rigidity and entrapment. The metaphor“alert” must link to “cornered”: Sol may affect a debonair pose, but he is alsopressured. In contrast, Fuller Brush Man, lacking Sol’s shaftlike torso and longneck, is a symphony in squares: square hands, suit, shoulders, even the samplesin his pocket. He is guilelessly stolid, and the metaphor is not one of entrapmentbut of stasis: going nowhere. Each ƒgure’s proportions, then, formthe metaphor for character from which facial expression and gesture will beinterpreted.Once the dominant character trait is established, Neel can elaborate on anindividual personality through the use of ontological metaphor. In speech,ontological metaphors are frequently personiƒcations: concepts identiƒed aspersons. In images ontological metaphors work in reverse: people are identiƒedas concepts, or as traits associated with animals or objects. Because Neelis a draftsman and creates a painted outline drawing before beginning to paint„esh and fabric, she limns physical features with surgical precision. Sol’s longneck, small head, and beaklike nose resemble an ostrich’s, whereas FullerBrush’s crouched pose and begging paws resemble a dog’s. 35The use of animals as ontological metaphors for human characteristics is afundamental device of caricature as well as an integral part of colloquial

24 / The Subjects of the Artistspeech. The ostrich and dog metaphors in the previous portraits expand but donot encompass possible interpretations, but on occasion Neel’s use of the animalis so unexpected that we literally see the meaning form in our minds. Herportrait of Ginny (1969, ƒg. 11), for example, looks like the very personiƒcationof the late 1960s with her miniskirt and long straight hair, but these generalizationsplay against her peculiar pose and facial expression, which despiteher hip, offhand sexiness, resemble something nonhuman . . . The splayed,sinewy legs, the bulging eyes—it’s a frog! Once the frog metaphor springs tomind, the sitter’s posture becomes legible: the hair and shirt begin to „ow likewater, and her „exed toes, balanced on the painting’s bottom edge, suggestthat her tensed body is poised to hop off the stool. The ontological metaphorhere is based not on animal characteristics (Fuller Brush’s doggishness), buton animal actions: in this instance that of leaping. To the thick-legged Neel,she must have looked like an entirely new species, evolved from the decade’senvironmental conditions. Thus, Ginny becomes the representative of a generationof liberated women in a period of rapid change: she crosses a decade’s—and an era’s—divide in a single leap.Ontological metaphors involving inanimate objects can be equally vivid. Atƒrst, the portrait of her son in Richard in the Era of the Corporation (1979, ƒg.12) creates a commanding diamond shape within the rectangle, but this is“offset” by his re„ection in the mirror, itself an unstable rhomboid. The senseof instability is increased by the tension between his upper and lower body,which face in different directions. The orientational structure is con„ictedand unstable. Here the ontological metaphor permits further elaboration: thewhite tub chair in which he sits is a rigid, cold block, an icy sepulchre that isrepeated in the white frame of the mirror. Within this frigid environment,Neel uses her nonƒnito to chilling effect: the top of Richard’s head—hisbrain—is vacant. Whereas Ginny is „uid, Richard is frozen in a bucket of ice,crystallized in an awkward, uncomfortable position. Color works to symbolicallyreinforce the reading: the severe black and white coloration is offset byRichard’s pallid face. The question of whether or not in reality Richard Neelwas unhappy with his choice of career is irrelevant to the interpretation of theportrait; it is quite evident that the depicted Richard is not comfortable in his(physical) position. Neel has used the sitter she had at hand, not so much toprovide a commentary on his personal situation, but to create the personiƒcationof an era. “[M]y things of the 1960s are different from the 1970s, and onlyat the end when I did Richard, did I know what the 1970s were about. The1970s was when corporations took over.” 36In using portraiture to map the social terrain, Neel revitalized the traditionof portraiture established by Edgar Degas. Returning, if you will, to Henri’s“point of origin,” she conceived of her sitters as an amalgam, the “individual-

From Portraiture to Pictures of People / 25era.” In creating the portrait of both the private and public person, Degas hadto invent a vocabulary that was oblique rather than direct, suggestive of a realmof subjective thoughts and feelings released when a subject was distracted. Insteadof formal poses, head and body erect, Degas created signs for inadvertence,so that the viewer might experience the feeling of catching the sitter unaware.The positions the body assumed when not conscious of posing wouldreveal those characteristics that the more self-conscious sitter would take painsto hide. The new subject, the unwary sitter, emerged from Degas’s devices ofunbalanced or clumsy posture, tentative hand gestures, or averted eyes. Byde„ating the dignity of the formal portrait, Degas created visual evidence forthe realms of mind and feeling.Neel’s psychological realism is similarly based on a reading of the unconsciouslycomposed body and face as comprising a fund of cues to character:“Before painting, when I talk to the person, they unconsciously assume theirmost characteristic pose, which in a way involves all their character and socialstanding—what the world has done to them and their retaliation. And then Icompose something around that.” 37 From Degas, Neel would have learnedthat personality is a matter of façade, that plane where the exterior, social personand the interior, private person meet, and whose surface indicates boththe beliefs of a given era (“the world”) and the individual’s response to it (“theirretaliation”).Degas’ probing of interpersonal relationships may have provided a particularlyimportant precedent for Neel. Her portrait of Benny and Mary Ellen Andrews(1972, ƒg. 13), for instance, appears to be a direct quotation of Degas’sportrait of his sister Therese and her husband, Edmondo and Therese Morbilli(c. 1865, ƒg. 14), which she would have seen ƒrsthand at Boston’s Museum ofFine Arts when her son studied medicine at Tufts from 1965 to 1970. In theDegas, Morbilli’s body, seated astride his chair, with elbow thrust out, forms avigorous cubic shape next to which his wife’s frontal, „attened silhouetteseems to merge with the background. Placed high on the canvas, the Duke’shead conveys dominance, whereas Therese’s hands, the one on her husband’sshoulder and the other over her mouth, convey insecurity and dependence.The latter is a familiar example of Degas’s ability to translate inadvertent gestureinto telling pose.Neel’s portrait uses a similar set of contrasting poses. The black writer andartist leans back in the chair, his leg propped up on its arm in a blasé, almostexaggeratedly casual gesture also found in Degas portraits. From this vantagepoint he scrutinizes the viewer with supercilious indifference and restrainedaggressiveness. As with Morbilli, the expansiveness of Andrews’s pose constrictshis wife to a narrow portion of the canvas. Huddled there, knees pressedtogether, hand resting tentatively on her cheek, eyes widened, the photogra-

26 / The Subjects of the Artistpher-wife’s inferior position vis-à-vis her prominent, activist husband is emphaticallystated. Her red bowler hat and pigtails infantilize her, accentuatingher blank facial expression, and setting up contrasts of naiveté vs. sophistication.In presenting the Morbilli’s relationship, Degas created a physical connectionbetween them to suggest an emotional and matrimonial bond, howevertentative. Neel, on the other hand, separates and isolates the Andrewsesby changing the normally blue stripes of the chair to the grey of Benny’s hair,shirt, and socks, so that, in her blue pants, Mary Ellen is isolated both compositionallyand coloristically. Even their shoes “walk” to opposite edges of thecanvas: a couple uncoupled.The contrasts of conƒdence and insecurity expressed in the portraits areemphatically gendered, and studies of body language conƒrm the propositionsadvanced in both of these portraits. Nancy M. Henley’s Body Politics: Power,Sex and Non-Verbal Communication (1977) observes that “most of our nonverbalbehavior, far from being ‘natural’ has probably been developed andmodiƒed to embody and display sex and class differences.” 38 She argues thatin our culture “femininity is gauged by how little space they [women] take up,while men’s masculinity is judged by their expansiveness.” 39 Henley quotes anearlier study, Nierenberg and Calero’s How to Read a Person Like a Book(1971), which conƒrms that an expansive gesture such as “sitting with one’sleg over the arm of the chair . . . is said to indicate authority.” 40 There is noquestion in either the Neel or the Degas about who is on top.The anthropologist Gregory Bateson has argued that our iconic languagefunctions differently from our verbal language, conveying matters of relationshipbetween self and others. 41 But how does the face, that culminating pointof the portrait, carry its meaning? How do we know that Benny Andrews regardsus with a mixture of supercilious indifference and restrained aggressiveness?Unfortunately, it is here, where the literature on the relationship betweenfacial expression, gesture, and human emotion should be most useful, that it isoften most disappointing. In the majority of her portraits, Neel emphasizedthe importance of the face as a carrier of relationships by exaggerating its size:“the head contains most of the senses. You feel all over, but you hear, see,smell and taste with the head. You also think with the head. It’s the center ofthe universe, really . . . I don’t put any more emphasis than I think should bethere.” 42 The face occupies the same proportional importance in her portraitsas it does in human communication. For the same reason, the exaggeration ofthe size of the head is a standard device of caricature. In his well-known chapterin Art and Illusion, “The Experiment in Caricature,” Ernst Gombrich acknowledgedthe role that caricature has played in twentieth-century portraiture’ssearch for the “essence” of a sitter’s personality. Without the legacy of

From Portraiture to Pictures of People / 27the most brilliant caricaturist of all time, Honoré Daumier, he argued, caricaturewould not have been separated from humor, and Edvard Munch would“never have evolved his intensely tragic, distorted physiognomies, nor couldthe Belgian Ensor . . . have created his idiom of terrifying masks which so excitedthe German expressionists.” 43It is to the tradition of caricature that Neel turns when recording physiognomyand hand gesture. In Bessie Boris (1940, ƒg. 15), the painter’s egg-shapedhead is wedged at a precarious angle between the twin buttresses of her coat’slapels; from its sleeves spring her prominent hands, whose extended ƒngers aremaking opposing “points.” The unfocused eyes and half open mouth, “on theother hand,” suggest that she has momentarily forgotten what she had to say.Just how the wide, glassy eyes, furrowed brow, heavy caplike hair and tiltedhead can suggest someone eager to engage in conversation but unable to expressherself is itself difƒcult to articulate, but clearly Neel does not use caricatureas a reductive tool to isolate one aspect of a personality but rather to createa montage of features and gestures. The drawing is simpliƒed and reduced, butthe effect is anything but one-dimensional: she condenses in a single line boththe likeness and the exaggeration needed to convey character, creating therebythe indelible impression of a (hesitantly) “speaking likeness.”Like the European expressionists she so admired, Neel shifted caricaturefrom the realm of comedy to that of tragedy. In her moving depiction of oldage and death, Last Sickness (1953, ƒg. 16), we do not need Enkman and Freisen’sphysiognomy studies to tell us that, because the inner ends of her eyebrowsare raised and the corners of mouth are turned down, she is sad. 44 Childrenlearn to read and to deliberately assume this expression by the age of two.What is important is that Neel has used caricature’s devices of isolation and exaggerationto signal the intense emotions of fear and regret that dominate thelast months of the woman’s life. Her plaid bathrobe, in „esh-colored reds andpinks, patterns her sagging body into a falling house of cards; her limp, bonelesshands signal helplessness and lack of resistance. Again, we cannot inferfrom the image that Neel’s mother was in fact a bitter, fearful woman; rather,she serves, like the symbolic lemons above her, as a double omen of the bitternessof both living and dying.In Interaction Ritual, sociologist Erving Goffman argues that face is a socialconstruct, something we assume to signal the way we wish to be treated and theway we intend to treat others. This public face is the mask, that which in RolandBarthes’s words makes a face into “the product of a society and of its history.”45 For Barthes, whatever is uniquely individual—the subjective, the personal,the “private life”—“is nothing but that zone of space, of time, where Iam not an image...” 46 Neel’s task was to create the conventions by which that

28 / The Subjects of the Artistzone could be convincingly imaged. When the emotions to be represented areextreme, she could draw upon those masks familiar from daily experience andculturally reinforced in caricature, theater, ƒlm, and expressionist art.The premises of Neel’s realist-expressionism were ƒrmly rejected by thenext generation of ƒgurative artists, who returned to that most enduring ofAmerican genres, the portrait. Neel achieves the illusion of a sitter’s presence;as viewers, our empathy is substituted for hers as the sitter’s revealed personalitytriggers associations with our own emotional experiences and historicalmemory. The men who revived portraiture in the 1960s—Philip Pearlstein,Chuck Close, Alex Katz, and Andy Warhol—discarded the fundamental tenetof empathy while maintaining the speciƒcs of the era’s dress, pose, and gesture.For instance, Pearlstein had decided by the time of the “New Images ofMan” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1959 that expressionismwas just “a cheap way of getting a reaction.” 47 All four artists use depersonalizingconventions—clinical lighting, mechanical copying, or elimination of detail—toinsist on tension between the sitter’s psychological absence and his orher physical presence. In comparison Neel’s approach remains retardataire.But if Neel can be considered the last great exemplar of a tradition, by the endof the 1970s, with the emergence of identity politics, the nihilism of a Pearlsteinor Warhol would symbolize to a less established group of artists a denialof a selfhood that was just beginning to be articulated. For feminists and minorityartists, Neel’s precedent became increasingly important.

3Starting Out from Home,1927–1932Neel came of age in the 1920s, a decade when women were granted the rightto vote and the image of the New Woman was born, who, in her short skirtsand bobbed hair, could imagine enjoying professional and recreational activitiespreviously reserved for men. However illusory the image of the NewWoman’s freedom may have been in social reality, nonetheless, the number ofwomen writers and visual artists whose work was granted a public forumgreatly increased. These artists considered themselves modernists, and yetwere aware that the modernist movement was gendered masculine and thatthe term feminine was a derogatory one. In their novels and essays, womenwriters such as Virginia Woolf and Rebecca West, whom Neel mentionedwith admiration, addressed this problem directly, often using satire to de„atethe pretensions of male genius. Comparing modernist literature unfavorablywith classical literature in A Room of One’s Own, Woolf argued that despitethe “freedom of mind” and “liberty of person” found in the writings of the contemporarynovelist, “Mr. A.,” a “straight, dark bar, a shadow shaped somethinglike the letter ‘I’ fell across every page . . .” Commenting on the boredom inducedby the protagonist’s repetitious and egotistic display of sexual prowess,Woolf concludes that “He does it in protest. He is protesting against the equalityof the other sex by asserting his own superiority . . . virility has now become29

30 / The Subjects of the Artistself-conscious . . .—men, that is to say, are writing with only the male side oftheir brains.” 1 Women artists of Neel’s generation, including Woolf, participatedin various modernist movements and learned from the work of theirmale counterparts, but frequently their work included an implied critique ofthe themes of “virility and domination” that from their point of view renderedso many canonical modernist works simplistic and one-sided.Neel’s early work, created between 1927 and 1933 during a period of repeatedpersonal trauma, is important for establishing the themes she wouldpursue for the rest of her career. In addition, it shows her mastering the stylisticvocabularies of the European and American modernist traditions in order tosituate her subject matter within the realm of her family life. Neel’s contributionto American art in the late 1920s resides in her courageous attention tosubject matter—dysfunctional families, the death of a child, insanity—thathad counterparts in European painting but that had rarely been addressed inmodernist painting in the United States.Because there was little precedent for Neel’s subject matter within recentAmerican modernist painting, Neel may have drawn support for her venturefrom the fertile literary bohemia of New York’s Greenwich Village, just asMunch had done with the Christiania Bohême in Oslo. The years after WorldWar I have been described as a literary Renaissance, and by moving to NewYork in 1928 and later settling in the Village in 1931, Neel placed herself atthe center of a literary milieu characterized by “the directness of their attackon the social order.” 2 Among those fundamental social institutions, patriarchalfamily life and its constructions of gender were a primary target for writersas diverse as Eugene O’Neill, Djuna Barnes, Susan Glaspell, and SherwoodAnderson.Neel’s portrait gallery, and the seeds of her future political commitments,began at home, or rather, with her return to her parents’ home after living for ayear and a half in Cuba. Although Neel had enjoyed artistic success in thenewly formed Cuban avant-garde, where she gained a perspective on NorthAmerican culture she would carry throughout her career, she spoke later ofher resentment at the restricted role of women in Latino culture as well as ofher discomfort at the huge disparity between rich and poor. 3 In May of 1927,she returned home to Colwyn with her infant daughter, Santillana. By the fall,Carlos joined her and they moved to West 81st Street in New York. Santillanadied of diphtheria in December 1927; their Isabetta was born in November1928, after which the family moved to Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. OnMay 1, 1930, Carlos left for Havana with Isabetta, and Neel returned home toColwyn. In August 1930, she suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalizedin the Othopedic Hospital in Philadelphia. In late December, Carlos returnedfor a brief visit, and Neel was released from the hospital, only to attempt

Starting Out from Home / 31suicide at home in January. Neel was then placed in the suicidal ward of thePhiladelphia General Hospital; in April she was transferred to Dr. Ludlum’ssanitorium outside Philadelphia. She was released in September 1931, a yearafter her initial breakdown. 4 In the work from this period, Neel observed herpainful personal life with a combination of bitter satire and profound grief.Few modernist confessionals are so lacking in self-pity or self-indulgence.In this series of autobiographical paintings and drawings, culminating inthe oil Symbols (Doll and Apple) (1932), Neel led that most sacred of Americancows—the family—to the slaughter. For purposes of discussion, theseworks will be paired thematically: the birth of a child (The Family, 1927; Well-Baby Clinic, 1928), the death of a child, (Requiem, 1928; Futility of Effort,1930), and the drastic consequences of the emotional con„icts she enduredduring this period (Suicidal Ward, Philadelphia General Hospital, 1931; Symbols[Doll and Apple], 1932). Widely divergent stylistically, the early watercolorsand oils reveal an artist experimenting with the means to visualize hersubjects during a period when German Expressionism was only just being introducedin the United States.The Family (1927, ƒg. 17) represents a clean break from the artistic traditionin which she had been trained, and suggests that for the moment she experimentedwith the more modernist style of the Stieglitz circle artists. Gone isthe legacy of Henri, and the painterly treatment of the anonymous underclass.In its place is the delicate, simpliƒed pencil and wash technique that earlymodernist American painters such as Charles Demuth and Abraham Walkowitzborrowed from Rodin’s late watercolors and Matisse’s drawings. Moreimportantly, Neel has shifted from generic subjects in ethnic guise—the Afro-Cuban populace—to the speciƒc subject of her family relationships, whichshe deƒnes through contrast. The pairing of the parents—George and Alice—with their namesake children establishes a present/future narrative. Dividedinto cartoon strip registers, the „oor levels relegate the men to the top and bottom—theintellectual brother in the rareƒed realm of the attic, and, in the cellar,the bent, colorless drone of a dad mounting the stairs—Sisyphus with abucket of coal. Occupying center stage, the placid Alice holding an alert infantis oblivious to her mother crouching under the dining room table andscrubbing the „oor with the concentrated animal energy of the hysteric. Thefamily hierarchy has been neatly reversed, with the “provider” a browbeatenslave instead of king of the castle, and the mother, the family’s emotional center,as cornered and helpless as a frightened animal. The house may providephysical shelter, but certainly no emotional support. At present, brother andsister play their expected roles: Alice as contented mother and George as thelofty intellectual, but the future is under the feet of both siblings. Pointedly absentfrom this scene is a key ƒgure: Neel’s husband. The Family is discon-

32 / The Subjects of the Artistnected, dismembered. As she depicts herself, Neel, ironically, is blind to thereality around her: the visual evidence that neither the father nor the motherfulƒll the roles expected of them.This biting commentary on the myth of the supportive family unit was currentin literature but exceptional in American painting. Accordingly, in 1966in her review of the exhibition of Neel’s early watercolors at the GrahamGallery, the critic Charlotte Willard described her portraits as “a kind ofWinesburg, Ohio in paint.” 5 The description is apt, for Sherwood Anderson’s1919 episodic novel of small-town American life has signiƒcant structural andthematic parallels with Neel’s autobiographical series. The occupants of the“New Willard House,” father, mother, and son George, an aspiring writer, areas isolated from each other as the members of Neel’s The Family, and in Neel’sdescription of her parochial hometown (see chapter 1), one hears echoes ofAnderson’s vivid, condensed prose. Each chapter of Winesburg, Ohio is presentedas a portrait of an individual citizen who embodies the disjunction betweenthe truth of established ideologies and the falsehood of the roles itforced its subjects to play—“what the world has done to them and their retaliation,”as Neel described her sitters. Moreover, Anderson’s literary portraits dependfor their vitality on vivid descriptions of physiognomy, body language,and dress that parallel Neel’s scrutiny of her sitters. For instance, his characterizationof Wing Biddlebaum’s hands—“The slender expressive ƒngers, foreveractive, forever striving to conceal themselves in his pockets or behind his back,came forth and became the piston rods of his machinery of expression” 6 —isequally applicable to Neel’s portrait of the painter Bessie Boris (ƒg. 15). In addition,his sympathy for the tragic role life had imposed on Wing because ofhis homosexuality also parallels Neel’s stance. Both painter and writer basetheir portraiture on ƒrst-hand experience, but simplify and distort the sitters tocreate an assemblage of “grotesques,” as Anderson called them, which they believedwould present a composite picture of interpersonal relationships at aspeciƒc place and time.Neel’s visual narrative, like Anderson’s literary one, was thus deliberatelyexpressive, but based on observations of family life that were conƒrmed by thecontemporary sociological study by Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown:A Study in American Culture (1925). As their pioneering researchdemonstrated, the American family was not the stable force popular culturehad made it out to be. For instance, citing statistics on the rise of divorce, theycommented:The way in which these antecedents of divorce are imbedded in the whole complexof Middletown’s culture touching the adjustments between a man and his wifeis suggested by comparing what Middletown regards as minimum essentials of mar-

Starting Out from Home / 33riage with conditions actually existing in many Middletown homes . . . The husbandmust “support” his family, but, as pointed out above, recurrent “hard times” makesupport of their families periodically impossible for many workers; the wife mustmake a home for her husband and care for her children, but she is increasinglyspending her days in gainful employment outside the home; husband and wife mustcleave to each other in the sex relation, but fear of pregnancy frequently makes thisrelation a dread for one or both of them; affection between the two is regarded asthe basis of marriage, but sometimes in the day-after-day struggles this seems to bea memory rather than a present help. 7Despite the growing acknowledgment of marital unhappiness and failure,neither changing standards of living nor the permissiveness of the roaringtwenties did much to weaken the American belief in the mythology of the family.Nor, according to historian James Patterson, did the 1930s shake the foundationsof the myth: “The depression years, far from promoting sexual liberationor economic feminism, sustained traditional beliefs in the father as headof the household.” 8 Platitudes such as “a man’s home is his castle” and “awoman’s place is in the home” were reinforced by the rapidly growing advertisingindustry, which convinced the public that the family ideal could bereached through the purchase of the appropriate consumer products. 9 Even if,as the Lynds argued, a happy, supportive family life was never more than amyth sustained through advertising, the ideal has nonetheless been so ingrainedin the American mind that negative depictions have been virtually absentin painting. Rejecting the myth of the family as a haven from the pressuresof the public realm, Neel devised an artistic counterpart to sociology’s empiricalmethodology, with its reliance on transcribed interviews and analysis ofdata gathered ƒrst-hand. 10 Her 1969 portrait of Helen Lynd can thus be considereda tribute from one “pioneer” to another (ƒg. 18).If the subject matter of The Family is unusual in American painting, its format,where the „oors of the house are like the various registers of a comic strip,is equally exceptional. Of course, the use of the rectangular canvas to createthe appearance of looking into a single room is a standard one in realist painting,particularly in family portraiture. However, the convention of the cutawayhouse is found only in low art sources: popular lithographs, children’sbooks, satirical cartoons, and comic strips such as Winsor McCay’s “LittleNemo in Slumberland.” The Family is the ƒrst instance of Neel’s use of popularart in general, and the tradition of satirical caricature in particular, not simplyas a device to capture personality, but to signal that the work is a critique. 11The pedigree of the trope of the cut-away house as a metaphor in artisticsatire for both family and society can be traced as far back as the nineteenthcentury, however. An explicit connection between the „oors of a house and so-

34 / The Subjects of the Artistcial status was established by 1845 in prints such as Cross-Section of a ParisianHouse: 1 January 1845: Five Stages of the Parisian World, from Paris Comique(ƒg. 19), where one ascends from the carefree concierges on the bottom „oorthrough the bored bourgeois couple on the première étage, to the destitutefamily and bohemian artist in the garret rooms. By the mid-nineteenth century,then, class stereotypes that were central to satirical cartoons were inplace: bourgeois family stability was equated with boredom, while the working-classcaretakers on the bottom „oor were seen as vital, and the neglectedartist, of course, was forced to starve. On various “levels,” this stereotype informsmuch of modernist painting, including American modernism.If the family could not support the mother as artist, the artworld was equallyincapable of accommodating the artist who is a mother. In The Intellectual(1929, ƒg. 20), Neel addressed this con„ict with the same satirical wit she haddemonstrated in The Family. When Alice and Carlos moved to New York in1927, she found a job in a Greenwich Village bookstore run by Fanya Foss(ƒg. 21), a woman with literary aspirations. In the watercolor, Foss, at right, affectsa mannered, Pre-Raphaelite pose in an overstuffed chair. At the far left, incontrast to Foss’s contemplative calm, sits a three-armed and three-legged Alicetrying desperately to participate in the discussion while struggling to keepan energetic toddler in check. Rarely has the hopelessness of maintaining anykind of intellectual life while single-handedly caring for an infant been sovividly imaged. Neel effects her revenge—a kind of female deballing—on herfriend for the creative leisure time she enjoys by opening her dress to reveal,not voluptuous breasts, but sagging teats. Her real revenge, of course, is thewatercolor itself, which serves as a material rebuke to Foss’s arid dreaming.The style of both The Family and The Intellectual is closely related to CharlesDemuth’s watercolor illustrations for novels and short stories (1915 and 1919),which may well have served as a source. A. E. Gallatin’s monograph on Demuth,the ƒrst book on the artist, had been published in 1927, and Neel maywell have seen some of these “scandalous” watercolors at the Daniel gallery inNew York. The thin, delicate pencil line, the exaggeration of anatomy thatleaves the head large and the hands and feet minuscule, and the wet, heavywash all suggest the in„uence of the early Demuth. The Intellectual recalls inparticular his illustrations for Zola’s Nana (1915–1916, ƒg. 22). Even if Demuthwas not a major impetus for abandoning the painterly stroke of the AshcanSchool for the taut line of early modernism, the shift from a painterly realistto a linear modernist style was crucial for her art, based as it was on a preciseand subtle gift for caricature.Demuth’s art may have been important as well because of his willingness tobase this phase of his art in his personal preoccupations. In Demuth’s case, thetheme of sexual corruption that pervades his choice of literature—as varied as

Starting Out from Home / 35Emile Zola and Frank Wedekind on the one hand and Henry James and WalterPater on the other, gave him permission to obliquely address, in artisticterms, his homosexuality. If perhaps these very private works also gave Neelthe courage to address her personal life, they may have been important as wellas a precedent for gay subject matter, one of Neel’s central concerns. Demuthhad all but abandoned his intimate ƒgurative work when Neel began hers, butthe parallels between them reveal the shared interests of these two members ofthe American bohemian avant-garde.Society’s professed concern for the health and welfare of its children is parodiedin Well-Baby Clinic (1928–1929, ƒg. 23), where Neel brought her secondchild, Isabetta, for free neonatal care. 12 Continuing to employ caustic satire,Neel erased the factitious boundary between public and private life, as shewould continue to do subsequently. Crudely painted in oil, the revolting displayof “sloppy humanity, all ragged at the edges,” as Neel put it, depicts the infantsas „ayed monkeys and the mothers as demented hysterics. Only the bizarrelyhatted nurse/madonna at the center of the composition has her infantswaddled and under control; at left a doctor, proffering tranquilizer pills as ifthey were glasses of champagne, attempts to pacify the screeching mother.There is no natural relation between mother and child here, nor is there abenevolent support system. The impersonal institution cannot accommodate,but only sedate, the human difƒculties it ostensibly has the expertise to alleviate.The white tables could belong to either a clinic, a hospital, or a morgue,and the red, writhing bodies pass across them as if on an assembly line at ameat-packing plant. Isolated at the edge of the painting, Neel’s self-portraitseems as oblivious to her surroundings as she was in The Family, perhaps onceagain indicating her inability to escape from the con„icts of her prescribedmaternal role except through denial. The professionals manage and controlinfant care with a detachment that bears no relation to the psychological spaceinhabited by the patients, who in this clinic are not so much the babies as theunpaid, untrained mothers, who are assumed to have some sort of naturalexpertise.Stylistically, Neel has moved beyond the freely drawn caricature of TheFamily to an extreme painterly expressionism parallelling the most fevered visionsof a James Ensor or an Emil Nolde. The crude paint application and hotcoloration are conventional signs in expressionist painting for lack of rationalcontrol and for the release of subjective emotion. However, Neel could havehad only limited knowledge of German expressionist art in 1928. As SusanNoyes Platt has documented, there were few major exhibitions of German artin the United States in the 1920s. The most important was “A Collection ofModern German Art,” which W. R. Valentiner organized for the AndersonGalleries in October 1923. 13 It is unlikely that Neel traveled from Philadel-

36 / The Subjects of the Artistphia to New York to see that exhibition, and she would also have missed by amonth Max Beckmann’s ƒrst New York exhibition at J. B. Neumann’s NewArt Circle gallery in April 1927. However, an important article on German expressionistart by Rom Landau in the July 1928 issue of The Arts argued thatthe emotional expressionism of Kirschner and Nolde had been replaced recentlyby “The New Reality” of George Grosz and Otto Dix: “once Expressionismlost its power, the younger generation began to long for the externalrealities of life. They tried to be objective instead of subjective.” 14 In Well-Baby Clinic, Neel combined what Landau termed the “inharmonious volcaniceruptions” of the ƒrst phase of expressionism with the searing socialcommentary of the second. In the late 1920s, Neel’s watercolors display a contrastof taut line and broad areas of wash to create an ominous mood, similar tothose George Grosz created after his arrival in New York in 1932. A few yearslater, after the 1931 exhibition “Modern German Painting and Sculpture” atthe Museum of Modern Art, Neel’s portrait paintings reveal a cold, clinicaleye akin to that of Dix, whose portrait of Dr. Mayer-Hermann also entered thepermanent collection that year.Whatever her familiarity with German art, Neel’s independently evolvedexpressionism is again signiƒcant for its gendered content. Although the hospitalsetting, locus of both illness and insanity, is used as a metaphor in Germanart for social ills, Grosz, Beckmann, and Nolde tended to load their depictionswith religious or moral symbolism. Neel, on the other hand, avoids both mysticismand moralism in her critical evaluation of both the maternal instinct andthe scientiƒc competence of the medical establishment. Mothers who cannotafford private pediatricians for their children take them to publicly fundedhospital clinics for care. Social corruption is less the subject here than the incompetentcare offered to the indigent.If the institution of public infant care was scathingly mocked in Well-BabyClinic, the emotional dimension of family tragedy is addressed in two worksexecuted several years apart. Requiem (1928, ƒg. 24) a watercolor painted afterher ƒrst daughter, Santillana, died of diphtheria in December 1927, depicts aheaving ocean of grief next to which lie two prone skeletal ƒgures, one robedin white, the other in black, screaming in pain while two embryo/ƒsh look dispassionatelyon. Remarkably similar in means to Edvard Munch’s The Scream(1893, ƒg. 25), the pain expressed here is very different from Munch’s paradigmof personal alienation. Neel’s trauma is not isolated but shared. Mourninghas locked together the two ƒgures (Alice and Carlos), so that a death inthe family becomes the death of the family. 15The sparest and most abstract of the modernist paintings from her ƒrst matureperiod is in addition her ƒrst overtly socially concerned painting as well,initiating a transition from her early modernist to her social realist art at the on-

Starting Out from Home / 37set of the Depression. Futility of Effort (1930, ƒg. 26), a metaphor for the deadendingof her marriage with the departure of Carlos and Isabetta for Cuba onMay 1 of that year, was generated by “a notice in the newspaper about how achild crawled through the end of a bed and got strangled through the bedposts.The mother was ironing in the kitchen.” 16 Although the subject of the death ofinnocent children would be found fairly frequently in left-wing periodicalssuch as Art Front (the journal of the Artists Union), where this painting was reproducedin 1936, Neel’s early approach to the subject would prove exceptional.In most social realist art the mother remains the bulwark of the family,clinging to her children no matter how desperate the circumstances. Instead,Neel limns a harsher, less sentimental story with minimal means. The dolllike,lifeless ƒgure hangs from a bedpost suspended in a neutral grey ƒeld, withthe sketchy proƒle of the parent to the right, and with the black diamondshapedaperture of the window on the left marking the point of life’s departureinto death. The painting is as distilled as a memory, an image of a moment ofnegligence branded permanently onto the mind. The title supplied by ArtFront—Poverty—underscores the cause of the “accident,” which was deprivationas much as individual negligence, but Neel’s own title, Futility of Effort,conveys the hopelessness of lives lived in the grey, dimensionless, unchartedregion of indigence. The painted metal bed frame reprises the chair seats inWell-Baby Clinic, thus identifying poverty as an institution into which societyconƒnes certain of its members, sentencing them to ongoing family tragedy.Like the body of the child, Neel’s own psychic health had been broken in1930, and she became a resident of the medical institutions she so effectivelyparodied in Well-Baby Clinic. Like the earlier oil, the pencil drawing SuicidalWard, Philadelphia General Hospital (1931, ƒg. 27) documents the disjunctionbetween hospital care and the cure it claims to provide. The lines of examiningtables are now rows of beds, equally incapable of soothing their agonizedoccupants. The affable doctor, a wooden, insensitive ƒgurehead in controlof himself if nothing else, occupies the center of the medical arena.Drawn from her memory after release from the Philadelphia General Hospital,Suicidal Ward is a document of medical sadism presaging documentaryƒlms such as Richard Leacock’s Titicut Follies.Within modernism, insanity has been generalized into the trope of the sufferingartist, whose genius necessarily entails antisocial behavior. Neel makesno such romantic connection between creativity and insanity. Rather her interesthere is in its institutionalization: the restraint and ineffectual treatmentof those diagnosed as insane. The authority in control, Dr. Breitenbach, posesas the competent ofƒcial he imagines himself to be. According to Michel Foucault’sMadness and Civilization, the physician became “the essential ƒgure ofthe asylum” during the nineteenth century, converting it “into a medical space”:

38 / The Subjects of the ArtistHowever, and this is the essential point . . . It is not as a scientist that homo medicushas authority in the asylum, but as a wise man . . . [T]hese powers . . . took root inthe madman’s minority status, in the insanity of his person, not of his mind. If themedical personage could isolate madness, it was not because he knew it, but becausehe mastered it. 17Lacking in any genuine scientiƒc expertise, the doctor’s role is primarily supervisoryor regulatory: he is the personiƒcation of paternalism. Whereas in theclinic the doctor’s authority comes from his ability to see and to say—to applyknowledge to empirical observation—in Neel’s rendering, there is no attemptto speak (to diagnose and to cure), but only to appear to be in authority. Undersuch nonchalant observation, the differences between depression, insanity,and illness are elided, and Neel’s carefully individualized patients suffer in silence,unrecognized or acknowledged by the doctor’s distant, unfocused gaze.“See, that shows you’re mentally healthy, when you smile like that,” 18 wasNeel’s cynical addendum to the caustic commentary her drawing had alreadyprovided. Later, she would attribute her recovery not to medical treatment butto her own self-discipline.The reality of the asylum, and the regulation of one class and sex by anotherexplodes the modernist myth of the insane creative genius. Suicidal Ward depictswomen who are mentally or physically ill, not tormented artists. Thestudy of hysteria, a “woman’s af„iction,” has never been considered a componentof female creativity, but merely a natural inclination that served as a usefulmodel for male creativity. 19 Carolyn Heilbrun has argued that it was notuntil the generation of women writers born in the 1920s that woman’s insanityand incarceration could be expressed in autobiographical terms.The culmination of the early family depictions is not a narrative work, butrather a still-life. Neel’s ƒrst use of inanimate objects as a vehicle for mourningit carries emotional content through metaphor rather than through expressionistexaggeration. Painted after Alice had moved to Greenwich Village andher daughter was living in the care of Carlos’s sisters in Havana, Symbols (Dolland Apple) (1932, ƒg. 28) is an altar on which the doll/martyr of motherhoodis sacriƒced. Ostensibly the proud mother in a family snapshot from 1929(ƒg. 29), by 1932 this image had been thoroughly shattered. Neel explainedthe stresses that led to her decision to permit Carlos’s sisters to raise Isabetta asfollows: “You see, I always had this awful dichotomy. I loved Isabetta, of courseI did. But I wanted to paint. Also, a terrible rivalry sprang up between Carlosand me.” 20The devastating consequences of the social construction of motherhood inWestern Christian culture are conveyed through the starkly presented object:her life laid before us on the now-familiar examining table, drenched in a

Starting Out from Home / 39harsh „uorescent light. The doll, with its painted blue eyes, could be eitherAlice or Isabetta: that is, both Neel herself (the artist/art) and Isabetta (thechild/motherhood) are being sacriƒed on this cruel piece of institutional furniture.The apple, normally a symbol of female fertility as well as of knowledge,is here obscenely related to Eve’s sin by being shoved rudely into thedoll’s crotch, where it serves as a contraceptive to creativity and/or fecundity.The doll is impaled on the irreconcilable con„ict between motherhood andartistic career. 21 For lack of a modest amount of ƒnancial or professional support,both her sanity and her child had been lost. In all of her lectures, Neelemphasized that a woman should never give up painting: “If you decide youare going to have children and give up painting during the time you havethem, you give it up forever . . . You get divorced from your art.” 22 But the inevitablecost to mother and to child of the marriage of the woman artist to artentails a sacriƒce of biblical dimensions. 23The symbols of the painting’s title—the dummylike doll, the red rubberglove, the fruit, and the harsh, raking light—are motifs found in Giorgio deChirico’s art and suggest another modernist in„uence on Neel in the early experimentalwork. Perhaps Neel saw the proto-surrealist’s work at the KurtValentine Gallery in New York in the late 1920s. Like de Chirico, Neel hasused the irrational juxtaposition of inanimate objects to convey the mind’sability to form disjunctive images around its pain as an oyster forms a pearl.Only a brief allusion here, surrealism would ƒgure prominently in Neel’s renewedmeditation on the family in 1942, when the European surrealists werein exile in New York.Symbols (Doll and Apple) is speciƒcally an image of a woman’s psychicpain, and in its iconic representation of female martyrdom bears a resemblanceto a work from the same year by Frida Kahlo, Henry Ford Hospital (ƒg.30). (Neel was familiar with the work of Kahlo’s husband, Diego Rivera, whohad enjoyed a successful one-person exhibition at the Museum of Modern Artthe previous winter, but she could not have known Kahlo’s work, which wasnot exhibited in New York until 1939.) The traumatic miscarriage that Kahlosuffered in Detroit in July is staged on a metal hospital bed, both artists apparentlyrecognizing the ironic connection between the cold, inhuman furnitureand the sacriƒcial altar. One unexpected and signiƒcant coincidence in thesecontemporary works is the fact that both turn to the religious rituals of folk artto speak of their respective inabilities to fulƒll their expected role as mothers.Kahlo’s painting is on tin, a deliberate reference to retablo paintings which inMexican culture are used as offerings by those who have survived a disaster.Neel’s reference to the private devotional altars that both Carlos’s parents andhis unmarried sisters kept in their homes is more oblique, but the scraped paint,suggesting peeling plaster walls, as well as the palm fronds, cross, and sun, un-

40 / The Subjects of the Artistmistakably convey the sacriƒce/conversion of her American-born daughter toCuban culture in the name of a rigidly delimiting and dehumanizing conceptof motherhood. Her child had been returned to the very society whose patriarchalvalues she had „ed.Neel’s early work opens up new territory within the history of Americanmodernism by looking at the most intimate of family experiences and connectingthem with prevailing institutions and ideologies. Her early expressionism,an eclectic synthesis of European and American precedents from Munch andEnsor to Demuth served less as a means to directly express intense emotionthan as an objectifying device, a pitiless spotlight to train on the traumaticevents of her life, revealing both its tragedy and absurdity. The family, whosefragile bonds were severed by psychic and social forces, was exposed in all itsweakness. The works had no audience until the 1960s, and even after they becameknown, were generally considered less important than her later work.In his aforementioned review of Hills’s 1984 biography, Alloway stated: “Isee her as a late, very late starter and count the last twenty years of her art farmore highly than the ƒrst forty.” 24 Moreover, the late starter was consideredvery conventional stylistically. For instance, even though in 1982 curator andcritic Robert Storr would admiringly describe Symbols (Doll and Apple) as“The sparsest of icons to private female hurt . . .,” he nonetheless concludedthat her work was in no way innovative: “often the mood of the paintings is establishedaround subjects that are in themselves . . . downright cliched . . .what commands one’s respect, in fact, is the energy with which she attackssuch set pieces.” 25 As feminist art historians have pointed out, bias against traditionis frequently synonymous with bias against art by women. Even theseperceptive and supportive critics failed to adequately appreciate the innovativecontent of Neel’s early work. Her work thus conƒrms Lucy Lippard’s 1976 hypothesisthat:Within the old, “progressive,” or evolutionary context, much women’s art is “notinnovative,” or “retrograde.” . . . One of the major questions facing feminist criticismhas to be whether stylistic innovation is indeed the only innovation, or whetherother aspects of originality have yet to be investigated . . . [P]erhaps women . . . [differ]from the traditional notion of the avant-garde by opposing not styles andforms, but ideologies. 26If this be the case, the painter from a provincial town outside of Philadelphiawith a conventional art school training had been able, during a period ofgreat personal trauma, to isolate from the broad currents of American and Europeanmodernism those aspects relevant to her autobiographical concernsand to create a body of work unparalleled in its deconstruction of the ideolo-

Starting Out from Home / 41gies of family and motherhood. In contrast to the „ippant tone of her later lectures,Neel’s visual autobiography retells the narrative of the marginalizationof the modernist artist from a woman’s point of view. For the artist who hadchildren, personal identity was completely subsumed by her role as maternalcaretaker; neither family nor social institutions could conceive of a womanneeding anything other than her child. This fundamental misapprehensionand its tragic consequences are the subject of Neel’s early work.

Part IINeel’s Social Realist Art: 1933–198143

4Art on the Left in the 1930sLa VanguardiaNeel’s concept of the function of a socially concerned art as a critique of dominantculture was formulated during the year and a half (January 1926–May1927) she spent in Havana after her marriage to the Cuban painter Carlos Enríquezde Gomez. 1 Neel arrived in Havana at a propitious moment, just intime to join the burgeoning avant-garde movement there. Among the writersshe befriended were Nicolas Guillen, Marcelo Pogolotti, and Alejo Carpentier.The awareness on the part of these Hispanic writers of the injusticesin„icted on Latin American peoples by capitalism and colonialism permanentlyshaped her political attitudes, which Neel expressed in broad terms:“Another thing, this Cuban husband had given me a Latin American mentality.I hated everything American. Jose Martí, the Cuban leader exiled in NewYork, called America, ‘the colossus of the North.’” 2 The shock of the gulf betweenrich and poor in Cuba intensiƒed her outrage. Although her portraits ofAfro-Cuban street people were a continuation of the Ashcan School–inspiredwork that she had begun in Philadelphia, their subjects are a prelude to herSpanish Harlem portraits.According to the art historian Juan Martinez, although the visual arts were45

46 / Neel’s Social Realist Artmoribund when Neel arrived in Havana, Cuban literature and anthropologywere thriving. The decade from 1923 to 1933 was also to be a dynamic periodof political, educational, and cultural reform, during which the dictatorship ofGerardo Machado (1925–1933) was brought down. According to Martinez:“The most enduring contribution of the Cuban reform movement . . . was creatinga strong sense of nationalism or cubanidad.” 3 In books published between1906 and 1913, the anthropologist Fernando Ortiz had deƒned “LoCubano,” that which is Cuban, as the mix of Indian, Spanish, and African culturesfound in ajiaco, a Cuban stew. Spanish Harlem was a different sort ofstew, but after 1938 Neel would set herself the task of deƒning its culture, asOrtiz had done for Cuba.Cuban modernism was similarly characterized as a mixture of Europeanmodernism on the one hand and the native Indian and African traditions,Criollismo and Afrocubanismo, on the other. Moreover, the emerging avantgardeallied itself with social and political reform. The poet and communistleader Juan Martinello called artists to the cause: “Only art [can] achieve ourtotal liberation.” 4 As in the United States, socially conscious art frequently appearedin cartoon form in left-wing magazines such as Social (1916–1936) andCarteles (1919–1960), edited by the caricaturist Conrado Massaguer, as wellas by Carpentier, Martinello, and the essayist Jose Z. Tallet. Both magazinesdecried the lack of state support for the arts, and their efforts helped to pave theway for the establishment of public art education and mural projects in 1937.Throughout the decade, artists used their skills “as weapons to criticize theZayas and Machado regimes.” Among the most widely published of these effortswere Enríquez’s illustrations for El Terror de Cuba, published in 1933 inboth Spain and France by the Comité de Jovenes Revolucionarios Cubanos. 5Carteles and Social were the counterparts to the Masses and the Liberatorin the United States, and their use of art as a weapon anticipated Neel’s subsequentafƒliation with American social realism, speciƒcally her Masses &Mainstream illustrations from the 1940s.The one radical journal devoted exclusively to the arts was Revista deAvance, which between 1927 and 1930 called for and deƒned the vanguardmovement. Its ƒrst editorial, by Jorge Manach in the March 15, 1927, issue,was entitled “Vanguardismo: La ƒsonomia de las Epocas.” In May 1927, Revistade Avance sponsored the ƒrst exhibition of Cuban avant-garde art, the“Exposicion de Arte Nuevo,” which marked the beginning of a new direction,as the journal proudly proclaimed in its April 15 issue, brandishing such termsas “militant,” “new,” and “avant-garde.” As Martinez points out, the nineartists’ works were at most “mild versions of European modernist styles,” butthey were radical by Cuban standards at the time. In his autobiography Of

Art on the Left in the 1930s / 47Clay and Voices, Marcelo Pogolotti described the work of the exhibitors asfollows:Gattorno presented . . . typical cubist objects . . . and Victor Manuel a portrait and arainy cityscape of Paris, more or less postimpressionist. Carlos Enriquez exhibited ayoung blonde en plein air, seated on some grass, who would later be his wife, AliceNeel, a painter of talent, whose stay in Havana, although brief, left good and lastingmemories . . . This exhibition of art was endowed with a certain importance becauseit brought out the ƒrst signs of disquiet and longing for renewal. 6This milestone in the history of Cuban art was also Neel’s ƒrst group exhibition,and it is signiƒcant that, as the only North American in the exhibit, shewas singled out by the journal to exemplify the new avant-garde. Both the April15 and the April 30 issues contained photographic insets that juxtaposed theworks of Neel and her husband, Enríquez. Whereas the ƒrst inset also includeda landscape by Ramon Loy, the second contained only the works ofNeel and her husband, labeled “Neel-Enríquez.” Clearly, they were consideredthe cutting edge of the avant-garde, as the text suggests. The May 15 issue,published after the opening, contained other examples of Arte Nuevo: AntonioGattorno, Luis Lopez Mendez, Marcelo Pogolotti, L. Romero Arciaga,and two nudes “De un Realismo Exagerado” by Carlos Enríquez. There wereno examples of Neel’s work, perhaps because the editors wanted to emphasizethe Cuban character of the exhibition, or perhaps because Neel was no longerin Havana. The very month that the Cuban artistic vanguard came into itsown, Neel left the country, „eeing a strained relationship with Enríquez’s conservative,upper-class family. Hers was only the ƒrst of many subsequent departures,however. The writer Carpentier, whose depictions of Spanish imperialismin books such as The Harp and the Shadow so closely paralleled Neel’sown attitudes about American imperialism, left for Paris that same year. Enríquezfollowed his friend there in 1930, and Gattorno, Guillen, and Pogolottiwould all move to New York after 1935. Like Neel, the Cuban expatriotsaligned themselves with left-wing causes after their arrival. Guillen, for instance,would write for Masses & Mainstream during the years Neel was publishingher illustrations in the magazine. In 1969, after Pogolotti had moved toMexico, Neel made a point of seeing him when she traveled there withRichard. On that same visit, she also met David Alfaro Siquieros for the ƒrsttime, who showed her the murals he was then painting. 7The pairing of Neel and Enríquez in Revista de Avance is indicative of theirshared social and artistic concerns. Their studies of Afro-Cubans was a subjectfound in the art of Aristides Fernandez, Antonio Gattorno, and Eduardo Abela,

48 / Neel’s Social Realist Artalthough the latter concentrated on the rural rather than the urban poor. 8 Afterthey separated in 1930, however, their artistic concerns diverged, and Neel’slater unblinking social realism appears completely removed from the romantic,mythologized Cuban landscapes that established Enríquez as one of Cuba’smost prominent modern artists.To the extent that their very different oeuvres meet, it is on the commonground of the nude body. For both artists, sexuality was a continual preoccupation.Both depicted the nude with a frankness and lack of idealization that wasevidence of their Philadelphia training, and both had their nudes removedfrom exhibitions because of indecency. Enríquez’s paintings of Alice from1926–1927, of which two were published in Revista de Avance in 1927, are unabashedin depicting folds of „esh and (depilated) pubic areas (ƒg. 31); nonetheless,they seem modest in comparison with Neel’s nudes from 1930 on.The distance between their sensibilities is clearest in their 1934 portraits oftheir six-year-old daughter, Isabetta, with whom neither had had contact sinceshe was an infant. Painted after his return from Paris to Havana, Enríquez’s Isabettais doll-like and stiff, with generalized features that convey innocencebut little sense of individual character (ƒg. 32). On one of Isabetta’s visits toNew York that year, Neel, with remarkable boldness, painted her daughter as afull-length nude (ƒg. 33). Neel’s Isabetta strides forward, arms akimbo, bodylike a young sapling, ƒlled with the energy of growth, as indicated by the exuberant,luxurious hair that erupts from her head. Here the Freudian vision ofchildhood sexuality is translated as unself-conscious pleasure in one’s ownbody. Her cylindrical limbs and torso recall Gauguin’s Tahitian natives, as wellas the depictions of Cuban peasants Antonio Gattorno had made in the late1920s under the French artist’s in„uence. Planted on her “primitive” rug, Isabettathus becomes Neel’s interpretation of Cubanidad, a primal being who isonly incidentally Neel’s daughter.Coincidentally, the previous year, John Dos Passos had created a literaryportrait in The Big Money (1933), that was a double for the “Cuban” Neel.The vignette, entitled “Margo Dowling,” follows the fortunes of a beautifulyoung woman—“a knockout”—who marries a Cuban, moves to Havana, suffersunder the culture’s restrictive attitudes toward women, and endures severaldays of painful labor in delivering a daughter who dies shortly thereafter.Margo then escapes home to New York City, telling her mother: “. ..it waspretty bad. His people are pretty well off and prominent and all that but it’shard to get on to their ways. Tony’s a bum and I hate him more than anythingin the world. But after all it was quite an experience . . . I wouldn’t have missedit.” 9 Cuba was a source of interest to many American artists in the 1930s, fromDos Passos and Hemingway to Walker Evans. Dos Passos’s understanding ofthe clash of North and South American cultures was used to create a literary

Art on the Left in the 1930s / 49trope that happened to have encapsulated Neel’s personal experience. 10 Althoughthe social realist movement in the United States was in„uenced primarilyby the Mexican mural movement, the connections with the Cubanavant-garde were also signiƒcant. 11Social Realism, 1930–1940Thus, when Neel moved to Greenwich Village in 1931, she found herself atanother artistic center committed to social and political change. The Depressionhad precipitated the emergence of social realism, which gathered momentumbetween 1932 and 1935 and was characterized by the use of overtlypolitical subject matter, emphasizing the plight of the destitute worker. 12 Althoughthe product of a speciƒc set of historical conditions during the 1930s,social realism, examined in broad terms, can also be seen as part of a consistentstream of socially concerned art that threads throughout the twentieth century.Although rarely explicitly sectarian, nonetheless American social realism, as atrend rather than a movement, maintained a belief that an oppositional artwhose subject matter addressed sociopolitical problems could serve as a powerfulimpetus to social reform. Neel is thus a social realist in the narrow sensethat her paintings after 1930 are part of that emerging movement, and a socialrealist in the broader sense of a politically concerned, reformist art. Neel andher more prominent social realist colleagues, such as Ben Shahn, WilliamGropper, Phillip Evergood, and Jack Levine, continued throughout their careersto make art that critiqued the varying historical circumstances of a givenera from a left perspective. Although Neel’s contribution to the revolutionarytableaux characteristic of the social realist movement of the 1930s is relativelyminor, her invention of the proletarian portrait gallery is a genuine contribution,important not only for its alternative vision of social realism during theDepression, but also for its contribution to a larger trend of socially concernedart in America. Neel’s work provides one signiƒcant example of the way inwhich politically engaged artists adjusted the expression of their left-wing idealsin the face of changing historical circumstances. However, her continuingassociation with the Communist Party makes charting the political content ofher work a particularly challenging task.The years between the onset of the Depression in 1929 and the end of WorldWar II in 1945 were so tumultuous that terms such as revolutionary art, proletarianart, and social realist art are still buffeted by its winds, as are its loosely relatedcommunist terms: proletcult art, Zhdanovism, socialist realism. If thecommunist system, as exempliƒed by the U.S.S.R., provided the most deƒnitiveeconomic alternative to the collapse of capitalism in 1929, it nonetheless

50 / Neel’s Social Realist Artwas as unstable a model as capitalism itself. After Hitler’s rise to power in 1933,it appeared to be the political alternative to fascism, but its authority was underminedas early as 1934 by Stalin’s purges of dissidents; by the end of thedecade, the Nazi-Soviet Pact in August 1939 and the Russian invasion of Finlandin November 1939 destroyed for many fellow travelers their faith in theSoviet system. Given the course of international politics, it is hardly surprisingthat the Communist Party USA was fraught with internal dissension, and thatMarxist literary and artistic theorists in the United States could not provide atranslation of changing Soviet policies appropriate to the vernacular of theAmerican milieu.The nature of Neel’s contribution to social realism is also difƒcult to chartbecause she did not occupy a leadership position either artistically or organizationally.Neel joined several of the artists’ organizations, such as the ArtistsUnion and its successor, United American Artists, and in addition participatedin Union-sponsored exhibits and protests. However, she left no paper trail ofher activities that can elucidate her stance on any of the issues of the decade.Nor was she singled out by galleries or museums to be shown in national exhibitions,such as the American Artists’ Congress Exhibition at the ACA galleriesin 1935 or the “America Today” exhibit in 1936. Finally, she was uninterestedin the monumentally scaled public mural commissions that might have helpedto establish her reputation, but concentrated instead on the medium of portraiture,a genre considered irrelevant to a collective art.Just as Neel’s presence in the landmark artistic events of the decade isghostly, so the connections between her Marxist-in„uenced aesthetics, her politicalbeliefs, and her art are elusive. A lifelong supporter of the ideals if notthe practice of communism, her participation in communist politics was erratic.13 Nonetheless, she was familiar with the aesthetic ideas of some of themost controversial communist writers in this country, among them MikeGold, journalist and author of Jews Without Money (1930), and V. J. Jerome,author of Culture in a Changing World (1947). In addition, she read many ofthe central texts of communist theory, which she purchased through AlexanderTrachtenberg’s International Publishers in New York. 14 Neither an intellectualdilettante nor a political naif, Neel was conversant with the principlesof Marxism and of International Communism. Although the exact dates andstatus of her Party membership cannot be established, she remained at theleast a fellow traveler when it was dangerous to do so (during the 1940s and1950s), and as Party stalwart even when, with the emergence of the New Left,she formed new alliances. Although Neel never severed her ties with the CommunistParty USA, her continued alliegance to its politics and philosophy mayhave had less to do with a commitment to the goal of establishing a communiststate than with her outrage at the gross inequalities perpetuated by capitalism

Art on the Left in the 1930s / 51and her desire to maintain an oppositional stance to the American politicalsystem. Similarly, Marxist theory provided only the broadest framework forthe content of her painting. According to Annette T. Rubenstein, communism,and speciƒcally the model provided by the Soviet Union, “was a tremendouslyimportant factor in our lives, but it was most important in ratherintangible ways . . . it gave us a feeling of worldwide comradeship and a senseof participating directly in world history.” 15 Neel might best be described as apopulist in the tradition of Walt Whitman, William Jennings Bryan, and oneof her intellectual mentors, Mike Gold. Her communal art was forged withinthe context of America’s cultural traditions and its changing political climate.Despite Neel’s skepticism about theories, one, the call for a social realistart published by Mike Gold the year Neel entered art school, can stand as astatement of her sympathies, even if she did not read it until years later. In aFebruary 1921 essay in the Liberator, “Towards Proletarian Art,” written onlytwo years after the Communist Party was established in the United States,Gold (nee Itzhok [Irwin] Granich) issued a passionate call to arms for an art of,by, and for the laboring poor, one that would be pure and direct and wouldavoid the weaknesses of modernism:What is art? Art is the tenement pouring out its soul through us, its most sensitiveand articulate sons and daughters. What is Life? Life for us has been the tenementthat bore and moulded us through years of meaningful pain . . . The art ideals of thecapitalistic world isolated each artist as in a solitary cell . . .The masses are still primitive and clean, and artists must turn to them forstrength again . . . It is Life at its fullest and noblest . . . The Revolution, in its secularmanifestations of strike, boycott, mass-meeting, imprisonment, sacriƒce, agitation,martyrdom, organization, is thereby worthy of the religious devotion of the artist. 16Published two years before Henri’s The Art Spirit, Gold’s manifesto shares theAshcan School artist’s passionate identiƒcation with the laboring poor, butmoves far beyond Henri in seeing the revolutionary implications of an art ofthe masses. Gold’s messianic faith that an art forged from life could help fosterthe revolution, which in turn would usher in a new society, exempliƒed the romanticzeal of the early converts to communism.Neel’s earliest social realist painting, the spare pictogram Futility of Effort(1930, ƒg. 26), can be considered a quite literal response to Gold’s call for anart of the tenement. Yet, it was Ben Shahn’s more monumental The Passion ofSacco and Vanzetti (1931–1932, ƒg. 34) that crystalized the form and contentof the new movement. The Italian immigrant workers, symbols of politicalpersecution to a generation of left-wing artists and activists, are depicted asmartyred saints. In presenting the story, Shahn combines information from

52 / Neel’s Social Realist Artdocumentary photographs with the graphic caricature characteristic of theNew Masses illustrations to create a posterlike object. Thus its address is to amass audience, for whom its incisive characterizations would serve as a stimulus—tooutrage or to action. A highly sophisticated condensation of sourcesinto a clear ideogram, Shahn’s painting exempliƒes the “primitivism” of muchearly social realist art. Neel’s painting, in contrast, remains a personal cry ofsympathy rather than a public statement, and thus despite its emotional powervis-à-vis the Shahn, it could not serve as a model for the new movement.During the Popular Front period, Neel modiƒed her revolutionary approach,as did most left-wing artists who were employed by the WPA. The majorityof social realist artists now traveled on two tracks: the works they producedunder government auspices would depict the agarian or industrialworker as capable and gainfully employed; 17 the works produced for privateconsumption or publication in radical journals would reveal the social andeconomic devastation—the strikes, lynchings, and bread lines in these years—and continue to provide a critique of the system. An example of this doubletrackingis Neel’s Snow on Cornelia Street (1933, ƒg. 35), a Hopper-like cityscapethat she painted the day she was accepted onto the Public Works of ArtProject, and Uneeda Biscuit Strike (1936, ƒg. 36), a cry of protest as overt asWilliam Gropper’s Youngstown Strike from 1937.Although I will argue that the former is the more radical conception of socialrealism, the latter better ƒts the term as deƒned in Louis Lozowick’s “Towardsa Revolutionary Art,” published in Art Front in 1936: “the worker as victim,as striker, as hero.” However, Lozowick’s artistic Popular Front went so faras to sanction the bourgeois subjects of still life and landscape exempliƒed byNeel’s Snow on Cornelia Street: “The formation of a revolutionary art is not thetask to be achieved by one work or even by one artist. It is the labor of a movement;whether one member or another occasionally paints a still life or a landscape,is, viewed in the large perspective, of little consequence.” 18 Lozowick’smanifesto is thus an attempt to gather under one social realist umbrella the diverseapproaches to socially concerned art in 1936, whose con„icts the foundingof the American Artists Congress had brought to a head. Signiƒcantly, heomitted mention of portraiture.With the broadening of its stylistic base, social realism could again embracemodernism, which Shahn had rejected only a few years earlier. In 1936–1937,articles in Art Front by Fernand Leger and Louis Aragon voiced the opinionsof the European moderns themselves about the proper garb for social content.The van Gogh exhibit at the Modern in 1936 also brought the question of expressionismto the fore, and its adherents would gather strength over the nextfew years. 19 Between 1938 and 1940, Neel’s star would rise, ever so brie„y,with the alliance between social realism and expressionism.

Art on the Left in the 1930s / 53If she were to make her mark, however, it would be with the dramatictableau, the staging of revolutionary scenes that formed the staple of social realistsubject matter. Yet only a handful Neel’s tableaux from 1933 to 1936 areexplicitly political. Her most militant social realist tableau, Nazis Murder Jews(1936, ƒg. 37), depicting a communist torchlight parade, 20 creates an antifascistprotest by documenting one. As with Futility of Effort, it can be considereda response to the period’s manifestoes, in this case Stuart Davis’s insistencethat the American Artists’ Congress was to “be a strengthening element to thewhole ƒeld of progressive organization against War and Fascism.” 21 As withher contemporary Uneeda Biscuit Strike, Neel documents actual events, inthis instance the demonstrations that characterized the Popular Front period.As in the documentary photography of the period, Neel uses signage in orderto underscore the work’s message. By afƒxing her sign to the front plane of thecanvas, Neel visually arrests the pictorial momentum and demands attentionto the cause of the march. As in any good propaganda art, the work’s message isforceful and devoid of ambiguity. However, when shown in a group exhibit ofhonorable mention recipients of “The First Annual Competitive Exhibition”for American Artists Congress members at Herman Baron’s ACA galleries, itwas found lacking in formal terms. In the September 12, 1936, New York WorldTelegram, Emily Genauer wrote:Alice Neel brandishes aloft the torch which she and members of the Artists’ Unionalong with her hope will eventually lead to enlightenment and destruction of Fascism.One, depicting a workers’ parade, would be an excellent picture from thepoint of view of color, design, and emotional signiƒcance if the big, bold black-andwhitesign carried by one of the marchers at the head of the parade, denouncingHitler, didn’t throw the rest of the composition out of gear by serving to tear a visualhole in the canvas. 22Neel countered appropriately: “But if they had noticed that sign, thousands ofJews might have been saved.” 23 An important contribution to social realism,Neel’s painting is one of the earliest in American painting to speciƒcallyprotest the Nazi persecutions of Jews. 24As Neel’s painting indicates, the notion of a public art directed to the proletarian,which had guided the artistic stance of Gold and of the New Masses,was now redirected toward the threat of fascism; the comparable situation inpolitics was the CPUSA’s support of Roosevelt’s 1936 campaign. The additionalcon„icts involved in being a revolutionary artist employed by the U.S.Government were exposed in a review of an exhibition of WPA art at the WhitneyMuseum. In “The Public Use of Art,” published in the November 1936issue of Art Front, Meyer Schapiro raised the question not of the style or con-

54 / Neel’s Social Realist Arttent of socially concerned art but of its audience. To create a genuinely publicart, Schapiro argued, the artist “had to undergo a change as a human beingand as an artist; he must become realistic in his perceptions . . . and free himselffrom the illusions of isolation, superiority and the absoluteness of his formalproblems.” 25 This meant working directly with the proletariat to determineits needs.Schapiro not only recognized that the gap between the bourgeois artist andthe working class had to be bridged before a public art could emerge, but concludedthat beyond an art accessible to the masses, “the people [must] controlthe means of production and attain a standard of living and a level of culturesuch that the enjoyment of art of a high quality becomes an important part oftheir life.” 26 As Patricia Hills has pointed out, this essay “calls for nothing shortof revolution...” 27Mike Gold could hardly let such radical criticism of social realism stand,and disparaged Schapiro’s writings as merely “wonderful victories on paper”penned by “a little group of Phi Beta Kappa Trotskyites in New York . . .” 28During the Popular Front years, in sum, the Communist Party deliberatelymuzzled all talk of world revolution, whereas Trotskyite Marxists such asSchapiro continued to speak of its necessity. Hills concludes: “Hence the Partysacriƒced a sharp cultural critique of capitalism to political expediency. At thesame time, independent intellectuals like Schapiro in their writings called for‘revolution’ for artists and cultural workers, but remained aloof from collectiveaction and the struggles in the streets.” 29 Neel’s move to Spanish Harlem in1939 was a political statement to the extent that she considered it a move awayfrom the rariƒed world of Schapiro and the Greenwich Village intelligentsiato the “real” world of the underclass. In essence resolving the contradiction betweenthought and action, Neel decided that her art would be made from andaddressed to that audience.The path the socially concerned artist was to follow became even less distinctwith the coming of World War II. The acrimonious debate over the Russianinvasion of Finland within the American Artists Congress in the spring of1940 caused the public defection of its most prestigious members, includingMeyer Schapiro, George Biddle, and Stuart Davis, after which the Congressslowly declined. 30 During the 1940s and 1950s, the word revolution disappearedfrom the literature, as the Smith Act of 1940 had made its advocation acrime. When the Supreme Court upheld the act in 1951, the door was openedfor McCarthyism.During these years, radical artists’ writings became reassuringly centrist andtheir art ambiguously allegorical. Philip Evergood’s 1943 article, “Sure, I’m aSocial Painter,” written the year that WPA’s easel program was dissolved, setthe tone for postwar social realism:

Art on the Left in the 1930s / 55My only aim is to paint a good picture—a work of art—and, on this level plain, tosay what I want about life.As a matter of pure fact all good art throughout the ages has been social art.And because good art of the past has portrayed human beings and their habits, ithas constituted the most pleasing record of the past that exists. 31Socially concerned art, according to this apology, had nothing to do with radicalpolitics. And frequently in this decade, Evergood’s art was so burdenedwith allegory that its political message was muf„ed.As the political subject matter of social realism became more oblique, themessage was obviously ever less accessible to the masses. The most importantof her later social realist works, marking the transition from group afƒliation toan independently-evolved art of social concern, T. B. Harlem (1940; ƒg. 38)might initially be interpreted as an allegorical reference to the Spanish CivilWar (1936–1939), as the wounded male is Hispanic. 32 However, the painting’stitle dispels the possibility of misidentiƒcation. At the moment when themovement’s social agenda had been abruptly diverted, Neel insistently callsattention to the ongoing “massacre of the innocents” not by fascism’s war machinebut by the economics of capitalism. His “uniform” is a body brokenthrough the effects of tenement living, like the infant cipher in Futility of Effort.His even stare cannot be de„ected or avoided; we must acknowledge hissituation and our possible complicity in it.Neel’s social realist paintings thus on occasion served as an interventioninto the course of the movement: T. B. Harlem redirects the emphasis on internationalpolitics during the war toward a domestic agenda. 33 Signiƒcantly, it isa portrait.The Proletarian Portrait GalleryNeel’s contribution to American Social realism lies not in her tableaux but inher portraits, or what I have chosen to call her proletarian portrait gallery. IfNeel’s social realist art was conceived in Havana from 1926 to 1927, it was nurturedin the equally vital milieu of Greenwich Village from 1930 to 1939. Inboth locales, the concentration of artists, writers, and political radicals provideda fulcrum for her own work. If her Cuban portraits presaged her SpanishHarlem series after World War II, so her portraits of the Greenwich Village intelligentsiainitiated her “Proletarian Portrait Gallery” in the 1930s, which sheextended to include her portraits of aging communist leaders in the 1950s.Neel’s portrait gallery represents an alternative to the prevailing concept ofsocial realism as history painting in the form of social critique. By concentrat-

56 / Neel’s Social Realist Arting on the single portrait rather than on multiƒgured narratives, Neel’s art appearedheretical. The future editors of Partisan Review, Philip Rahv and WilliamPhillips, for instance, were unable to comprehend the portrait’s relevanceto a collective, communist art, despite the clarity of Neel’s own social realistdeclaration:I started doing revolutionary paintings when I lived on Cornelia Street in 1933.Philip Rahv and his sidekick, Lionel [sic] Phelps, both radicals, came to my place.Rahv and Phelps said: “The easel picture is ƒnished. And: “Why paint just one person?”And I said, “Don’t you know that is the microcosm, because one plus one is acrowd.” But still they said: “Siqueiros paints with duco on walls.” But I said, “We’renot up to that, duco on walls.” 34No doubt these radicals thought that Neel was simply ignorant of the recentdevelopments in socially concerned painting. Although it is not hard to understandwhy two recent converts to proletarian art and literature would havefound Neel’s portraits anachronistic in 1933, the accusation of the fundamentalincompatibility of the genres of social realism and portraiture continued todog her throughout her career. In 1981, Gus Hall, the leader of the CPUSA,refused to let his portrait be exhibited in Moscow, lest it betray an interest inthe “cult of personality.”Yet it was precisely the cult of personality that Neel’s proletarian portraitgallery was designed to avoid. Collectively, Neel’s portraits serve an historicalfunction comparable in a very broad sense to a National Portrait Gallery. Butthe state-sponsored museum valorizes an era’s “movers and shakers.” A secularpantheon, the portrait gallery links the material events of history togetherthrough individual leaders, creating a heroic mythology. The purpose ofNeel’s proletarian portrait gallery, on the other hand, was antimythologicaland radically egalitarian; instead of the apotheosis of the great leader, she representedthe average citizen: not George Washington astride his horse, but herfather, George Washington Neel, “lying in state” in his cofƒn. If a portraitgallery serves to embalm a nation’s view of its history, Neel’s portrait galleryserves to restore history’s „ux through the „otsam its forces bring to the surface.The museum of the people, the proletarian portrait gallery, presents citizensrather than heads of state, a “human comedy” rather than a solemn litany.Visual art and literature conceived in this way are not historical documents orartifacts but historical accounts that privilege the imaginative recreation ofcultural beliefs and attitudes over the analysis of the causes and effects ofevents. In the presence of Neel’s “ancestor ƒgures,” her anonymous immortals,one comes to understand that the past is never closed but is instead passedon. The expatriate Cuban poet G. Cabrera Infante, whom Neel may have

Art on the Left in the 1930s / 57read, expressed a similar concept of artistic truth in “A View of Dawn in theTropics.” The poem recounts an incident involving a sugar plantation ownerwho commemorated the signing of a generous contract with his workers with aphotograph; when the black cloth was lifted the “camera” was revealed to be amachine gun, which the owner used to execute the assembled work force. Theauthorial voice concludes: “The story could be true or false, but the timesmade it believable.”The ƒrst entrants into the gallery, then, are drawn from her literary milieuin the 1930s, many of whom she met through her lover at the time, KennethDoolittle. According to the Belchers:Doolittle seemed to know everyone in the Village. Through him, Alice met suchVillage ƒxtures as the poet Christopher Lazar and the writer Philip Rahv, the Communistlongshoreman Paddy Whalen, and the left-wing activist Sam Putnam. Thepoet Kenneth Fearing smoked opium with Doolittle; Putnam slept for a while on asofa in their apartment. Within a year of her arrival in the Village, Alice was activelyinvolved with and had been accepted by the political-intellectual community. 35Greenwich Village at the end of the roaring twenties and the beginning ofthe Depression had a persona Neel adopted in 1932 by “elective afƒnity.” Itwas there that she ƒrst joined the New York art network by exhibiting in theGreenwich Village outdoor art festival in Washington Square during the summerof 1932. In the next booth was the painter Joseph Solman, who would behelpful to her in the early years 36 ; impressed with her work, he included it in asmall show he organized at the International Book and Art Shop on WestEighth Street in January 1933, Neel’s ƒrst New York exhibit. The district remaineda Village in which the bohemian residents all knew one another.Caroline Ware’s Greenwich Village, 1920–30, written in 1935, characterizedbohemia’s attitudes with the same dispassionate observation used byRobert and Helen Lynd to study middle-America’s mores. In her openingchapter, “The Village in American Culture,” Ware describes the character ofthe “Villagers”: “In the War and post-War years, Greenwich Village became asymbol of the repudiation of traditional values. Here congregated those forwhom the traditional pattern in which they grew up had become so empty ordistorted that they could no longer continue a part of it and submit to thesocial controls which it imposed.” 37 The neighborhood was one that attractedintelligent people and stressed social tolerance. 38 A diverse population ethnically,the “Villagers” viewed “art and sex as avenues of escape,” and “carriedon those activities, especially artistic, which had little or no place in a civilizationdominated by either the remains of the Calvinist ethic or by the purely acquisitiveimpulse . . . It was to art as a way of life that all turned, either as a

58 / Neel’s Social Realist Artmeans of satisfying themselves or for giving themselves status in a society inwhich art was the one recognized form of divergence.” 39 Clearly, art was anantibourgeois stance for Neel, a divergent position from which other kinds of“deviance”—political, social, ethnic—could be granted recognition.Ware concluded that “the social factors dominating this community werethose which led toward social disorganization and cultural confusion,” andshe ended her study with the questions: “What new patterns may develop to replacethe rampant individualism which ƒnds few outlets in the urban life oftwentieth-century America except in predatory action or escape? Whence maycome organizing forces which will canalize individual energies and give themsocial form?” 40 By the time Ware asked these questions in 1935, the Villagershad found their own antidote to the rampant individualism of the 1920s, withits distance from the social concerns of even its closest neighbors, the Italianimmigrant populace. The answer, for the near term anyway, was radical politicsand the vision of a communist utopia. For Neel, as for so many Village intellectuals,communism offered an alternative to the social structure she hadabandoned.In literature, this transition from art-for-art’s-sake individualism to an art ofsocial concern is exempliƒed by the shift from the Lost Generation of a Hemingwayor a Scott Fitzgerald to the social critiques of a John Dos Passos ora Mike Gold. 41 The earliest recruits to Neel’s alternative portrait gallery (c.1933–1935) were all drawn from this white, male, literary elite, a seemingly incongruousbeginning. All were representatives of the transitional literary generation,bohemian Villagers in the process of adopting a cause: Sam Putnam,Max White, Kenneth Fearing, and the well-known Greenwich Village ƒxtureJoe Gould. All except Gould were “New York Intellectuals,” in Alan Wald’sterm, 42 who were communists during the Depression, but who moved towardthe center after the war. All except White were members of the WPA’s FederalWriter’s Project, the counterpart to the Federal Art Project that supportedNeel until 1943.A prominent translator, novelist, and critic, the historical Samuel Putnamassumes the character of the quintessential bohemian in Neel’s portrait (SamPutnam, ƒg. 39), painted in 1933, the year he returned from France. Onceback in New York, Putnam joined the Communist Party, wrote a literary columnfor the Daily Worker, contributed to Art Front, and was an associate editorof the New Masses. In 1944, he quit the Party, citing “misguided humility.”By the time of his death in 1950, he had translated some ƒfty French, Spanish,Italian, Portuguese, and Russian works, including the deƒnitive version ofDon Quixote (1949). 43Painted in the spare expressionist style of her work of the late 1920s, the por-

Art on the Left in the 1930s / 59trait pictures a gaunt, glassy-eyed man staring upward as if possessed. Putnamhad a long, irregular scar on his forehead (photograph, ƒg. 40), which Neelchose to exaggerate to create a metaphor for psychic disturbance. Only twospots of color enliven the dark surface: the matching reds of the wine in hisglass and the lips surrounding the black hole of his mouth. Almost as if he werea proƒle out of his 1947 book Paris Was Our Mistress: Memoirs of a Lost andFound Generation, Putnam personiƒes the writer of the 1920s, disturbed,heavy drinking, absorbed in his own world. The fact that he had recently convertedto communism and that by the mid-1930s his writing held tenaciouslyto the Party line had no bearing on Neel’s vision. 44 Neel chose not to paint thisnewly-committed Marxist in a social realist style, but to cast him instead in hisprevious incarnation as an expatriate writer.In a bracing contrast, the representative of the new group of proletarianwriters, Max White (1935, ƒg. 41) implacably confronts the viewer. Neel lessensthe „at stylizations of the Putnam portrait and adopts a more naturalistic stylethat endows White with the projecting volume of a sculptural relief. His rectangularbody a wall, his cylindrical head a bollard, White is planted before usas an immovable bulwark. The large head and hands are assertive, with the“punctum” of the blackened nail on his middle ƒnger creating a signal of past(and possible future) aggression. White occupies not the realm of the mindbut, looming before the viewer, the “real,” material world, where he is a forceto be reckoned with, the new ideal of the worker-writer, who has come down toƒght in the streets for the revolution. Yet, according to his literary biography,Charles Edmund “Max” White (b. 1906) was a cosmopolitan who lived inFrance and Italy and was the author of a gourmet cookbook for which Neel designedthe cover. The protagonists of his novels are misunderstood artistic geniuses:In the Blazing Light (1946) is based on Goya, The Midnight Gardener(1948) on Baudelaire. 45 Proletarian he was not, but no matter, for with his“Olmec head,” as Neel described him, he certainly looked the part. 46The oddest character in the literary lineup, Joe Gould (1933, ƒg. 42), is alsoseated frontally, his hand on his knee, but in contrast to Max White’s hero,Gould plays the fool, the pathetic representative of the Greenwich Village bohemiain decline. Although he counted among his friends the writer MalcolmCowley, the photographer Aaron Siskind, the poet e.e. cummings, and thepainter Joseph Stella, who made a beautiful proƒle drawing of Gould, Neel’sdepiction accords him little respect. With his unkempt hair, watery eyes, andbroad smirk, Gould can only be a charlatan or a lunatic. In fact he was both,and after painting him as a Village writer, Neel revealed just how bizarre hewas in a spectacular, full-length portrait nude (1933, ƒg. 43).An excerpt from Joseph Mitchell’s Joe Gould’s Secret (1965) tells his story:

60 / Neel’s Social Realist ArtJoe Gould is a blithe and emaciated little man who has been a notable in the cafeterias,diners, barrooms, and dumps of Greenwich Village for a quarter of a century. . . Every day, even when he has a bad hangover, he spends at least a couple ofhours working on a formless, rather mysterious book that he calls “An Oral Historyof Our Time.” . . . He estimates that the manuscript contains 9,000,000 words, all inlonghand . . . Gould puts into the Oral History only things he has seen or heard.“What we used to think was history [Gould says]—kings and queens, treaties, inventions,big battles . . . is only formal history and largely false. I’ll put down the informalhistory of the shirt-sleeved multitude . . . or I’ll perish in the attempt.” 47Gould’s oral, proletarian history was not unique in its time: in the mid-1930s, the Federal Writers’ Project of the WPA initiated a ƒrst-person narrativeproject that collected thousands of interviews with people in marginalized professions.Indeed, Ralph Ellison, one of the Project writers who conductedthese interviews, developed speciƒc methods to transcribe their vernacularspeech that he subsequently would put to use in his in„uential The InvisibleMan. 48 Indeed, Gould’s own description of his Oral History’s contents (as transcribedby Mitchell) could read as a prospectus for the Writers’ Project as wellas a précis of Village life. 49 Unfortunately, his voluminous notebooks turnedout to be empty. Yet, although his project was a sham, his concept of history ascontingent and relative, to be assembled bit by bit through the recording of interviewswith the broadest possible segments of the populace, was perfectly applicableto Neel’s portrait gallery. By representing Gould as a fraud, she by implicationauthenticated her version.In posing Gould for a second, nude portrait, 50 Neel violated the decorum ofportraiture so violently that it was censored. The scrawny, pathetic physiquewas so transgressive of the tradition of the heroic male nude that the portraitcould not be “hung,” so to speak, before a viewing audience until 1973. 51 Whyis Gould so threatening? The little goblin is hardly a convincing embodimentof evil. The mephistophelian aura of the pointed beard and the infernal glowof the ground only play up the utter powerlessness of his musculature. In hismisplaced pride in his physique, he is as pathetic as Daumier’s The HandsomeNarcissus. Instead of the “imposing male apparatus” Freud found so impressive,the male genitals are presented as they appear to women. Turning thetables on Freud, Neel suggests that if anatomy is destiny, Joe Gould is doomed.Magniƒcently endowed, spectacularly unerotic, Gould’s unwarranted appendagesare grotesque because Neel has multiplied that which is always assumedto be single and intact: male sexual identity. Her pictorial repetition is the equivalentof the gleeful taunt of the sexually curious child. Mocking rather thanfetishistic, the excessive penises effectively desexualize the man; as the viewermentally removes one set of extra genitals, they all become expendable. One

Art on the Left in the 1930s / 61recalls that Freud saw the Medusa’s Head as “a conƒrmation of the technicalrule according to which a multiplication of penis symbols signiƒes castration.”52 The univocal male voice that normally and normatively accompaniesthe intact member is as silent as the pile of empty notebooks that Gould left athis death. According to Peter Brooks’s gloss of Lacan, “patriarchy is the basis ofknowledge and power, and [because] the gaze is phallic . . . to display the penisis to turn subject into object, a twist or per-version.” 53 Neel’s twist uncaps, Pandora-like,the female gaze, a gaze that undermines certain fundamental assumptionsof patriarchal culture.Recognizing its landmark importance, Neel inscribed the painting’s datebetween Gould’s legs. Neel’s con„ation of the genres of portraiture and thenude, like her con„ation of history painting, portraiture, and literature, simultaneouslyde-constructs existing conventions and substitutes new ones in theirplace. Her gallery of New York intellectuals, the creative male elite, is perhapsnot as potent as its own self-image, since its “members” can be added to ordeleted without signiƒcant alteration. 54 Yet the fact that until World War IINeel’s proletarian portrait gallery omitted women artists and activists indicatesthat despite her protofeminist criticism of patriarchal culture, she retained itsbiases. Her friendships were with men.Neel’s visual history is sharpened and clariƒed by comparison. The Putnam-White pairing charts the emergence of proletarian literature between 1933and 1935, whereas her 1935 portraits of Kenneth Fearing and Pat Whalenunite intelligentsia and worker to visualize the period’s proletarian ideal. In anexception to Neel’s customary practice of isolating her sitters against a plainground, in Kenneth Fearing (ƒg. 44) the poet and his “literary setting” areunited. Seated with shirtsleeves rolled up beneath the bare bulb of “inspiration,”the gaunt, angular artist—with his hair bristling, his ƒsts clenched, andhis ears tuned to the city’s sounds—projects contained energy. The device ofsurrounding an author with his cast of characters is unusual in Americanpainting, although it is found in popular sources such as magazine illustration.55 Neel’s allusion may refer to the style of Fearing’s writings, which arepart of the tradition of hard-boiled, or pulp ƒction. 56Fearing’s pose, three-quarter view, seated facing left, with resolute stare andclenched ƒst, so closely matches that of the maritime union activist PatWhalen (1935, ƒg. 45) that the two contemporary portraits seem designed tohang together. So paired, they present the ideal rather than the reality of theera, that of intellectuals and blue-collar workers sharing a vision of a new communistsociety and working side by side for the revolution. With his unwaveringstare, ƒrm-set jaw, and clenched ƒsts, Whalen is a cliché of the proletarianhero found throughout socially concerned art of this period. From the DailyWorker headline beneath his ƒsts, “Steel, Coal Strikes Set for June 16,” 57 one

62 / Neel’s Social Realist Artwould assume Whalen to be a mill or mine worker, but Whalen was a maritimeworker, a seaman stationed in Baltimore, the ƒrst of several importantunion leaders Neel recorded. Why then no newspaper reference to the greatWest Coast maritime strike that had erupted in May 1934? Perhaps Neelchose instead to refer to the inter-union con„ict that would lead in October ofthat year to the creation of the left-leaning industrial union, the CIO, by JohnL. Lewis, head of the United Mine Workers. Whalen’s Marine Workers IndustrialUnion had dissolved in 1935, and so the future of the union movement,and the communists’ position within it, was unstable. Whalen’s two clenchedƒsts, planted on the Daily Worker, may indicate the double front on whichcommunist union leaders were then forced to ƒght.Neel’s 1983 remembrance of Whalen, like all good oral (anecdotal) history,encapsulates more scholarly written histories, such as Bruce Nelson’s Workerson the Waterfront (1988):Patty Whalen was the organizer on the waterfront . . . He was just an ordinary Irishmanexcept for one thing: He was absolutely convinced of Communism, and hecould convince other longshoremen . . . I painted another painting of him pullingdown the swastika „ag from the Bremen, but I painted over it . . . A liberty ship wasnamed for him after the war, but during the McCarthy era they changed the nameof the ship . . .George Myers told us a great story about when Patty Whalen was head of theport of Baltimore, a very important job. Patty Whalen would go into a bar. Hewould demand a drink for a black man who was with him. They’d say: “We do notserve Negroes here.” So Patty Whalen would take his heavy glass of beer andsmash the mirror . . . And ƒnally the owners of the bar were so intimidated thatthey would sell to Negroes.” 58Neel’s verbal picture of a communist union activist conƒrms Nelson’s thesisthat the maritime unions in the 1930s, motivated by “a powerful determinationto transform the world of work,” made major gains during the Depression59 and were not paralyzed by the social inertia of the working class. 60Although Whalen is not mentioned in Nelson’s discussion of the MarineWorker’s Industrial Union in Baltimore, he characterizes the leaders there asparticularly hard-working and self-sacriƒcing. 61 During the Popular Front era,their most conspicuous and dramatic acts involved pulling down the swastikasfrom German ships in Olympia, Washington, San Francisco, and New York.Whalen, with his unshakable resolve, has all of the attributes of the leaders inthese years, as well as the record of Communist proselytizing, and of ƒghtingagainst particularism, racial discrimination, and fascism that characterized theunion’s heroes. 62 Neel’s portrait is a record of communist idealism in the

Art on the Left in the 1930s / 631930s, as personiƒed by a fearless defender of the faith who was also a specƒcindividual. In the postwar era, when that faith, like Whalen’s name on the libertyship, was effaced, Neel would have to rethink her image of the communistworker-hero.Neel’s budding proletarian portrait gallery provides a montage of the emergenceof socially concerned art from 1933 to 1935, when the term proletarianincluded both the intelligentsia and the worker. The absence of the prominentvisual artists of these years may seem curious, but there is logic to that decision:the gallery was her contribution to social realism, and she may not havewanted to either valorize or criticize her fellow artists. The writers would serveto personify the various artistic positions within the decade. But the expressionist-realismof the paintings and their occasional artistic references also requirethe same reconstruction of historical context demanded by the sitters themselves.Her painting was representative of the socially concerned expressionismchampioned by the critics of the Art Front.During the 1930s, as German Expressionism became more widely known,it was admired as an art of social concern. 63 The earliest critical champion ofExpressionism was painter-critic Charmion von Weigand, wife of the communistwriter Joseph Freeman. In “Expressionism and Social Change” (Art Front,November 1936), von Wiegand argued that after seven years of economic“stagnation” America was now ready for a truly revolutionary, expressionist art,one that could provide “the destructive action necessary to the new future.”German Expressionist art, she argued, had lost its force after it abandoned socialcriticism. At present, its young American converts embodied the true spiritof expressionism, one that visualizes the “social struggle of our time as it assumesever more dramatic and violent form in the United States.” 64 She thenlisted the U.S. practitioners: Helen West Heller, David Burliuk, The Ten,Benjamin Kopman, Milton Avery, Herbert Kruckman, Alice Neel, and JohnVavak.In the following issue, painter-critic Jacob Kainen, who in 1934 had criticizedthe John Reed club exhibitions for being insufƒciently insurrectionary,took up the expressionist banner, uttering “harsh words” about the 1936 Whitneypainting annual, which he accurately described as boring and repetitious.Sweeping both urban and social realist painters aside with a single stroke—“the fact remains that painters like Speicher, Kroll, McFee, Karƒol, Brook,Klitgaard, Lucioni, Curry, Miller, Mattson, Hopper, Kuhn, Lawson, and severalothers look pretty old fashioned”—he bestowed his critical “best of show”award to William Gropper’s “The Senate,” 1936, a work dependent on theprecedent of Grosz. He also lauded Nahum Tschacbasov’s Deportation (1936,ƒg. 46), whose “moderated use of the Expressionist outlook should give ideasto those who are looking for new approaches.” 65 Tschacbasov’s expressionist

64 / Neel’s Social Realist Artpainting of huddled Jewish refugees, like Neel’s Nazis Murder Jews, explicitlyrefers to Nazi political persecution.A few months later, in an Art Front article entitled “Our Expressionists”(February 1937), Kainen described the new “movement” as if it were an establishedfact. Again singling out Tschacbasov as an artist who has “made Expressionismthe vehicle for a militant proletarianism,” Kainen listed twenty-threepainters who exempliƒed the new expressionism, but Neel was no longeramong them. In a melodramatic conclusion, Kainen summarized his deƒnitionof an updated revolutionary art, one no longer based on proletarian subjectmatter but on the artist’s ability to visualize the “social passions” of an era:The old, literal naturalism is failing to register esthetically in the face of vast socialpassions and portents of doom and regeneration. In proportion to the awakeningof artists to the fate which awaits the world, will painting take on a more Expressionistform. 66Kainen’s article appeared just months before the July 1937 opening of theDegenerate Art exhibition in Berlin. The Nazi condemnation of German Expressionistartists could only add to the ideological import of the style. Kainen’smanifesto proved an accurate prediction of the course of art during the waryears, for the ƒgurative expressionism of Hyman Bloom and the early JacksonPollock, if not of the lesser-known artists cited in his article, was predominantin the 1940s. But it is indicative of the aesthetic volatility of the times that thetwo early champions of ƒgurative expressionism, von Weigand and Kainen,would themselves turn to abstract painting after the war. 67At a time when two con„icting political systems occupied common groundagainst a third, no single aesthetic system could claim to have an exclusive purchaseon social reality. The staged dramas of most social realist tableaux, withtheir coherent plots, could not visualize a reality that was fragmented and contradictory.For this brief moment, expressionism appeared to be the mostpromising option for a renewed social realism. It was not the only option, however,and early in 1937, in a review of the “Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism”exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, von Wiegand argued that surrealism’stechniques for reaching the unconscious mind could be useful to the developmentof a new social art as well. 68The immediate result of Art Front’s expressionist manifestoes was the formationof the New York Group. Founded in 1938 by Jacob Kainen, the NewYork Group was characteristic of the short-lived alliances of artists at the end ofthe decade. “Our Expressionists” had been in part a review of an exhibit at theMontross Gallery of The Ten, and their association may have inspired Kainento form his own group. 69 Kainen chose Jules Halfant, Herb Kruckman, Louis

Art on the Left in the 1930s / 65Nisonoff, Herman Rose, Max Schnitzler, and Joseph Vogel, with Neel as thesole woman. 70 In contrast to The Ten, which had declared itself opposed tothe political use of art, 71 the New York Group remained committed to art’s politicalfunction. Yet in these turbulent years their solidarity could not last: thegroup dissolved after its second exhibition. Its joint statement, printed in thebrochure of the ƒrst of its two exhibits at the ACA gallery, situates the NewYork Group squarely at the center of Popular Front concerns: the reconciliationof social realism with modernism, of local with international politics:The New York Group is interested in those aspects of contemporary life whichre„ect the deepest feelings of the people . . . However . . . [t]here must be no talkingdown to the people; we number ourselves among them . . . The New YorkGroup, while it wishes most of all to maintain its local and national character, at thesame time wishes most of all to avail itself of the best international traditions. Inshort, we wish to be artistically and socially progressive. 72The political position of these artists was clear: they continued the basic tenetof social realism that the artist was to ƒnd his subject in and through labor, toconsider himself a laborer, for if labor was seen less and less as the source ofrevolution, it was nonetheless the “bedrock” of life experience.The titles of the works in the exhibition conƒrm their continuing social realistconcerns: Jules Halfant exhibited The Eviction, Herb Kruckman RailroadWorkers, Louis Nisonoff, On the El, and Max Schnitzler, WPA Lunch Hour.Neel submitted two early works. The ƒrst, Poverty (Futility of Effort), was a logicalchoice, as it had been published two years earlier in Art Front, but theEnsor-like (Well) Baby Clinic, 73 had been made ten years earlier and wouldnot have appeared particularly germane in its subject, although it surely wouldhave been the most radical example of expressionism. Although Art News,quoting Kainen’s statement directly, reviewed the 1938 exhibition favorably, itconcluded on an equivocal note: “With underlying unity in their philosophytoward art and variety in their particular styles, one looks forward to more oftheir work.” 74 The New York exhibition schedule also appeared to afƒrm thedirection these artists were taking: the May 14, 1938, issue of Art News enthusiasticallyreviewed three concurrent gallery exhibits of the German Expressionistartist Kathe Kollwitz. 75 Kollwitz’s reputation as the prototypical Social Realistdid not reconcile the New York Group to its one woman member, however.Neel summarized the majority attitude in the New York Group quite directly:“They were so embarrassed because I was a woman, but I didn’t feel any differentfrom them. They didn’t understand.” 76By the time of the second and last exhibition of the New York Group,February 1–18, 1939, the membership had been whittled down from eight to

66 / Neel’s Social Realist Artsix: Halfant, Kainen, Kruckman, Neel, Schnitzler, and Vogel. 77 It was perhapsportentous that despite the ARTnews critic’s anticipation, this second exhibitwas not reviewed. The group’s expressionist-realism was a compromise style,social realist subject matter clothed in moderately expressionist form. Lackinga clear direction that would have given it critical visibility, its two exhibitionswould have been indistinguishable from others mounted at Baron’s gallery.Their cautious, centrist position was inadvertently exposed at a symposiumheld at the ACA gallery during the 1939 exhibition, titled “Social Painting andthe Modern Tradition.” The three panelists were Philip Evergood, John Graham,and Kainen. Straining to elucidate his idea of an art for laborers, Kainenasserted that the artist’s job was to teach the masses, who have been “miseducatedby magazine covers . . . and other pictorial commodities,” but who are“willing to learn.” 78 The conduit between the artist and his (educable) publicwould be the Federal Art Project: “We should ƒght to maintain and extend theprojects.” 79 John Graham then threw a monkey wrench into the proceedingsby “denouncing ‘proletarian art’ and saying that the real revolutionary art wasabstraction.” 80 The center could not hold, not in 1939. 81 If Neel’s reputationwas to be made it would have been at the ACA, but she would not exhibit thereagain until 1951, at the urging of Joseph Solman. 82 The years of solidarity wereat an end, and Neel’s exile was beginning. But so was a new phase of her socialrealist art.

5The Cold War Battles:1940–1980The war years were both artistically and politically bleak for Neel, as social realismdeclined, the WPA was terminated, and Neel was increasingly isolatedfrom mainstream postwar art. Her task in the Cold War years was to maintainher allegiance to the principles of a social realist art, which she did by producingillustrations for Masses & Mainstream, by continuing the political commentaryof her social realist tableaux, by extending her proletarian portraitgallery to include communist leaders, and, ƒnally, by creating a wing of hergallery devoted to the residents of Spanish Harlem. Her illustrations and tableauxcontinue her activities from the 1930s; her portraits, her most radicalcontribution, will be the subject of the following chapter.During the war, left-wing arts organizations suffered the same vicissitudesas those of the Communist Party. After the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, fellowtravelers were pressed to support a policy of “Peace” and nonintervention, butafter the Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941, they abandoned domestic agendas tosupport the war effort to “save the fatherland.” When, in 1943, Stalin dissolvedthe Comintern as a gesture of appeasement to the West, Earl Browder hailed itas a step toward “new and favorable conditions for the integration of theCPUSA into our own American democratic way of life ...” 1 Such optimism,expressed while Party membership was at its historic height, was short-lived.67

68 / Neel’s Social Realist ArtDuring these early war years, Neel joined United American Artists (foundedin 1939), the left-wing organization that had evolved from the Artists Unionand, like the Union, worked “to protect and expand the art project and to ultimatelycreate a Government Bureau of Fine Arts.” 2 In 1942, the group reorganizedas the Artists League of America. Chaired by Lynd Ward, the UAA wasofƒcially a union—local 60 of the Union of Ofƒce and Professional Workersof America (UOPWA), a CIO afƒliate. Rockwell Kent was the UAA’s nominalpresident and provided the group’s clearest statement of purpose: “The UnitedAmerican Artists is a labor union. Its membership is composed of men andwomen who as workers in the ƒne arts hold themselves with some pride to bemembers of that working class . . .” 3 In other words, it extended the principlesof the American Artists Congress and the Artists Union, as well as of the shortlivedNew York Group.In addition to the publication of a journal, New York Artist (Jack Tworkov,ed.), the UAA established its credibility as the body continuing the principlesof the American Artists Congress and the Artists Union by organizing two ambitiousexhibitions in May-June of 1940. The ƒrst, a juried selection of 39artists held jointly at the ACA and Hudson D. Walker galleries, was fulsomelypraised by the critic Elizabeth McCausland. 4 At the same time, the ƒrst (andlast) annual UAA exhibit was held at the Associated Press Building at 50 RockefellerPlaza. Clearly the second tier, there was no jury for the exhibition andany member “in good standing” paying $2 could be included. Alice Neel wasone of the 295 artists who elected to do so, selecting for exhibition one of hermore radical recent works, Childbirth or, Maternity (1939, ƒg. 47).Neel had commemorated the birth of her son Richard in September 1939with a portrait of her hospital roommate Goldie Goldwasser writhing on herbed in the throes of an agonizing labor. Although the subject might seem tolack political implications, the issue of women’s health care had been an importantCP issue in the 1930s. The historian Robert Shaffer has argued that “Arecurrent theme in the CP Press was the danger to women in the United Statesof childbirth itself. Many articles claimed that the Soviet Union, because of itssocialized medical system and maternity insurance for women workers, had alower mortality rate in childbirth.” 5 The distorted ƒgure recalls the sufferingwomen in Picasso’s Guernica (1937), which during the Popular Front epitomizeda work of art that was both modernist and antifascist; Neel no doubt sawit when it was exhibited at the Valentine Gallery in New York in 1938. As withher submission of Well-Baby Clinic to the New York Group exhibit the previousyear, perhaps Neel might have wanted the communist-leaning UAA toprovide recognition of this speciƒc form of women’s work. 6By 1943, as far as her friends knew, Neel had become one of many promisingartists who seemed to drop through the cracks of history as the Old Left

The Cold War Battles / 69became increasingly fragmented and the hegemony of abstract expressionismwas established critically and institutionally. Writing to Jacob Kainen inSeptember of that year, Joseph Solman listed the whereabouts of the nowscatteredmembers of the New York Group, adding “Someone informs meAlice Neel is doing portrait commissions for a living. Sounds unbelievable,but anything is possible with her.” 7 That same month, the ƒnal prop for hercareer gave way with the termination of the WPA. Neel’s art would all but disappearfrom the galleries between 1940 and 1950. Her exhibit at Rose Fried’sPinacotheca gallery in 1944 was reviewed unfavorably, 8 and when in 1951 shewas given an exhibition at the ACA gallery for the ƒrst time since 1939, the ArtDigest reviewer mistakenly but understandably called it “her ƒrst one-manshow.”Ironically, the demise of the WPA provided Neel with a quite unwelcomeform of publicity. 9 On April 17, 1944, Life magazine announced the WPA’send with the sneering headline “Canvases Which Cost the Government$35,000,000 Are Sold for Junk” (ƒg. 48). Stored in a government warehouse inFlushing and subsequently sold to a Long Island junk dealer for four cents apound, many of the paintings were purchased in bulk by Henry C. Roberts,owner of a Lower East Side shop. As luck would have it, one of Neel’s paintings,“New York Factory Buildings,” was reproduced in the Life article, theonly painting of hers to be reproduced in this decade. Like Joseph Solman,who had initially located the abandoned artwork, Neel had sufƒcient respectfor her art, despite Life’s verdict, to buy back as many paintings as she couldlocate.Perhaps as a result of this article, Neel became the symbol of the WPA’ssorry end for her old Greenwich Village friend, Kenneth Fearing. In his 1946hard-boiled mystery, The Big Clock, a central character is the eccentric but exceptionalpainter Louise Patterson, who lives in a studio loft that is “a paradisefor rats and termites,” and whose former lover had been proud to “destroysomething new and creative” by displaying the “pile of scraps and ashes andcharred fragments, all that was left of ƒve years’ work, heaped up in the ƒreplace.”The plot hinges on Patterson’s ability to identify the protagonist, GeorgeStroud, as a murderer, which she declines to do because “I haven’t got so manyadmirers I can afford to let any of them go to the electric chair.” 10 Fearing’screation of Louise Patterson, layering parody of her unconventional behaviorwith admiration for her creativity, is the most extended literary portrait we haveof Neel.The plot begins when Strout/Fearing outbids Patterson/Neel—an “overweight”customer with a “face like a cyclone” and a “blood curdling laugh”—for one of her WPA paintings in a junk shop. 11 Despite this caricature of herappearance, Fearing’s portrait is in the end an affectionate one, from an ad-

70 / Neel’s Social Realist Artmirer who believes in the continuing importance of her work. As he hasGeorge recount upon winning the bidding match: “although Patterson hadn’texhibited for years . . . it did not seem possible her work had passed into completeeclipse. The things I had picked up for a few hundred had been bargainswhen I bought them...” 12 Now a commercial success, Fearing used his art toremind the New York artworld of a signiƒcant artist who years before, when hewas unknown, had recognized his talent.Such oblique support made little practical difference, of course. As the tideturned against a politically engaged art, social realists like Neel found themselvesbranded as caricature artists. According to Evergood in his previouslycited 1943 apology: “Either the social realist is a ‘lousy Red,’ or he must be anillustrator, a caricaturist, and a clumsy proletarian who is insensitive to the estheticsof line, form and quality.” 13 The Art News review of Neel’s 1944 exhibitis indicative of this general attitude. Acknowledging that it was “plainly serious,thoughtful work,” nonetheless the reviewer criticized such paintings asWoman in Pink Velvet Hat for a “deliberate hideousness which makes themhard to take even for persons who admire her creative independence . . . Nordoes the intentional gaucherie of her ƒgures lend them added expression.” 14Since every social realist was tarred with the same brush, it is curious that herfellow artists were insufƒciently “gentlemanly” to rally to her defense.Masses & Mainstream: Social Realism in the 1950sDuring the late 1940s and early 1950s when both modernism and realism jostledto gain the support of the “vital center,” Neel chose not to align herselfwith social realists like Raphael Soyer, who now adopted a “humanist” stancein opposition to abstract expressionism; instead, she remained on the sidelineswith the communists, who had a competing deƒnition of humanism that deemphasizedindividualism. Neel’s aesthetic stance was thus colored by hercontinued Communist Party afƒliation, which was in turn propelled by a refusalto participate in the jingoistic rhetoric of the 1950s. America’s victory andstatus as a world leader had not precipitated any fundamental changes inNeel’s “Cuban” heart. As the persecution of communists as subversives increasedunder McCarthyism, the Party responded by claiming that the realthreat to the United States was not the external one of an imperialist U.S.S.R.,but a homegrown fascism that was threatening democratic liberties fromwithin. 15 For many artists, this threat was real. But unlike a Ben Shahn,William Gropper, or Rockwell Kent, Neel was not called to testify at any of theanticommunist hearings during the early 1950s, and so her career was notjeopardized as theirs were. 16 Even though the FBI did not close their ƒle onher until 1959, she was not targeted as a subversive, probably because her

The Cold War Battles / 71drawings did not “advocate revolution” and her paintings had no audience. 17Anonymity had its advantages, for Neel did not have to go underground; shewas already there.The Cold War froze communist aesthetics into an equally unbendingdogma. The „exibility of the Popular Front years yielded in 1946 to the secretaryof the Central Committee Andrei Zhdanov’s renunciation of all experimentationand a call for a socialist realism that “was the Party,” marked bywhat Maxim Gorky had called “the humanism of the revolutionary proletariat...” 18 Reality for the socialist realist artist was the reality of what theproletariat would become, not what it was. The rigid deƒnition of socialist realismunder Zhdanov restricted its artistic production to idealized pictures ofParty leaders and workers capable of overcoming any obstacle. This lamentableideological position was given its American voice in June 1947 by V. J.Jerome, head the cultural commission of the Communist Party USA. 19 In hisaddress to the Marxist Cultural Conference in New York City (subsequentlypublished as Culture in a Changing World) Jerome ƒrst criticized the imperialistpolicies of the United Nations and the Truman doctrine. But he reservedhis most virulent language for the Trotskyite intellectuals who had „ed theParty during the war, whom he accused of “literary lynching.” 20To American Marxists he posed a familiar task: “the development of thecultural capacities of the working class, for whom culture is a matter of struggle,a matter of heroism.” 21 Although her expressed sympathies for Jerome hadto do with his imprisonment under the Smith Act, 22 Neel, who had attendedhis lectures at the Jefferson School, was in general agreement with his call forworking-class communist heroes. This Party line was reiterated, without seriousdebate, in Masses & Mainstream, to which Neel contributed throughoutthe Cold War. A result of the merger in 1948 of Joseph North’s New Massesand Samuel Sillen’s Mainstream, Masses & Mainstream was edited by Sillen,with the authority on Negro history Herbert Aptheker, the black novelist andpoet Lloyd Brown, and the former Art Front critic Charles Humboldt (a.k.a.Clarence Weinstock) serving as the associate editors. During the run of itspublication, from 1948 to 1956 (after which it continued for another six yearsas Mainstream), the magazine published drawings by the regulars from theNew Masses, including William Gropper, Robert Gwathmey, Ben-Zion, BenShahn, and Antonio Frasconi. Although its contribution to American culturalhistory is hardly as signiƒcant as the New Masses had been, it merits more seriousdiscussion than it has received to date. 23Masses & Mainstream is the voice of a defensive and embattled Party, strugglingunder systematic governmental persecution during the Cold War. TheSmith Act of 1940 was further strengthened by the Internal Security Act of1950, which required communists to register with the attorney general. How-

72 / Neel’s Social Realist Artever simplistic its argumentation, the magazine courageously refused to acceptwithout protest governmental censorship and denial of rights, the “redbaiting”of the McCarthy era. Its stated aim was tore-enter the arena in deƒance of those who would outlaw dissent and chain theAmerican people to a program of fascism and war . . . Our speciƒc intention is toƒght on the cultural front, in the battle of ideas. Our editorial viewpoint—thoughnot necessarily the viewpoint of every contributor—is Marxist. 24By Marxist Sillen meant Zhdanovist. 25 Several years later, in a two-partarticle “Communists in Novels,” Charles Humboldt centered the concept offorward progress in the new communist hero: “He must, ƒrst of all, be able tomaster the forces that overcome others, to resist oppression instead of beingcrushed by it...” 26 Yet the small cadre of communist writers and artists inNew York at the time were well aware of the weaknesses of Zhdanovism, despitewhat they said in print, and throughout the 1950s its members argued activelyabout alternative deƒnitions of a Marxist art. For instance, Neel occasionallyparticipated in the Writers and Critics group that met monthly at theUpper West Side apartment of Annette T. Rubinstein, a literary historian andteacher at the New York Marxist School. Neel was invited to join by CharlesHumboldt, and the Masses & Mainstream crowd attended regularly. Signiƒcantly,V. J. Jerome was not invited, as he was considered too dogmatic. 27 Thegroup wrestled with the relationship of literature to Marxist theory by readingand discussing the advocates for opposing viewpoints, such as Brecht andLukacs. 28 According to Rubinstein, within the CP literati, “there was no embraceof anything like Zhdanov’s debased and fraudulent ‘socialist realism.’” 29Although Neel did more listening than speaking, she was made aware of thecontradictions within Marxist cultural theory, and of the need to ƒnd her ownresolution to them.In a 1955 letter to the editor of Masses & Mainstream, Neel articulated herown alternative to Zhdanovist heroism. Her friend Phillip Bonosky, in reviewingLars Lawrence’s Morning, Noon and Night, had taken the author to taskfor an overly idealized depiction of the working class. In his ensuing editorialargument with Albert Maltz, Neel sided with Bonosky, whostands up for something to my mind much more important and ethical in the deepestsense: the relation of art to life and the responsibility of the writer to re„ect inthe most advanced and humanistic way any part of the life of his day . . . I think wehave all realized for many years now that the “hero” lives and has lived . . . [L]iterature,unless it re„ects truly, becomes only a pale and falsiƒed re„ection of life. 30

The Cold War Battles / 73Neel’s letter, with its elliptical phrasing and inclusion of the required codeword “hero,” requests little more than the injection of nuanced reality into therigid formulas of socialist realism, but it is nonetheless a genuine, if belated,critique of the Party line. By the mid-1950s criticism of socialist realism fromwithin the Party had become overt, particularly after Khrushchev’s revelationsof Stalin’s atrocities at the 20th Party Congress in 1956. 31 Thereafter, the magazinecould no longer sustain its aesthetic stance any more than it could advocateits political positions. Masses & Mainstream would report on the Party’sever-shrinking cadre, whether it be the resignation of Howard Fast or the suicideof the socialist realist novelist Alesander A. Fadeyev in 1956, with increasinglythin rationalizations.Neel’s professional association with Masses & Mainstream was a means ofmaintaining her oppositional stance politically and artistically. But her afƒliationwas a tenuous one. Although Humboldt was impressed by her work, Sillenfound it too expressionistic and frequently rejected it for publication. 32During the early 1950s, the magazine concentrated increasingly on foregroundingthe work of black and Hispanic artists such as Jacob Lawrence,Elizabeth Catlett, and Leopoldo Mendez, as well as the writers Lloyd Brown,Pablo Neruda, and Jesus Colón; by the mid-1950s it featured the black artistCharles White, an outstanding draftsman whose idealized portraits could bereconciled without difƒculty with the Zhdanovist party line. The increasingaesthetic conservatism of the magazine until after 1956 would hardly haveserved Neel’s cause well.Her work for Masses & Mainstream and other communist publications consistsof story illustrations and courtroom drawings; these drawings mark herƒrst contribution to the public art of illustration and caricature, which hadbeen integral to social realist production in the 1930s. Yet apart from the courtroomdocuments, the drawings are primarily literary rather than directly politicalin content. They are important as comments on proletarian literaturerather than as additions to the tradition of political cartooning to which Sloan,Shahn, Gropper, and others continued to make such important contributions.Five of Neel’s ink drawings from 1949 to 1952 illustrated stories by the proletarianwriter Phillip Bonosky, whom she met in 1948 when Bonosky came toNew York to join the staff of the Daily Worker. 33 A proliƒc writer, his BurningValley (1952) remains an important work of American proletarian literature;like most of the stories Neel illustrated, it is set in the mills and factories ofPennsylvania. The Neel-Bonosky collaboration is signiƒcant as a new venuefor Neel’s social realism. Bonosky’s stories were not epic but anecdotal and offeredthe opportunity to depict focused dramatic incidents in the lives of thelower class.

74 / Neel’s Social Realist ArtPerhaps predictably, Neel’s two ƒnest story illustrations were rejected, 34 andwent unpublished until an anthology of Bonosky’s writings, A Bird in Her Hair,and Other Stories, was produced by International Publishers in 1987. Onestory, “A Quiet Summer’s Day” (1948, ƒg. 49), recounts a child’s death bydrowning in the polluted waters near a factory, a victim theme repeated in proletarianliterature from the time of Gold’s description of his sister Esther beingrun over by an Adams Express Truck in his 1927 “Poverty is a Trap.” 35 Thetheme was equally common in the visual arts.In the drawing for the anthology’s title story, “A Bird in Her Hair” (ƒg. 50),Neel uses the same stage set, the generic factory town, but brings to it all of thestrengths of her portrait skills. The protagonist, Ellie, is a poor young womanwhose tangled bush of hair was the subject of repeated taunts by the townspeople.As visualized by Neel, the barefoot woman’s stance and facial expressionembody the anger and deƒance of the poor outcast who has responded to interclasscruelty with an act of eccentric creativity—permitting a bird to nest inher hair. Ellie is less the proletarian heroine than a woman who reacts to oppressionwith an individual act at once so outrageous and so creative that itforces respect and silences her critics. Like Louise Patterson, Ellie is Alice.Because they are portraits, Neel’s Masses & Mainstream drawings of thetrials of Communist Party activists are equally strong. Along with the artistCharles Keller, Neel was assigned to cover the notorious “Trial of the Twelve,”actually eleven members of the National Board of the Communist Party, whoin July of 1948 had been accused under the Smith Act of belonging to a groupof persons who “teach and advocate” the overthrow of the U.S. Governmentby force. 36 Keller’s two trial drawings illustrated Joseph North’s report, “Justice,Inc.,” in the April 1949 edition of Masses & Mainstream, whereas Neel’sdrawing of Judge Harold R. Medina was relegated to Charles Humboldt’s reviewof George Marion’s book on the subject, Trial by Stoolpigeon, in the Decemberissue. Humboldt’s review credited Marion with exposing “the natureof this system and how it makes a mockery of justice.” 37 In contrast to Keller’sbland sketches, Neel unleashes the full force of her caricature skills to build onNorth’s vivid characterization of the urbane judge:The judge’s face is a mask. Behind it operates the complex psyche of a bourgeois intellectual. . . His mop of hair is iron gray and his mustache droops; His eyebrowsarch frequently . . . He strives for a homey, yet classic, colloquialism, assaying therole of a gentle Francis of Assisi, endlessly patient, low-toned, an understandinguncle. 38Neel’s ink drawing of Judge Medina (ƒg. 51) uses his arched brows to suggesthis superciliousness and the hypocrisy of his self-assumed role of “The

The Cold War Battles / 75Martyr.” Sadly, Neel’s other caricature, of the stoolpigeon Angela Calomaris(ƒg. 52), was not published, for Marion’s descriptions of the “stools, foxes,frames and hookers” who testiƒed against the communists convinces thereader of the illegitimacy of the legal process. Neel’s dirty bird, with its splayedfeathers, is modeled on the recurrent “criminal type” established in nineteenthcenturyphysiognomy studies, but Neel has upped the ante by making Calomarislook like an unshaven man in drag. One can imagine that the editors ofMasses & Mainstream might have considered this grotesquerie unpublishable,but the image provides a particularly apt description of much of the “incriminating”testimony during the McCarthy era. By rejecting it, Masses & Mainstreamdiluted its own polemic.Three of Neel’s social realist paintings from the 1950s, the now discreditedgenre she continued throughout the decade, provide even stronger evidenceof her support for the CPUSA than permitted by the restrictive editorial policiesof Masses & Mainstream. In 1951, Neel attended the funeral of one of theParty’s long-time leaders, Ella Reeve “Mother” Bloor (1862–1951). Joiningthe “Nights of Labor” in the mid-1880s, Bloor had been active in organizingunion labor until World War II. A delegate to the ƒrst and second congressesof the Red International of Labor Unions and to the ƒrst international meetingof communist women, Bloor traveled as a guest in 1937 to the Soviet Unionfor the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution.Her death notice in the September 1951 Masses & Mainstream eulogized thisimportant leader. 39 In her funeral portrait, The Death of Mother Bloor (1951,ƒg. 53), painted from memory, Neel reprises Ben Shahn’s The Passion ofSacco and Vanzetti, and her own Dead Father, honoring at once not only oneof communism’s founding ƒgures but also the founding of American SocialRealism. In so doing, Neel belatedly acknowledged the importance of women’scontributions to the CPUSA. In her 1940 autobiography, Bloor had gentlychided the Party for its failure to give women “full equal responsibility withmen.” 40 If, in A Bird in Her Hair, Neel visualized a ƒctional proletarian hero,here she eulogizes an historical one.Neel’s most ambitious pictorial commentary on McCarthyism, Eisenhower,McCarthy, Dulles (1953, ƒg. 54), is one of a handful of American critiques ofCold War foreign policy found in the medium of painting. Linking persecutionat home with militarism abroad, Neel transforms Dulles into a skeletaleagle with bloody talons, McCarthy into an ass brandishing a jail cell, and Ikeinto the angel of death presiding over the Western hemisphere. The bright redexplosion in Central America is no doubt a reference to the recent CIAbackedoverthrow of President Jacopo Arbenz Guzman in Guatemala. In1957, Paul Baron’s Political Economy of Growth, a communist analysis of postwarAmerican imperialism, argued that the historical advance of capitalism

76 / Neel’s Social Realist Arthad led to a programmed backwardness for Third World nations. 41 While Mc-Carthy was busy scaring out subversives at home, Neel made explicit theUnited States’ illegal subversion of Latin American governments, the sortof imperialist expansionism justiƒed by what to Neel was a spurious anticommunism.42If Eisenhower, McCarthy, Dulles is Neel’s comment on the Cold War, SaveWillie McGee (c. 1958, detail, ƒg. 55) represents her stand on the other majorcommunist issue of the 1950s, Negro civil rights. From the 1920s on, the CommunistParty, under directives from Moscow, had identiƒed the black struggleas part of its larger revolutionary struggle. During and after World War II, it remaineda major focus of Party activities. By 1938, shortly before Neel moved toSpanish Harlem, the CPUSA reached the height of its in„uence in the blackcommunity. However, the hierarchical organization of the Party worked to itsdisadvantage, breeding resentment on the part of blacks who felt dictated to bya predominantly foreign-born group of Jewish intellectuals. Yet, if the CP’srole in encouraging Negro art and culture was equivocal, its role in buildingand defending the civil rights movement was crucial. Just as it had aided in thedefense of the Scottsboro Boys in the 1930s, so in the 1940s and 1950s theParty rallied to the defense of many persecuted blacks in the South, amongthem Willie McGee, “a black truck driver whose white lover accused him ofrape after her husband discovered their affair.” 43According to the Encylopedia of the American Left, McGee’s case becamethe cause célèbre of the Civil Rights Congress (1946–1956), called the “mostsuccessful ‘Communist Front’ of all time.” 44 The July 1950 “Political Prisoners”issue of Masses & Mainstream listed Willie and Rosalee McGee with therecently convicted “trial of the twelve” leaders Eugene Dennis, Howard Fast,and W. H. Lawson. The same issue carried Rosalee McGee’s remarks at aCivil Rights Congress dinner held in New York on May 22, 1950, illustratedwith a woodcut by Stanley Edelson. Throughout 1950 and 1951, Masses &Mainstream reported on the status of McGee’s appeals. The execution of theMartinsville Seven in Richmond in February 1951 drew justiƒable charges of“mass murder” from Sillen in the March issue, charges that were formalizedin the stunning petition published in the May issue: “Mass Murder of Negroes:We Charge Genocide!” 45Because the Communist Party expended such energy on the McGee case,Neel no doubt painted Save Willie McGee (1952) as a belated gesture of solidarityafter the demise of the CRC. The historical connection between thirtiesactivism and the continuing concerns of the 1950s is seen in Neel’s inclusionof William Zorach’s sculpture Benjamin Franklin (1935–1937), a work commissionedin 1936 by the Treasury Department for the newly completed U.S.Post Ofƒce building. Reproduced in the November 1951 Art Digest, a second

The Cold War Battles / 77version of the Franklin sculpture stood in Union Square, where Neel attendeda vigil for McGee. Zorach’s Franklin may have stood in Neel’s mind for theprinciples of American civil liberties and also for a public art supported by thepeople and for the people, a cause now lost. In its depiction of the peacefulprotest, the painting provides evidence that in her own mind communism wasnot incompatible with democracy, despite Cold War rhetoric.The Proletarian Portrait GalleryIn addition to her illustrations and tableaux, Neel continued to add portraits ofcommunist writers and activists to her expanding gallery. Because the communistleaders she painted had been active since the 1930s and were now wellpast middle age, the series consists not of young idealists like Fearing andWhalen but of the stalwart, unrepentant old guard. This “Forefathers of AmericanCommunism” series spans the early 1950s to the late 1970s and includes:Mike Gold (1952), Art Shields (c. 1952), Bill McKie (1953), and, later, DavidGordon (1973), and Gus Hall (1980). All are representatives of postwar communism,tethered to the U.S.S.R. while surrounded by hostile forces at home.The series, unique in American art, must have presented a particular challengefor Neel, for portraiture had now become the predominant genre in SocialistRealism, despite the fact that, according to communist ideology, theportrait was a particularly virulent example of the bourgeois gloriƒcation of theindividual. By the time of Lenin’s death, the U.S.S.R., yielding to the power ofthe human face to create a totalitarian propaganda art, had replaced its religiousicons with ubiquitous in„ated images of its leaders. Such portraitureoffers clear evidence of the distance of socialist realism from Russian social reality.46 The romanticism of the portraits of Lenin in the 1930s had hardenedby the 1950s into the immobility of the portraits of Stalin characteristic of theCold War (e.g., Shurpin’s The Morning of Our Fatherland, 1948, ƒg. 56). BecauseNeel’s oeuvre was created in opposition to ofƒcialdom, and becauseSoviet portraiture was if anything even more ofƒcious than that of Americanpolitical leaders, Neel was caught on the horns of a dilemma when depictingthe leaders of the CPUSA.Her “solution” to this dilemma was to continue the approach she hadadopted in 1933: the leaders she painted were also her friends, part of herintellectual-political community, and it was as intimates embodying all thehuman contradictions of the public-private person that these leaders werepainted. Her Forefathers of American Communism series thus includes herlovers Jose (1935–1939; see ch. 6) and Sam Brody (1940–1958). Of all of herlovers, Sam Brody would have provided Neel with the strongest, most con-

78 / Neel’s Social Realist Artsistent support for her social realist art. The two met in 1940, and her early portraitdepicts a handsome, if tense, individual (Sam, 1940, ƒg. 57). The very imageof an intellectual, he holds one hand poised above the other as if to hold anidea in his mind.A founder of the Worker’s Film and Photo League (a section of the Worker’sInternational Relief, sponsored by the Communist International) in the winterof 1930–1931, Brody had been a ƒlm critic for the New Theatre Magazine, ExperimentalCinema, Filmfront, and the Daily Worker. He was the most knowledgeablewriter in America in the 1930s about the Russian revolutionary ƒlmmakersEisenstein, Pudovkin, and Dovjenko, and was the ƒrst to translate theParis lectures of Dziga Vertov into English in the January 1935 Filmfront 2and 3. Consciously emulating Vertov’s concept of the Kino-Eye, which he ƒrstencountered in Henri Barbusse’s publication Le Monde in Paris in 1921–1922, Brody described WFPL’s ƒlms as “reality recorded on ƒlm strips and . . .built up into wholes embodying our revolutionary interpretation of events.” 47With Leo Seltzer, Lester Balog, Robert Del Duca, and others, he made amongthe earliest social documentary ƒlms of the Depression, including hunger1932: The National Hunger March to Washington (1932–1933), Bonus March(1932), and America Today (1933). 48 Unlike Social Realist painting, theseƒlms were shown in union halls where they could reach the working class directly.According to Brody, “The Workers Film and Photo League carried onthe struggle on two fronts: (1) by making ƒlms aimed to bring to proletarianmessage of class stuggle to the working class audiences and (2) to expose andcombat the Hollywood lies that ƒll the American screens.” 49By the time Neel met Brody he was no longer the active and innovativeartist he had been. Nonetheless, his beliefs had not changed. Even as late ashis Jump Cut interview in 1977, Brody confessed that as a member of the SocialistMedia Group in Santa Monica he was “still trying.” 50 Throughout hiscareer as a critic and ƒlmmaker, his approach to art paralleled Neel’s: “I amnot a disinterested art-for-art’s saker. The most ‘escapist’ art is, by that very fact,sterile at best and reactionary at worst . . . What is art if it is not to ‘engage’ . . .and ‘enrage’ too.” 51 In 1946, well after the dissolution of the League, Brodyfounded Horizon Films “to combat the alarming increase in racial and religioustension in our country—using the double barreled weapon of truth and16mm ƒlm.” 52 Like all of Neel’s “proletarian” portraits from these years, hermany portraits of Sam from the 1940s and 1950s relate the left-wing “hero” tohis era. The sensitive intellectual from 1940 becomes by 1958 (ƒg. 58) the stillhandsome, ever resolute proletarian with a black t-shirt and crossed arms, defensively“wearing his politics on his sleeve.”In contrast, Neel’s portrait of another of her intellectual mentors, Mike

The Cold War Battles / 79Gold (1952, ƒg. 59), appears much more establishment. After the New Massesceased publication in 1948, Gold had moved to Paris, where he served as acorrespondent for Masses & Mainstream and the Daily World, returning to theStates in 1951. Neel’s 1952 portrait of Gold was painted when his reputationand that of proletarian literature in general was in decline. Her painting wasone contribution to an effort to rehabilitate the writer’s importance; anotherwas the publication of The Mike Gold Reader in 1954, compiled by the editorof Masses & Mainstream, Samuel Sillen.For her “rehab,” Neel depicts Gold as the eminence grise of his profession,in appearance quite different from his revolutionary youth. Like Neel, Goldhad crafted a persona that was calculated to present an “oppositional” image tomiddle-class propriety in the 1930s. According to Joseph Freeman, Gold “affecteddirty shirts, a big black, uncleaned stetson with the brim of a sombrero,smoked stinking, twisted Italian three-cent cigars, and spat frequently and vigorouslyon the „oor ...” 53 Neel would have understood the signiƒcance ofthese props, and if the tobacco-spitting revolutionary is now nowhere in evidence,it was because a new persona was required by the times. Seated beforeus is a handsome, well-groomed man in sport coat, tie, and vest, seated at hisdesk with his publications. Neel thus represents him as the very image of theIvy League academic intellectual Gold spent a lifetime railing against. 54 Theproducts of his intellectual work, the New Masses, with its red cover, and theDaily Worker, open to his column “Change the World!” are fully in evidenceas testimony to his place in American communist literature. As in the Fearingportrait, Neel links her work to his in the background, where she reprises thecomposition of her cityscapes from the 1940s to create a reference to Gold’s artof the tenement. The portrait thus legitimates Gold’s proletarian literature aspart of the American intellectual tradition.Gold had done the same for Neel the previous year by arranging to have herwork shown at the New Playwright’s Theatre, which was founded in the mid-1920s by Gold, John Dos Passos, and John Howard Lawson to present “massplays done for workers at prices that workers can afford.” 55 From April 23 toMay 23, 1951, Neel exhibited twenty-four paintings at the theater; in addition,a small brochure was published for which Gold supplied the introduction:Alice has for years lived with her children in a Harlem tenement. Her studio is thekitchen and her models the neighbors and the streets. She comes from an oldPhiladelphia family dating back to the Revolution. But her paintings reveal that hereis her true family. In solitude and poverty, Alice has . . . become . . . the ƒrst clear andbeautiful voice of Spanish Harlem. She reveals not only its desperate poverty, butits rich and generous soul . . . ALICE NEEL is a pioneer of socialist realism in American

80 / Neel’s Social Realist Artpainting. For this reason, the New Playwrights Theatre, dedicated to the samecause, presents her paintings to its audiences, who will know how to understand,appreciate and encourage one of their own. 56In describing her as “a pioneer of socialist realism in American painting,”Gold annointed Neel his counterpart in the visual arts, pointedly using theRussian term to acknowledge her political afƒliation. In her portrait, Neel hasreferenced socialist realism by using one of its tropes, the wise teacher, who,like Stalin in Shurpin’s portrait, embodies a vision of the future. Neel skirts thelevel of Shurpin’s empty platitude, however, by granting her sitter a humancomplexity utterly lacking in the Russian work. Gold is both an Americanbourgeois intellectual and a communist: the personiƒcation of the contradictionthat was the CPUSA. 57Until the 1970s Neel’s work, like Gold’s, was often criticized as a sort of visualjournalism, lacking in formal strength. In the October 24, 1970, New YorkTimes, Hilton Kramer praised her ability to render the faces of her sitters withan “uncommon intensity,” but faulted the “formal structure” of the paintings,which failed because she was a “hostage to [her sitter’s] immediate feelings.”Just as literary critics such as James Bloom and Morris Dickstein have recentlyrevised the negative assessment of Gold, so by 1983, Ted Castle found inNeel’s portraits not a short, quickly dissipated burst of intensity, but a broad socialcritique: “She has done the work of a whole generation of artists who wereafraid for their lives as artists if they were to portray the actual conditions of society...” 58 Both artists’ reputations suffered in part because of their communistpolitics; when the Cold War had thawed sufƒciently, their merits—andthe importance of their contribution to the tradition of socially concerned artin the United States—could be acknowledged.Although with the end of the Cold War it is possible to appreciate thestrengths of their work, both artists do fall into the trap of sentimentally attributinghuman virtues such as courage and endurance to the lower classes, andvices such as greed and moral turpitude to the upper. Gold’s verbal portraits ofcommunist heroes consistently in„ate them to Bunyanesque proportions andcast them as characters out of American mythology. For instance, in his essay“John Reed and the Real Thing” (1927), Gold describes the revolutionary as“a cowboy out of the West, six feet high, steady eyes, boyish face; a brave, gay,open-handed young giant.” 59 In her portraits of communist leaders in the1950s, Neel also draws on stereotypes from American popular culture. Paintedin 1950, the sixty-two-year old journalist Art (Thomas Arthur) Shields (ƒg. 60)is made to resemble a Gary Cooper-like cowboy with his thumb placed in hispants pocket like a gun in a holster; our aging hero is still capable of a ƒght.

The Cold War Battles / 81Like Gold, Shields was an old hand at proletarian journalism, ƒrst coming toprominence with his account of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, They Are Doomed(1921). This taciturn paragon of integrity echoes not only Gold’s he-man portraitsbut Shields’s own prose. 60 Like both of these American communists,Neel turned to the American cowboy mythology of rugged individualism forher left-wing, collective art.On the other hand, Ford Union organizer Bill McKie (ƒg. 61), with hisarthritic ƒngers, can barely hold his pipe, much less a gun. So Neel substitutesanother heroic type from American popular culture: the mild-mannered citizengoaded into action by injustice, more Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goesto Washington (1939) than Gary Cooper in High Noon (1952). In 1953, whenNeel painted McKie’s portrait, Phillip Bonosky published a biography of theScottish labor organizer, Brother Bill McKie. Following Bonosky’s description,Neel presents a “lean long-faced man with mild blue eyes, a foreign cut to hisdark suit.” Indeed, he looks more like management than a former member ofthe CIO who between 1927 and 1941 helped to found the UAW and to organizea major strike. 61Neel’s proletarian portraits of the 1950s thus merge the two con„icting “humanisms”of capitalist individualism and socialist realism. Wishing to reinterpretsocial realism without falling into the trap of socialist realism, Neelskillfully incorporated into her portraits the very contradictions her sitters wereforced to live. Her proletarian portraits from the 1950s make explicit the disjunctionsbetween the heroes of American popular culture and those of theSoviet worker’s paradise, between the class of the proletarian writer and theunion activist, between artistic freedom and ideological commitment. Theproletarian writer (Gold) as college professor, the union organizer (McKie) asdebonair sophisticate, the aging journalist (Shields) as cowboy: either thesemen are not what they seem, or they are something different from what theyonce were. In either event, they are anomalies, the period’s pariahs. Ratherthan embodying the “essential driving forces” of society, they are “men as theylive their own history,” that is, their own history in all of its contradictions.Neel’s closest associates in the Party were male, and there are few comparableportraits of women communist writers from the 1950s, despite their importantliterary contributions. 62 Despite Mother Bloor’s commentary, the attitudeof the Party leadership toward its female members remained less than progressive.63 Nonetheless, from the 1940s on, female Marxist critics had provided anongoing critique of the depiction of women in American literature, ƒlm, andadvertising, quite apart from their important contributions to left-wing literature.Articles by Joy Davidson, for instance, on the image of women in Hollywoodƒlm presage feminist criticism of the late 1970s. 64 As her “feminist”

82 / Neel’s Social Realist Artinterpretations of social realist themes attest, Neel was certainly not insensitiveto these issues, even if she believed that in general society’s inequities wereattributable to economic status rather than to gender.Neel’s most important portrait of a left-wing woman artist in the 1950s wasthat of the black playwright and actress Alice Childress (c. 1950, ƒg. 62). Oneof Neel’s rare proƒle portraits, the actress directs her gaze out the window tothe street. Dressed in a formal, strapless dress, with a prominent gold medallionhanging from her neck that makes her look a bit like Queen Elizabeth,Childress appears to be in costume, quite oblivious to the eccentric impressionthe clothing creates “offstage.” Whatever else she may be—and her race isindeterminate—Childress occupies a world of her own creation.In all probability, Neel met Childress at the Amercan Negro Theatre inHarlem, where she was an actress and director in the 1950s. Childress alsopublished articles regularly in Masses & Mainstream, and in 1949 she starredin her loosely autobiographical one-act play Florence. Published in Masses &Mainstream in 1950, Florence is a poignant defense of the black voice in thearts. 65 Just beginning to be known at the time of Neel’s painting, Childress’sreputation is now secure. 66 Neel’s afƒliation with Masses & Mainstream andthe intellectual left positioned her to recognize this artist’s importance. 67After the mid-1950s, Neel ceases painting Party literati and concentratesher efforts on the residents of Spanish Harlem. When she returns to her seriesof leaders a decade later, it is to record a Party suffering decline. The transitionfrom the late 1950s to the late 1960s, when the series resumes, is charted inseveral letters from 1958 between Neel and Gold. Gold was to spend the lastdecade of his life in San Francisco, where he began but never completed hisautobiography. Their letters reveal that Neel was a vital link to his old life. Inone letter, Gold encouraged her to think of her slide presentations in terms ofproletarian theater: “I think you could get up a good act there—write out aninteresting human series of notes on each painting...” 68 This encouragementarrived at a key moment, when Neel had decided that the time had come forher to get “off the shelf.”Gold then described the “beatnik” population, which he compared to “ourown New York village—thirty years later.” Complimenting her on the drawingsshe had published in the 1958 Mainstream, 69 he confessed that “I did notlike it when those snoot young intellectuals cut my name off the list of editors.”70 Clearly the editors no longer felt that “writers of his mold [were] urgentlyneeded,” as Sillen had declared in 1952. Neel, on the other hand, was atlast granted a portfolio: four full-page ink drawings, of Georgie Arce, Sam, ayoung woman, and a tree at Spring Lake—not a socialist realist hero in sight.Gold further complained that, despite his intentions, he was not able to stick towriting his book, and again contrasted his own lack of recent achievement

The Cold War Battles / 83with Alice’s continuing productivity. The 1958 date of the letter indicates aline of demarcation between the old and the new left in politics, literature, andin Neel’s career as well. Gold recognized that San Francisco was the center ofa new movement with the creative energy of the old Village, but he was notable to join it. Neel, on the other hand, would not only paint Allen Ginsberg’sportrait (c. 1966, ƒg. 63), but, the year following Gold’s letter, was a member ofthe cast in the classic Beat ƒlm Pull My Daisy (1959).For Neel, Beat literature would have represented another viable oppositionalstance to mainstream culture in the 1950s, one that had strong echoes ofGold’s proletarian literature from the 1930s. 71 Yet despite his debt to proletarianliterature, Ginsberg would hardly have ended “Howl” with words likeGold: “Lenin! / I see the bloody birth you will bring.” And for his part, Goldwould not have been caught dead chanting mantras in a Yoga position in aGreenwich Village coffee house. Neel’s portrait of Ginsberg as a drugged outmystic, painted in the mid-1960s, could not be more different from the stolidportrait of Gold from 1952. For Neel, admiring and recording them both, itwas all part of the changing Zeitgeist from the ƒfties to the sixties. 72In 1967, when Gold died, Neel pulled her portrait of him off the shelf andpainted his memorial, not in terms of socialist realism but in her own “personalrhetoric,” (Mike Gold, In Memoriam (1893–1967), ƒg. 64). Propping thepainting on a dresser, draping it with black cloth, and placing a skull andpitcher of lilacs (the „ower of mourning) on a low stool, she created a privateshrine—the very opposite of a socialist realist icon—to the now-neglected author.The homemade, heartfelt altar was an appropriate “funeral,” because forGold communism was a religion, a faith he maintained until his death. Althoughhomemade altars with portraits of deceased relatives are common inhomes throughout Latin America, as Neel well knew, they look unfamiliar—strange—in the North American context. Neel created an unorthodox memorialto an orthodox communist whose thinking, within the American context,was subversive. So, too, Neel’s memorial subverts the clichés of socialist realistmonuments and brings us back to the historical reality of place and time: Goldexited stage right in 1967, at the moment of the ascendency of the New Left,and shortly before the student protests would erupt at Columbia University, afew blocks from Neel’s apartment.The continuing in„uence of proletarian literature and of Gold’s work inparticular can be found throughout Neel’s career, surfacing in her choice anddescription of her subjects. For instance, in her slide lectures Neel describedFuller Brush Man (1965, ƒg. 10) in a way that suggests how thoroughly she hadabsorbed the subject matter and content of proletarian literature: “He was Jewishand he had been in Dachau. Those things in his pocket are prizes for buyingsome of his brushes . . . He said he had to make twenty-ƒve sales a day for

84 / Neel’s Social Realist ArtFuller Brush or lose his job. But he was so happy to be in America.” 73 This perfectproletarian antihero, whom Neel described as a ƒxture in her neighborhood,also happened to be a character in one of Gold’s poems, “The HappyCorpse” (Masses & Mainstream, July 1952).Doggedly all day he climbsup and down the steep apartment housesa gray little Chaplin refugeeescaped from the Hitler furnacesto become a Fuller Brush salesman herenow he is 100 per cent American . . .Hitler’s victim now believes in the Chase National Bank . . .” 74A brilliant visualization of Gold’s poem and of the “Death of a Salesman” literaryconceit in general, the painting exempliƒes the close correspondence betweenNeel’s revived social realism and Gold’s writings.By this time, however, Neel’s portraits had taken a new direction: her focuswas on the New York art network and the extended family. The last communistforefathers in Neel’s proletarian portrait gallery, two of whom will be discussedhere, constitute a coda, a memento mori for a political party that hadbeen born in the same decade as the men themselves. They were painted inthe changed political climate of the 1960s and 1970s, during the period of increasedinternational exchange, when the Party’s hard-line rhetoric had becomeincreasingly empty. Now that these men could no longer conceivably beregarded as a threat to the U.S. government, they are presented as citizens worthyof respect.As with Mike Gold, Neel painted David Gordon in both ƒgurative and stilllifeform. Gordon, who replaced Bonosky as cultural page editor for the DailyWorld, had written a poem titled “America” in 1927 at age eighteen that led tohis imprisonment on trumped up charges of obscenity. 75 A Party activist andart critic thereafter, Gordon died of cancer in June 1973. In that year, Neelpainted two portraits of Gordon: the ƒrst in the “aging radical” mode, the seconda private memorial. In the ƒrst (ƒg. 65) Gordon is all soft curves in a lightblue sweatsuit and dark blue beret. Gentleness, wistfulness, and fatigue nowcharacterize the former revolutionary poet. 76 Initially, David Gordon seems toresemble Neel’s portrait of the composer Virgil Thomson (1971, ƒg. 66) withhis collar-length hair, slight paunch, and tired eyes; in other words, he is typedas an accomplished artist and critic at the end of his career, rather than asa communist. Unlike Gordon, however, whose kind eyes address the viewerdirectly, Thomson, a paunchy, tight-lipped, pale male, personiƒes the selfimportantacademic. During this period, then, Neel’s “Forefathers of Ameri-

The Cold War Battles / 85can Communism” series intervenes in high or elite culture so as to broaden itsspectrum and provide an opportunity to compare the later careers of 1930sradicals. Revising establishment decisions about which people should begranted historical importance, the series contrasts the successful with the unsuccessfulartist, casting each in new roles.In the 1930s, Thomson had been a left-wing sympathizer, and one of hisearly successes came with his score for Pare Lorenz’s documentary The River(1937), which helped propagandize the programs of the TVA. But accordingto his biographer, his position as art critic for the New York Herald Tribune,after 1940, provided him with a platform from which to promote his own career.77 As a writer for an establishment paper, Thomson’s criticism and musicgained an authority that Gordon’s writings could not; Neel paints a lumberingelephant burdened under the weight of careerism.Jar from Samarkand (ƒg. 67), the second of Neel’s portraits of Gordon, indicateshow closely Neel’s politics by the 1970s were intertwined with personalfriendships, and her proletarian portrait gallery a memento mori. As at Gold’sdeath six years earlier, Neel marked Gordon’s passing with a still life, a naturemorte, but one with even less public meaning than Gold’s “altar.” Neel had delivereda talk at Gordon’s funeral in October 1973, as had Allen Ginsberg, and,the public amenities dispensed with, Neel could address her own feelings ofloss in the painting.The critic Lawrence Alloway has argued that by the 1970s the shift from abstractionto realism “had a special signiƒcance for feminist art . . . In general,the new realism is rich in the iconography of relationships . . . [S]till lifes of the’70s are personalized, with their images of objects redolent of artists’ lives.” 78In the Gordon memorial, Neel contrasts the pregnant globes of bright fruitwith the small, dark pottery vase Gordon had purchased for her in Soviet Asiaand that his wife, Lottie, delivered to Neel after his death. 79 Solemn, motionless,the jar is like a funeral urn. Despite its small size, its emotional weight tipsthe table top up like a seesaw, life freighted toward death. In 1936, Lozowickhad argued that one could paint a “revolutionary” still life; in 1973 Neel painteda still life that memorialized the death of revolutionary hopes through her personalfeelings of loss. One plus one was becoming one minus one.Similarly, when Neel’s social realist colleagues at last enter the portraitgallery in these years, they are depicted as historical relics. Stylistically, TheSoyer Brothers (1973, ƒg. 68) returns us to the Depression era, and quite pointedlyto the art of the Soyers themselves. The aged twins, one year older thanNeel, sit huddled on the daybed like two timid mice. Their looks of quiet resignationand their slumped bodies immediately bring to mind their paintings ofunemployed men from the 1930s. Neel has even reduced her palette to theneutrals grey and brown, the colors of so much 1930s art. 80

86 / Neel’s Social Realist ArtDressed in their drab business suits, they look more like shopkeepers thanartists, perhaps a reference to their academic roles as teachers. Raphael (on theleft) described himself simply as a “representational painter,” which, he commented,was synonymous with a “social painter,” because it expressed “thespirit of the time.” 81 In his 1981 interview with Milton Brown for the Archivesof American Art, he was at pains to emphasize that “I never painted a picture ofpeople in a factory. I never painted a picture of people beating up strikers.” 82Yet apart from the differences their in attitudes toward the relationship of artto politics, Neel and Raphael Soyer in particular could be said to share twin careers.Soyer painted primarily portraits of relatives, friends, and fellow artists,including Neel. Both painted the female nude, including the pregnant nude,frankly and with lack of idealization, although Soyer de-emphasized the body’seroticism by conƒning the nude to the studio. 83 The two contemporaries thusoccupied the same place on the spectrum of American postwar art, that of the“old-fashioned” realist who believed that the human ƒgure, well drawn, wasthe basis of art. To Soyer, Neel belonged to that tradition. “I know,” he said,“that I have great feelings for someone like Alice Neel. I think she’s a verystrong painter, a very strong representatonal painter.” 84 For her part, eventhough she never explicitly praised his work, Neel valued Soyer’s advice, as thephotograph of the two of them at her 1968 Graham gallery exhibit reveals (ƒg.69). Certainly Neel recognized the struggle involved in maintaining a placefor representational art in the postwar New York artworld. That place, anachronisticbut still viable, is the subject of the portrait.The last entry in the communist wing of the portrait gallery personiƒes theParty’s increasing ossiƒcation. In 1980, when Neel painted a portrait of theChairman of the Communist Party USA, Gus Hall (ƒg. 70), she hoped itwould be shown in her upcoming Moscow exhibition. Without doubt, Neelwished to create a socialist realist portrait along Soviet lines by picturing aruggedly handsome man of the people in a Russian fur hat. However, Hall refusedto let the portrait travel, much to Neel’s displeasure. When she asked foran explanation, he responded, “I am always uncomfortable about anythingthat tends to give the impression of immodesty, egocentrism, individualismand that any way feeds a tendence [sic] toward a cult of the personality.” 85No doubt he simply disliked looking hidebound, but his expression of dogmatismnonetheless epitomizes the rhetoric of the Party, which from the 1960son refused to respond to calls from within its ranks for reform. His tenacity issuggested by his bulldog-like face, suggestive of the apparatchik rather than avisionary. After the fall of the communist state, Hall was interviewed in theSeptember 1991 issue of Time magazine, where he was described in patronizingterms as the “80-year old party patriarch”—“the last of the Red-Hot believers—,”who refused to recognize that “the party is ƒnally over.” 86 Neel pre-

The Cold War Battles / 87sents a ƒgurehead, wooden but tenacious, who represents the state both of theParty and of socialist realist art.Neel’s proletarian portrait gallery spans the history of American communismfrom the 1930s to the 1980s, and insists that these leaders will not be writtenout of American history—or into it—simply as enemies or crackpots. Centralto Neel’s cultural, if not her political life, the CPUSA did provide her withher link to history, as well as the intellectual framework for her social realistwork, and an ongoing underground network of moral support. In return Neelcelebrated the idealism of individuals who, like herself, had maintained thecourage of their convictions. And if those convictions became increasinglynarrow-minded, as in the case of Gus Hall, she would record that part of historyas well. He was still a “hero” even if he was ƒghting a losing battle in creakingarmor.As the Old Left gave way to the New, Neel occasionally lent her name and/or art to the growing ƒeld of protest art. However, there are no counterparts toNazis Murder Jews to protest the war in Vietnam. Her “protest” came in theform of portraits of young men fated to ƒght in it. Only in her occasional illustrationsdid she continue to use art as a vehicle for overt political protest. In1971, the artists Rudolf Baranik and Benny Andrews compiled The AtticaBook. A joint effort of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition and Artists andWriters Protest Against the War in Vietnam, The Attica Book served as “a battlecry and lament—the Guernica of America’s dispossessed” 87 for the brutal suppressionof the riots at the upstate New York prison. That statement could havebeen written in the 1930s, and the artists who contributed to the book did includesome of the well-known Left artists of the previous generation: JacobLawrence, Romare Beardon, and Antonio Frasconi. But the generation ofartists reared in the 1930s and 1940s was also included: Nancy Spero, LeonGolub, Duane Hanson, and May Stevens. In this context, Neel’s untitled drawingof protesters with raised ƒsts looked as if it had wandered accidentally outof Masses & Mainstream, deƒnitely out of the mainstream in this context.Of greater historical interest than Neel’s speciƒc artistic contribution to TheAttica Book is the support that Neel began to receive at this time from theartists-activists of the New Left. Rudolf Baranik and his wife, May Stevens, whoƒrst met Neel through Phillip Bonosky in about 1954, were especially supportive.Both teachers as well as activists, Baranik and Stevens invited Neel to lectureto their classes at the Pratt Institute and Queens College. These served asimportant “trial runs” for her later lecture-performances. Active in the women’smovement after 1970, Stevens wrote an important article on Neel’s nonportraitwork for Women’s Studies in 1978. 88 Stevens’s link to the women’s movementwas crucial for Neel’s later career, despite the fact that she never fully acceptedthe idea of a collective art, whether communist or feminist. 89

88 / Neel’s Social Realist ArtIn the 1980s, with Neel’s reputation established, she was included in importantexhibitions of 1930s art. 90 As the ƒrst evidence of a thaw in the ColdWar appeared in the early 1960s, the United States and Soviet Union began topermit cultural exchange as an ostensibly neutral ground on which the opposingsystems could meet. As Khrushchev permitted greater latitude for the visualarts in Russia, even permitting some abstract art to be shown, if notpraised, the Iron Curtain was raised to permit American artists with the propercredentials to exhibit there as well. Neel no doubt considered participation insuch exchanges as important as any of her “New Left” activities, and her correspondencewith Mike Gold and Phillip Bonosky attests to her ongoing inquiriesabout the possibilities of exhibiting in Russia. Her ƒrst opportunity camein 1960, with the U.S.-U.S.S.R. Gift Exhibition, initiated by Rockwell Kentfor the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship. 91 This earliest ofthe “revivals” of social realist art was unquestionably one of its most comprehensive.During the late 1950s, Bonosky helped Neel keep the faith with positive reportsof life behind the Iron Curtain. 92 His letter from August 1960 assuredNeel that he would work on a solo exhibition at the Moscow Artists Union butcould not do so until after the “joint exhibition of American realism,” theFriendship exhibition. Twenty years later, in July 1981, an exhibition of eightyƒvepaintings by Alice Neel opened at the exhibition hall of the Union ofArtists of the U.S.S.R. on Gorky Street. Bonosky played an important role in itsorganization, but Neel herself paid for the price of shipping and for her family’stravel costs. Bonosky authored the catalog essay, which predictably toutedher communist credentials. The text then departs from “Old Left” rhetoric tobrie„y summarize the arguments of American scholars on the in„uence ofCold War politics on the critical reception of abstract expressionism:[A]rt had been taken over rather aggressively by abstract and other non-ƒgurativeforms. And to the degree that their emergence in time coincided with the politicsof McCarthyism in the 1950s they were also politically sanctioned . . . Only the leftlistened to her. As for the attitude of the bourgeoisie which now makes such a fussabout her name, well, at that time Alice Neel had simply ceased to exist . . . [InAmerica] the ofƒcial press . . . has distorted the meaning of the creative work . . .[H]er participation in the struggle for peace is not simply rage at a “stormy life.” 93Bonosky was right about the distortion of the meaning of Neel’s work in theAmerican critical press, but he failed to acknowledge Neel’s complicity in it.In Russia she geared her press statements to the Soviet audience, praising a systemwhere “the government owes you everything.” 94 When Neel arrived inMoscow, the ediƒce of the communist state was crumbling, taking with it theofƒcial art of socialist realism. Yet, publicly at least, the Party line was rigidly

The Cold War Battles / 89maintained. 95 With the Zhdanovist façade still ƒrmly intact but increasinglyunder stress from the guerilla attacks of the artistic underground, it is hard togauge who the audience for her work might have been and what interpretationsit may have elicited. 96In spite of the interest in the exhibit on the part of the general public, onecan speculate that in Moscow in the period of late communism, American socialrealism appeared to be the naive, well-meaning sibling of its cynical, ofƒcial“negative twin,” socialist realism. Even though Brezhnev was still inpower, and Gorbachev’s glasnost would not be instituted until 1986, nonetheless,unofƒcial art, even art overtly critical of the government, was widely toleratedand respected, whereas exhibits of socialist realism were ignored. Amongthe more prominent artists of the 1970s and early 1980s were the Sots artists,among them Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid. According to the art historianMargarita Tupitsyn, the Sots artists “proposed to view socialist realismand propaganda imagery not as mere kitsch or simply a vehicle for bureaucraticmanipulation, but as a rich ƒeld of stereotypes and myths which theycould transform into a new language, one able to deconstruct ofƒcial myths ontheir own terms.” 97 To Russian artists familiar with the profound cynicism ofpaintings such as Komar & Melamid’s portrait of Stalin as a narcissist prayingto his own image (Stalin in Front of a Mirror, 1982–1983, ƒg. 71), viewingNeel’s portrait of Mike Gold (Mike Gold, In Memoriam, 1967), an altarpieceexpressive of genuine faith in the ideals of communism, must have created astrong conceptual dissonance. Whereas Neel memorialized the passing of anera with continuing respect for its intellectual elite, Komar & Melamid forcethe viewer to look at a shoeless tyrant in the process of creating a false publicface for ubiquitous distribution.With the end of the Cold War, the half-century artistic communication gapbetween East and West was bridged with remarkable symmetry, affording Komar& Melamid comfortable artistic passage to the United States. However,this postmodern, postcommunist art also marked the beginning of an era towhich Alice Neel’s humanistically based social realism no longer belonged. In1984, the year of Neel’s death, Lucy Lippard articulated the premises of a newart of social concern: “It is understood by now that all art is ideological and allart is used politically by the right or the left, with the conscious and unconsciousassent of the artist. There is no neutral zone.” 98 However obvious such astatement would have seemed to Neel, the means for critiquing the system hadprofoundly changed. With the disintegration of the totalitarian Russian statethat was communist in name only, a new, postcommunist social realism, lessself-righteous, less convinced of the existence of unassailable truth, began toemerge, and with it the outlines of a transnational oppositional art that beganto rewrite yet again the agendas of both social and socialist realism.

6El Barrio:Portrait of Spanish HarlemI love you Harlem your life your pregnant women, your relief lines outsidethe bank, full of women who no dress in Saks 5th ave would ƒt, teeth missing,weary, out of shape, little black arms around their necks clinging to theirskirts all the wear and worry of struggle on their faces. what a treasure ofgoodness and life shambles thru the streets, abandoned, despised, chargedthe most, given the worst / I love you for electing Marcantonio, and him forbeing what he is And for the rich deep vein of human feeling buried underyour ƒre engines your poverty and your lovesAlice Neel, unpublished notes, Neel Arts, New York CityIn 1938, pregnant with a son by her lover José Santiago, Neel moved fromGreenwich Village to Spanish Harlem to be close to José’s relatives. She markedthe move with a small painting that caricatures the two of them walking uptownthrough Central Park, her belly echoing the shape of his guitar. She titledthe painting The Flight Into Egypt, and in contrast with the vital artistic andintellectual milieu she had enjoyed for the previous six years in GreenwichVillage, she must have felt as if she were entering exile in the desert. Yet Neelchose to make this important time of transition, in her life and in the historyof left-wing art generally, into an opportunity to initiate a new social realist90

El Barrio / 91project, a collective portrait of the residents of Spanish Harlem. During the1940s, when Negro civil rights became a major issue for the CPUSA, Neelstaked out a new center of activity, quite different from the territory to thenorth claimed by Party activists. There, by calling into question current deƒnitions—political,anthopological, and artistic—of “race,” Neel crossed boundariesthat had been created by the artiƒcial partitioning of our society along ablack-white axis.The community is depicted through two genres; ƒrst, the posed portraits ofthe residents, and second, the physical environment, the social container orbody. The two genres are related compositionally: frontal and imperturbable,each is both face and façade. These face-ades present themselves for viewingbut cannot be penetrated. Her project is to make visible a culture through itspeoples and its dwellings, but not to categorize. Instead, the two “fronts” onwhich she approaches the subject represent two potential avenues for knowing,rather than assembled bodies of knowledge. The strength of Neel’s projectlies in its very limitations. For the most part, her sitters sit in her space, theirbodies and faces revealing their response to the presence of an unfamiliar whitewoman. They frequently remain unnamed, or acknowledge the strangeness oftheir names by anglicizing them: Call me Joe (1958, ƒg. 72). She does not speakfor them; rather, she makes them visible, as individuals, family members, andas part of an ethnic group. Although she does not “interpret” them or visualizetheir habitats and their activities for our interpretive gaze, she gives them citizenshipby welcoming them into her space.Neel not only uses two genres but also frequently uses compositional doublingto underscore the question of sameness/difference. The children in TwoBlack Girls (ƒg. 7) appear African American, but their Hispanic names (Antoniaand Carmen Encarnacion), parenthesized in the title, establish dualBlack/Hispanic “racial” identities, just as their contrasting poses and facial expressionssuggest different personality types. Doubling can also be used to con-„ate distinctions and cross boundaries; for instance, the tenement façades inFire Escape (1948, ƒg. 73), uniform in their repeated patterns of blank windows,set into question that sameness by doubling it against the „at pattern ofshadows, so that differences between substance and image, inside and outside,become indistinguishable. Neel’s project is not an art of the studio addressedto an educated public of potential purchasers, but an art of the neighborhoodthat permitted a class largely invisible to the middle-class culture to view itself.The process of painting was thus an honoriƒc one with a communal purpose,rather than the means to an end of museum exhibition or private ownership.Although the predominance of children in Neel’s portraits from the 1940sand 1950s can be explained by the fact that her primary energies were directedtoward the raising of her two boys, her focus on children also re„ects the fact

92 / Neel’s Social Realist Artthat during the Cold War years, when women were pressured to return to thehome, America became a child-centered society. According to the sociologistElaine Tyler May, mothers were now informed that they were “the architectsof peace,” and that “The new philosophy of child guidance makes of parenthoodnot a dull, monotonous routine job, but an absorbing creative profession.”1 May’s Homeward Bound argues that “The powerful political consensusthat supported cold war policies abroad and anticommunism at home fueledconformity to the suburban family ideal.” 2 One indicator of the importance ofthe child in the postwar family was the custom of commissioning their portraits,which would then adorn the living room wall. Whether paintings orphotographs, these images confronted children with their idealized selves asthe focus of their world. The children Neel painted, on the other hand, did notcome from homes where their own faces were likely to occupy the center ofthe family space. In convincing the children of Spanish Harlem to participatein this ritual, Neel temporarily erased class differences.During the 1940s and 1950s, when the middle class migrated to the suburbs,Neel painted what the sociologist Michael Harrington would call in1962 “The Other America,” “an America of poverty . . . hidden today in a waythat it never was before. Its millions are socially invisible to us...” 3 Ten yearsearlier, the publication of Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man had articulatedthe effect of that social invisibility on the “emotional experience” of nonwhites.As he wrote in the ƒrst and last paragraphs of his Prologue:I am an invisible man . . . I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse tosee me . . . When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, orƒgments of their imagination—indeed, everything or anything except me . . . I amone of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility;any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, andwhy should I be, when you refuse to see me? Responsibility rests upon recognition,and recognition is a form of agreement. 4Both sociologist and novelist isolate the key strategy by which inequitableclass relations are maintained: a willed social myopia. Neel’s Spanish Harlemproject achieves a pictorial recognition between classes by having her sittersaddress her—that is, address the whiteness that was equally invisible becausenormative.East Harlem, the area between Fifth Avenue and the East River, which,bounded by 125th and 96th streets on the north and south, was at the turn ofthe century an ethnic slum housing a populace mostly of Russian Jewish, Italian,and Irish origin. After World War I, Puerto Ricans, as well as smaller groupsof Cubans and Dominicans, moved into the area in large numbers, providing

El Barrio / 93the area with its description, “Spanish” (Hispanic) Harlem. By 1958, a total of600,000 ƒrst- or second-generation Puerto Ricans lived in New York City, andalthough after 1950 the greatest concentration was found in the South Bronx,East Harlem remained identiƒed with the Puerto Rican community. 5Called “El Barrio” (the neighborhood), its character was quite differentfrom Black Harlem to the north and west. Perhaps the most signiƒcant differenceresided in the way “race” was deƒned. Black Harlem had been settled bymigrants from the American South, long victims of American racism. The residents’lives were shaped by the North American concept of a Negro race, atthe time so rigidly deƒned that the ludicrous “one-drop” rule (one drop ofNegro blood categorizing one as Negro) went unchallenged. The immigrantsfrom the Caribbean came from a culture where the mixing of “races” was anaccepted fact, rather than an illegal act of miscegenation. Although skin colorand associated characteristics of hair texture and facial features frequentlyserved as an indicator of class (that is, the more upper-class, the whiter the populationtended to be), variations were so subtly differentiated that black/whitedistinctions simply could not be applied. Whereas in the United States, PuertoRicans would be categorized by the census as either Negro or White, theirown range of classiƒcations included “brown” and “colored.” Darker-skinnedPuerto Ricans were described simply as “de color” on the Island, but when settlingin the United States they were faced with an inappropriate either/or censusdesignation. 6 Inevitably, this led to con„ict, including gang violence, betweenthe two marginalized groups.The understanding Neel gained in Cuba of the differing concepts of racein North and Latin America permitted her to question the North’s monolithicracial categories. She thus exempliƒes the arguments made by her friend fromthe Cuban years, Nicolas Guillen, in his essay “Havana to New York” in theJune 1949 Masses & Mainstream, which acknowledged that although whiteand Cuban cultures may be inclined to overgeneralization and simpliƒcationwhen writing about one another, such crosscultural analysis could just asfrequently result in insight. 7 A master „esh painter, Neel represented everynuance of skin shade within her family groups, as if to ask, “Where does blackend and white begin? What does “race” mean in a “mixed” culture? How dovisual differences matter?”Several years before Neel began her Spanish Harlem series in 1938–1939,Meyer Schapiro had published an essay, “Race, Nationality and Art,” in ArtFront (March 1936), that ƒrst questioned the notion of “race” within art criticism.An eloquent refutation of Nazi ideology, Schapiro’s essay had challengedthe accepted notion that there are identiƒable racial or national characteristicsin art, reminding the reader that

94 / Neel’s Social Realist ArtSuch distictions in art have been a large element in the propaganda for war and fascismand in the pretense of peoples that they are eternally different from and superiorto others and are, therefore, justiƒed in oppressing them . . . The idea of a purerace is a myth scorned by honest anthropologists. 8Both Schapiro’s essay and Neel’s project anticipate the most controversialdisquisition on race at the time, “The Races of Man,” written by two ColumbiaUniversity anthropologists, Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltƒsh. Presagingpostwar centrist discourse, it argued that “The Bible story of Adam and Eve . . .told centuries ago the same truth that science has shown today: that all thepeoples of the earth are a single family and have a common origin.” 9 AlthoughNeel never articulated her opinion about current anthropological theories ofrace, she would have sympathized with the authors’ argument that racism hadan economic base. “In any country every legal decision that upholds equal citizenshiprights without regard to race or color, every labor decision that lessensthe terror of being ‘laid-off ’ . . . can free people from fear. They need not lookfor scapegoats.” 10 However, Neel’s Save Willie McGee suggests that she wouldhave found naive at best the anthropologists’ efforts to conƒned the politicalproblems of race relations solely to the arena of poverty.Moreover, in rejecting the idea of ƒxed racial characteristics, Neel distancedherself from the “African” premises on which much of the art of the HarlemRenaissance had been based. A decade before Schapiro’s essay was published,Alain Locke, in his 1925 introductory essay to the anthology The New Negro,had urged the artists of the Harlem Renaissance to deƒne Negro culture interms of difference from the dominant white culture, and to look to African artas the basis for their own cultural expression. But the institution of slavery hadall but eliminated those traditions. As Michael Leja observed with reference toprimitivism in American art of the 1940s, “Laying such claim to African visualtraditions would have required wresting these forms away from the dominantculture . . . What made such a move impossible, however, was the fact thatAfrican arts were only available to the Harlem artist through modernism . . .and its misreadings.” 11 Whatever the weaknesses of its premises, Locke’s callhad led to an unprecedented „owering of literature, art, theater, and musicthat remains the outstanding achievement of American art between the wars.Although a comparable development in music and literature would slowlytake root in Spanish Harlem, there was no counterpart in the visual arts to aPalmer Hayden, a William H. Johnson, or a Jacob Lawrence. Nor did documentaryphotographers of the Photo League, who were also creating importantstudies of Harlem life, include Spanish Harlem. The role of making a creativedocument fell to Neel, who had adopted Hispanic culture. Neel’s artonly rarely intersects with the artists of the Harlem Renaissance, for not only

El Barrio / 95did she abandon “primitivism” by the early 1940s, Neel had no interest in thecycles of black history, religion, and mythology found in those artists’ works.She was not creating a separate cultural history, but a multicultural one. As awhite woman with a nonwhite daughter and son, she would have understoodfrom ƒrsthand experience the spurious and oppressive uses to which the conceptof “race” had been put.Although Neel’s Spanish Harlem series was precipitated by her long-standingpolitical commitments, Spanish Harlem was not a site of intense Partyactivism. Indeed, Spanish Harlem’s diversity makes generalizations about itspolitical base difƒcult. According to New Left historian Gerald Meyer, “ElBarrio grew within Jewish East Harlem, a great center of Socialist Party politics,”12 and as a result its newer residents also became radicalized. From 1934to 1950 the district was represented in the U.S. Congress by the Italian Americanmember of the American Labor Party Vito Marcantonio, who served as avoice for Puerto Rican interests. In 1948, the CP candidate, Henry Wallace,carried the district, and in 1950 the American Labor Party candidate for Senate,W. E. B. DuBois (shortly to join the Communist Party), received approximately45 percent of the vote in El Barrio. 13 The problem with drawing conclusionsfrom this summary is that it assumes that the Hispanic immigrantswere as politically active as their Jewish predecessors had been, when in factless than 50 percent of the population voted in the 1960 elections. 14Mitigating the radical political legacy of Jewish East Harlem was the natureof poverty within the Puerto Rican community. According to sociologist OscarLewis’s study of an extended Puerto Rican family, La Vida (1965), the slow assimilationof Puerto Rican immigrants meant that many retained their conservativeviews and customs. Moreover, the culture of poverty itself moved withthem from the island to the mainland, preventing the growth of active politicalorganizations. Lewis characterized the culture of poverty by the lack of participationof the poor in the larger institutions of society, and on the local level bya minimum of organization beyond the level of the nuclear or extended family.15 “The culture of poverty is both an adaptation and a reaction of the poor totheir marginal position in a class-stratiƒed, highly individuated, capitalist society.”16 The very distinction Lewis makes between the (temporary) condition ofpoverty and the (stagnant) culture of poverty is based on the existence of localpower bases, which were found throughout Black Harlem, but which SpanishHarlem lacked. As the social worker Patricia Cayo Sexton noted, the residentsof Spanish Harlem appeared to have merely traded the green poverty of PuertoRico for the grey poverty of New York. 17Neel’s apprenticeship for her Spanish Harlem portraits was served from1935 to 1939, in the extensive series of paintings, watercolors, pastel, and pencildrawings she made of José Santiago, a musician (guitarist), whom Neel met

96 / Neel’s Social Realist Artwhen he was playing at a nightclub, La Casita, in the Village, and who wouldbecome an English teacher in Mexico later in life. The portraits, whether Joséis sleeping, reading, or playing the guitar, are almost all bust-length, and are, ifanything, even more impenetrable than her subsequent Spanish Harlemwork. Even when she paints him as a menacing demon against a ƒery ground(ƒg. 74), José’s handsome, square-jawed features are impassive. In her extendedportraits, such as those of her daughter-in-law Nancy, she establishes a „exible,changing dynamic between herself and the sitter, choosing to emphasize oneaspect or another of their personality type as she sees it changing over time.With José, however, there are few cues to personality, no expression on theface, and no motion in the body. There are occasional clues to his nationalistpolitics: in one watercolor (1936, ƒg. 75) his sheet music is titled “Puerto RicoLibre!” so that one can assume he supported Congressman Marcantonio’s bill,submitted that year, calling for “genuine independence [for Puerto Rico andfor the declaration of] responsibility of the United States for the disastrous stateof the economy of Puerto Rico...” 18Yet whatever his politics, José is in and of another world; his features andguitar signify “Latinness” but little more. He remains remote and foreign;whether awake or asleep, his eyes are always downcast, and he is absorbed inhis own thoughts, dreams, or music. Together in bed, their two bodies formone contour on two different planes (Alice and José, c. 1938, ƒg. 76), which,despite their compositional union, is without physical contact or intimacy. Expressingdifference through the oppositions of light/dark, awake/asleep, fullface/proƒle, Neel avoids the cliché of exoticism while acknowledging that hisperson is ultimately unfathomable.José’s one identifying attribute, his guitar, remains an abstract sign, a broadgeneralization for Latin music (José and Guitar, 1935, ƒg. 77). Neel’s interestin Latin music was fostered while she was living in Havana, and her interpretationparallels instead that of the Puerto Rican writer Jesus Colón, whose collectionof Daily Worker columns, A Puerto Rican in New York, was publishedin 1961. Writing in the tradition of Gold and Bonosky, Colón’s essays are verbalportraits of his neigbors. One of these, “José,” is about a self-taught guitaristwho wrote songs based on music he heard as a child in Puerto Rico, and whoalso mastered Cuban, Argentinian, and Mexican music. José plays for familyand friends at home, leading Colon to wonder “how many Josés are lost in thebasements and top „oors of New York City, with nobody telling them theyhave talent...” 19 Neel’s painting is a monument to this as yet unheralded tradition,a signiƒcant “proletarian” art that remained an important part of herlife in Spanish Harlem. Like his literary counterpart, José sits in a culturallimbo.After Richard was born, Neel found herself abandoned once again, as José

El Barrio / 97dropped precipitously out of her life. During her Spanish Harlem years, whenshe was raising ƒrst Richard and then Hartley outside of the conventional bondsof marriage, it is hardly surprising that she would return to the subject of thefamily, which had preoccupied her during the years she bore her daughters.Neel’s situation, atypical for the white middle class, was the norm in her milieu.Many Hispanic families were matrifocal because that conƒguration providedmother and child with greater security. According to Oscar Lewis,Women felt that consensual union gives them a better break; it gives them some ofthe freedom and „exibility that men have. By not giving the fathers of their childrenlegal status as husbands, the women have a stronger claim on their children if theydecide to leave their men . . . [M]atrifocality, a high incidence of consensual unionsand a high percentage of households headed by women, which have been thoughtto be distinctive of Caribbean family organization or of Negro family life in theU.S.A., turn out to be traits of the culture of poverty . . . 20In her 1938 portrait of José’s brother Carlos’s wife Margarita, and their sonCarlitos, Neel presents the matrifocal family in terms of another period cliché:the tenement or peasant madonna, exempliƒed by Winhold Reiss’s The BrownMadonna, published in Locke’s New Negro (1925). Puerto Rican Mother andChild (Margarita and Carlitos) (1938, ƒg. 78) references that trope and the associationsof sentimentalized spirituality that serves to silence the social realityof raising children in poverty. As „attened as a Byzantine icon, Margarita hasthe tragic mien of the Virgin of Sorrows, but her distinctly undigniƒed crossedlegs, which form a hammock to support the child, suggest that she is veryyoung and quite awkward in her role. Once the false façade of idealization iscracked, its opposite can emerge. Does this woman-child, with her sexualizedinfant, refer instead to a dominant trope of Harlem Renaissance literature, thatof the tragic mulatta who is the silent bearer of racial impurity? 21 Neel digs tothe roots of period clichés and ƒnds fear of difference.Five years later, in The Spanish Family (1943, ƒg. 79), Margarita, now withthree children, is the stabilizing force for the infant on her lap and the jitterychildren at her side. Showing the family wedged together in front of the“Spanish” grillwork, a symbol of the “green poverty” they left behind, the compositionbrings to mind Dorothea Lange’s FSA photograph Migrant Mother(1936), the most frequently reproduced image from the Depression era. In theyear of the WPA’s demise, Neel repaints the subject in terms of ongoing urbanpoverty, which, with the war effort, was in danger of being ignored. Neel’s1940 portrait of Margarita’s husband in T. B. Harlem serves as an accompanimenthere: he is absent as a result of poverty-induced illness. However, thetheme of poverty is secondary to the stability provided by the centralized verti-

98 / Neel’s Social Realist Artcal of the now mature mother. In this painting, the matriarchal family, whilevulnerable, is presented as an alternative ideal to the dominant model.Yet, how fragile and unstable this family appears in constrast to the patriarchalfamily of the 1950s. Even though in the middle-class family the breadwinner/fatherwas absent for the better part of each day, he was always frontand center when the time came for a commissioned family portrait. The idealof the American postwar nuclear family is pictured, and punctured, in DanWeiner’s hilarious Morris Levinson, The President of Rival Dog Food and HisFamily Outside Their Home in Scarsdale (1955, ƒg. 80), where the husbandand wife are buttressed by their possessions, a son and a daughter at the frontand the façade of a palatial home to their rear. This is the façade, indeed, of theAmerican Dream as it was then conƒgured, one that required this adaptiveJewish family to masquerade in a Protestant colonial costume in selecting theirdomicile. The very stiffness of their poses betrays their game, but few viewers atthe time would have noticed that the façade depicted by Weiner was a false one.Black Spanish-American Family (1950, ƒg. 81), a woman and her daughters,dressed in proper middle-class attire, attempts the same masquerade with lesssuccess. The contrast of dark-skinned mother and light-skinned children demonstratesthe complex racial mixture that constitutes Hispanic culture. Thismixture appears odd initially, at least when the facial features are comparedwith the handsome regularity of the mother’s and children’s features in TheSpanish Family. In 1929, Neel had written a short story, “The Dark Picture ofthe Kallikaks,” that parodied current eugenic theories by casting the decadent“Nona” in the same role as Zola’s Nana—the corrupter of upper-class bloodlines.When Neel began her Spanish Harlem series, the theories of biologistCyril Burt enjoyed wide support. In The Backward Child (1937), Burt’s “scientiƒc”studies of the inherited intellectual inferiority of slum children ledhim so far as to connect IQ with physiognomy; the faces of slum children, hewrote, “are marked by developmental defects—by the round receding forehead,the protruding muzzle, the short and upturned nose, the thickened lips,which combine to give to the slum child’s proƒle a negroid or almost simianoutline . . . ‘Apes that are hardly anthropoid’ was the comment of one headmaster...”22Nazism had caused a precipitous decline in the prestige of the theories ofSir Cyril and an acceptance of the liberal humanist anthropology of Benedict.Yet, the belief in the inherited nature of intelligence and thus the intrinsic inferiorityof certain races continued to provide the “scientiƒc” rationale for segregationand denial of equal rights throughout the 1950s, just as such widespreadassumptions of inferiority colored the representations of “races” in massculture. Neel presents the viewer with Burt’s “simian” types in Black SpanishFamily, yet their composure and deportment forestall any racist conclusions

El Barrio / 99one might draw, following Burt, from their features. In playing with ratherthan into racial stereotypes, Neel disrupts ideas of biological inheritance basedon spurious concepts of racial purity. Is this matriarchal family of indeterminaterace—(“Most people in the world are in-betweens,” wrote Benedict andWeltƒsh)—in fact a more accurate representation of the norm, the vital center,in a heterogeneous nation?Neel’s repeated pairing of children in her Spanish Harlem portraits ledNeel not only to question dominant conceptions of class and race but to examinethe nature of childhood friendship in terms of the subtle power relationshipsbased on age, size, and personality type. In Richard and Hartley (1950,ƒg. 82), Hartley’s hand, placed protectively on his brother’s shoulder, suggestsaffection and concern; dependence on his elder brother is indicated by Hartley’splacement slightly behind Richard. Similarly, in Two Puerto Rican Boys(1956, ƒg. 83), the dominant-dependent relationship is explicitly cast in malefemaleterms: the doe-eyed boy sits deferentially behind his assertive, cowlickedfriend. And ƒnally, the more complex relations of teenagers who formincongruous and ultimately incompatible cliques is presented in the widelyvarying physiognomies of Three Puerto Rican Girls (1955, ƒg. 84), three youngwomen from the same roots who will branch off in different directions. Childrenbond by sex, girls with girls, boys with boys, and race is not a factor in determiningeither familial relations or friendships, at least as far as we can understandfrom these portraits. Her portrait of James Farmer’s Children (Tamiand Abbey Farmer, 1965, ƒg. 85) makes a more explicit political point: integrationis accomplished through intermarriage as well as through Farmer’s activism,and the result is neither the freakishness nor the homogenization fearedin turns at the time: each retains his or her unique “color” and personality.Neither innocent nor cute, Neel’s children are individuals as various as theshades of skin she records with such virtuosity, as polyglot as the community ofwhich they are a part. But Neel’s message is not the simplistic one of assimilationand inclusiveness—“The Family of Man” notion of the 1950s. If thewhite’s concept of selfhood is constructed in opposition to others who are different,then the grounds of identity are undercut when the other is “in-between”rather than within racial boundaries. Hence their power to disturb. Whiteviewers cannot look at the children and maintain the myth of racial purity.The minority response to the willed social myopia of whites, the “irreponsibility”claimed by Ellison, is found in Neel’s extended portrait of GeorgieArce, whom she painted between 1950 and 1959 as frequently as she paintedher own children. Arce thus becomes the paradigm of a Spanish Harlem childhood.Different characteristics dominate in each image, but Arce’s expression,with its combination of innocence and duplicity, remains constant despite thechanges in his appearance. In an early drawing from 1952 (ƒg. 86), Arce is

100 / Neel’s Social Realist Arttense and guarded, while in others he appears playful and relaxed. In a paintingdone at the same time, Arce smiles, but all playfulness is gone (ƒg. 87). Setagainst a pink ground, Arce’s skin takes on a sickly yellow pallor, and his knittedbrow and sad eyes reduce the smile to the ingratiating gesture of someonetrying to please. In a second painting from 1955 (ƒg. 88), the penknife withwhich he had cut a piece of wood or fruit in the early drawing has grown into acarving knife, and although it is only rubber, he is no longer playing but adoptingthe model of the gang member. However one may interpret his expressionsthroughout this series, in the context of Neel’s portraits of children, Arce literallystands apart, for he is always alone. His consistent isolation deƒnes himjust as the other children’s friendships deƒne them: he is antisocial. Arce’s threatmay be no more than a charade, but the white viewer is likely to read it as real.As Ruth Frankenberg has noted, this perceived threat inverts the institutionalizedrelations of racism, wherein minorites “actually have more to fear fromwhite people than vice versa.” 23 Neel’s painting makes us aware that this fear issocially constructed, as are the studied postures of aggressive self-conƒdenceArce adopts as a pitiful defense against institutionalized white power. 24Even if we do not know Georgie’s life story, we can with some conƒdencelocate its literary counterpart in Piri Thomas’s autobiography of growing up inSpanish Harlem, Down These Mean Streets (1967), which he wrote with theencouragement of the documentary ƒlmmaker Richard Leacock and thepainter Elaine de Kooning. Thomas’s vivid portrayal of a horriƒc childhood ofgang ƒghts, drugs, and thievery, leading inexorably to jail, is only hinted at inNeel’s portraits of Arce by the inclusion of the knives, but both boys are characterizedby anger and pain, disguised by bravado, which is their reponse to theirslum environment. Thomas’s use of vernacular speech captures in its rhythmand intonation the struggles with identity faced by the black Puerto Ricanwhose mother is white and whose siblings are light-skinned. At his brotherJosé’s insistence that “We’re Puerto Ricans, an’ we’re white,” Piri replies: “Say,José, didn’t you know the Negro made the scene in Puerto Rico way back? Andwhen the Spanish spics ran outta Indian coolies, they brought them big blacksfrom you know where. Poppa’s got moyeto blood . . . It’s a played-out lie aboutme—us—being white.” 25The Spanish Harlem portraits provide a picture of a vulnerable minoritypopulace of women and children. However, during the late 1950s, when Neelwas painting the decline of the Party through its aging leaders, she also paralleledher Spanish Harlem series with the emerging new radicals, the leaders ofblack culture. Whereas her earlier portrait of Alice Childress had exempliƒedthe alliance between communism and Negro civil rights, these later portraitsincluded authors who had defected from communism in order to assert an independentblack voice. The historian Mark Naison has argued that during and

El Barrio / 101shortly after the Depression the Party’s contributions to Negro theater and historymade the CPUSA “a major force in American society promoting systematiccultural interchange between whites and blacks and encouraging whitesto recognize the black contribution to the nation’s cultural heritage.” 26 In additionto her portrait of Childress, Neel’s portraits of a lithe, elegant, but namelessballet dancer (Ballet Dancer, 1950, ƒg. 89) and the young communistwriters Hubert Satterfield and Harold Cruse (c. 1950, ƒg. 90) are presented aspensive dreamers, involved with the creative life rather than the world of activism.By 1961, however, Cruse had become disaffected from communism and inThe Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, a text that anticipated much of the separatistlanguage of the Black Power movement, accused the CP of bad faith: “Inthe late 1940s and 1950s, the white political leftwing ran to Harlem in order toestablish a political hegemony over Negro art and artists—for the purposes ofdistorting and wielding both into programatic weapons.” 27 As a member of theCommittee for the Negro in the Arts (CNA), he formed a dissident group inthe late forties called the Harlem Writers Club, which protested the CP’s“unity theme” (Black and White Unite and Fight) and its “enforced interracialism.”28 Nothing in Neel’s portrait suggests the outrage behind Cruse’sshrill call for separatism, for it was not until the early 1960s that the civil rightsmovement had entered its new phase. By then, not only had “Negroes” assumedfull leadership of the movement, but the concept of Black Power, substitutingblack nationalism for integration, had begun to be formulated in thewritings of Malcolm X and Stokeley Carmichael. 29This seminal cultural moment is recorded in Neel’s portraits of JamesFarmer (1964, ƒg. 91) and Abdul Rahman (1964, ƒg. 92). Farmer, a founder ofthe Congress of Racial Equality, was program director of the NAACP at thetime of this sitting. Dressed in a business suit, he personiƒes the integrationistcivil rights leader of the 1950s, who, for all the suppressed anger and the resolveindicated by his pose, seeks equality through the existing legal systemrather than revolution. Rahman, bemused by his new identity as a Black Muslim,complete with hat and military jacket, seems pleased that his masquerademay cause others to be “frightened by these resplendent and angry new blacks,by turns hard edged and remorseless or smoothly self-delighting, all rage andassertion in public but sometimes twinkling with affability, even self-irony inprivate.” 30 Neel was forthright about her own reaction. “He is a different Negro.I have studies of the Negro people, like those little girls, being overpowered.This man is not frightened. He is a nationalist, a black nationalist, even thoughthere’s a certain hysteria about him...” 31Neel’s portraits of blacks from the late 1950s and early 1960s are vivid indicatorsof social change, and of the important contribution of black writers and

102 / Neel’s Social Realist Artartists to that change. Whereas Neel’s Spanish Harlem series serves to makevisible a marginalized group of predominantly Hispanic women and children,her portraits of black activists assert a confrontational presence. These are thenew revolutionaries, whose identity is no longer in question.Home-Based: Spanish Harlem as DomicileSocial realist tableaux, no matter how wrenching the subject, can suffer fromformulaic renderings of the downtrodden that elicit indifference rather thansympathy. One way out of this impasse was to empty the stage of its stock charactersand to use the city’s buildings as a metaphor for the life lived withinthem. To do this Neel appropriated the motif of the tenement, which predominatedin Depression-era art, and transformed it from a stage to a metaphor forcity life.Throughout modern art, the city has served as a metaphor for alienation,and Neel’s task was to ƒnd the means to restate that theme in terms of the experienceof tenement life in Spanish Harlem. When she began her career, thetheme of urban alienation in American art was “owned” by Edward Hopper,who forged a major career with his ƒnely tuned evocations of urban isolation,metamorphosing the period’s economic depression into a psychological state.Gaining from his study with Robert Henri an admiration for Manet and Degas,Hopper translated the French aristocratic, detached observation of urbanlife into the loneliness of the small-town boy in the big city.Neel especially admired Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning (1930, ƒg. 93),which was exhibited both in the Whitney Museum’s Annual and at Hopper’sone-person exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1933. As in many ofhis cityscapes, Hopper chose a long, horizontal canvas for this painting andstretched the architectural façades across its full breadth. The impenetrablewall with its repeated rectangular windows effectively squeezes out human access,for which the barber’s pole and ƒre hydrant substitute. Hopper’s use ofabstract architectural elements to convey the absence of human contact in thecity constitutes one of the more signiƒcant formal inventions in North Americanart between the wars, one that Neel adopted and reformulated.In 1933, the year Hopper’s work reached prominence, Neel was acceptedto the Public Works of Art Program and went to the Whitney Museum to register.When she returned to her apartment in Greenwich village, she paintedSnow on Cornelia Street (ƒg. 35), the ƒrst of her views from her apartment window.Initially, it looks like a pastiche of Hopper’s painting: here, too, the city isvacant and mute, its human voice sti„ed under blankets of snow, as well as bythe geometry of the blank windows with half-drawn shades. Yet, Neel has com-

El Barrio / 103pletely rethought Hopper’s pictorial structure. Hopper’s elongated horizontalformat erects a barrier that closes the viewer off from the city. Neel’s format, onthe contrary, is vertical, suggesting in its standing orientation a space one canstep into. Moreover, Neel’s bleak courtyard is organized by manageable transitionsbetween levels, multiple landing platforms of rooftops, ledges, and ƒreescapes that permit the viewer to mentally traverse the constricted spaces. Insteadof denying access, Neel creates a safe, if stark, enclosure, with an accessible,if narrow, way out. Hopper’s point of view is that of the „âneur, one whostrolls city spaces without connecting to them. By framing the scene as a viewfrom her window, she creates a space that is lived in rather than passed through.Thus, in the year she aligned herself with the new revolutionary painting, Neeltranslated Hopper’s personal vision into a budding social realist one.As Andrew Hemingway has demonstrated, Hopper’s art enjoyed its successbecause it lent itself to institutional and critical discourses of the period, whichdeƒned the virtues of painting in terms of individuality, honesty and direct engagementwith reality . . . Not only could Hopper’s work function as a sign of securelymasculinized art, but it could also function as a sign of a dominant white ethnicity . . .[the critics] found in the work of Hopper and the so-called “American tradition”conƒrmation of a particular American identity which effectively excluded NativeAmericans, African and Asian Americans and recent immigrants. 32Perhaps the most blatant example of this attempt to identify Hopper with awhite, male, Anglo-Saxon tradition is in Guy Pène du Bois’s 1931 monographon the artist, in which he claimed that Hopper “will be shown . . . without patiencefor trivialities . . . a male, if you like; certainly an anglo-Saxon.” 33 Apartfrom du Bois, Hopper’s strongest champion was Lloyd Goodrich at the WhitneyMuseum, an institution that, in the 1930s, favored a realist art that “wasunderstood as the American Renaissance . . . [I]ts exhibitions stood primarilyfor the conservative American Scene.” 34 For the Left, struggling with the issueof creating a proletarian art, Hopper’s work and “his avowed aim ‘to personalizethe drainpipe,’ . . . must have seemed singularly escapist . . . a rather nostalgicvision, which appealed to a particular bourgeois liberal faction ...” 35 ForMeyer Schapiro, in particular, du Bois’s essay would have provided an exampleof the proponents for the “American Scene,” who advocate “that the greatnational art can issue only from those who really belong to the nation, morespeciƒcally, to the Anglo-Saxon blood . . . [W]e must denounce appeals foran American art which identify the American with a speciƒc blood group orrace...” 36 Even after the war, Hopper’s insistence on painting as a record ofhis emotions without political content positioned his art as one of the few acceptablerealist alternatives to abstract expressionism during the 1950s as well;

104 / Neel’s Social Realist Artunlike the social realists, Hopper’s art did not decline but rather grew in reputationin the postwar years.In opposition to Hopper, Neel’s social realist cityscapes present a communalrather than a personal (male, Anglo-Saxon) vision. Hopper’s paintings inscribehis private feelings of alienation through the metaphor of the emptybuilding; Neel’s buildings stand for the experience of the poor urban populacegenerally. Until 1962, Neel’s residences were the ƒve-to-six-story apartmentblocks that were built at the turn of the century to accommodate the city’sswelling population. The view out her window re„ected her economic status:the constricted view corresponding to straightened economic circumstances.For Neel, as for Mike Gold in his 1919 manifesto, these conditions were theseed from which her proletarian art would grow: “When I hope it is the tenementhoping. I am not an individual; I am all that the tenement group pouredinto me during those early years of my spiritual travail.” 37 By isolating the tenementas emblematic of urban experience, Neel mapped out a unique territorywithin the varied terrain of the urban scene. Despite the intense fascinationNew York City has held for twentieth-century American artists, only Neel soconsistently pictured the experience of living in tenement housing, the city asdomicile.Neel’s unique point of view, her insistence on looking out through the eyesof the poor rather than looking in at them, resulted not only from the way inwhich her work was exhibited, but from her working conditions, for she neverhad the luxury of a studio separate from her home. For women, the domesticarena has been a place of unpaid work; in Engel’s terms, domestic slavery. Ifone’s studio is also one’s home, then the two roles—artist and domestic laborer—most at con„ict in any woman’s life must confront each other in any depictionof that space. Fire Escape (1946, ƒg. 94) visualizes that con„ict. Here, therepeated black lines, each with its taut stripe of snow, bring to mind the prisonof poverty that metaphorically bars one from exiting. Yet, as in Snow on CorneliaStreet, the measurable steps between different spatial registers provide away down/out, and, since they are covered with snow, an assured refuge fromƒre. The compression of the spatial coordinates—inside/outside, up/down—onto the painting’s surface creates a visual demand for a doubled reading, bothliteral and metaphorical. The metaphorical: “this is a prison”; the literal: “thisis a (ƒre) escape.” The tightly framed spaces are at once restrictive and protective,claustrophic and intimate, conƒning and liberating. The loneliness andisolation characteristic of Hopper’s cityscapes are given greater complexity inNeel’s reinterpretation, the freedom within strict conƒnes that is the experienceof the home-based woman artist.The view out the window characteristic of all of Neel’s cityscapes underscoresthe inhabitants’ limited mobility by obscuring both ground and sky,

El Barrio / 105both the building’s base (feet) and its cornice (head). The view through thewindow restricts the vista to the trunk of the building opposite, its torso. Again,the restriction that this motionless, delimited section suggests is at variancewith the work of other urban scene artists. For instance, most precisionist paintingand photography has the same bird’s-eye, free-ranging, panoramic viewpointfound in the commercial advertising of the day (ƒg. 95). In Advertisingand the American Dream, Roland Marchand singles out the view from theofƒce window as a central fantasy of capitalist realism:No advertising tableaux of the 1920s assumed so stereotyped a pattern as those ofthe typical man—Mr. Consumer—at work . . . As the “master of all he surveys,”that epitome of the American Man, the business executive, commanded an unobstructedview . . . in the advertising tableau, women never gained the opportunity tolook down with that magisterial sense of domain, control, and prospects for the futurethat the “typical” man obtained from his ofƒce window. 38The sociologist Raymond Ledrut, in his essay “Speech and the Silence of theCity” has argued that this “magisterial sense of domain” is the ideal point ofview of capitalism itself:The great capital or the State reveal themselves in glass and steel, verticality andright angles adapted to the spirit of the ofƒce, the world of business or administration,which asserts itself thus as a power transcending the life of the citizens. Historicalaction eludes cities and their inhabitants. It is concentrated in high places, in asphere of social space supreme and detached from local life. 39If the phallic skyscraper is the domain of the powerful male (either artist or executive),the tenement, as represented by Neel, is the realm of the powerless.Neel’s torso/façades, although “female” in their constriction, are not obvioussexual symbols; nonetheless, the metaphor of the house as a female body has awider currency than simple Freudian symbolism. Neel defantasizes the femalebody/house by making it erect. In her masterpiece, Rag in Window (1959, ƒg.96), the skin of the building is stained and spotted, its surface, like Carlos’s brokenbody, a visual record of the indignities it has suffered. The gray, torn, windblownrag, the tenement’s “hair,” was for Neel a metaphor for the twentiethcentury and speaks of suffering and vulnerability rather than eroticism. Notthe male child’s fantasies, but the process of aging in the female adult, and themarks left by the struggle to survive, are inscribed for public view.In its social commentary, Neel’s Rag in Window parallels the opening photographof Robert Frank’s The Americans (1959), the in„uential work of personaldocumentary that was published the year the two worked together on

106 / Neel’s Social Realist ArtPull My Daisy. As in Neel’s Fire Escape, the image and the title of Frank’s Parade,Hoboken, New Jersey (1955–1956, ƒg. 97) are contradictory. A parade is a“formal, public procession,” but the image shows two female torsos imprisonedwithin the windows in the apartment’s brick wall. In both artists’ works,the analogy between the cropped, featureless façade and the constricted, isolatedlives of its occupants provides a critique of our culture’s ideology of freedomand social mobility, asking: “freedom for whom?” Because in a capitalistsociety the space of the home is walled off from the workings of the economy,poverty and women frequently occupy the same location. Neel’s cityscapesimply what Frank’s make explicit by con„ating the boundaries of income line,gender, and social status into one line of vision. Given any one of these positions,this is what you see.Rather than providing a document of the changing face of New York Cityduring the twentieth century, Neel demonstrated that for speciƒc groups theliving conditions of the city remained unchanged: cramped, deteriorating quartersserving as shelter and little more. Neel’s railroad apartment in Harlem, aproduct of urban planning in the 1880s, may have given way to the urban renewalhigh rises, those Corbusian nightmares of the 1950s, and the boundariesof slum districts may have shifted, but from the point of view of povertythe perspective of New York was unvarying. Neel refused to acknowledge thespace of power, the space of precisionist and advertising art. Concentrating insteadon the social body symbolized by the tenement torso and immobilizedbeneath “the great capital,” she mapped the mental geography of tenement life.Neel’s strategy, then, was to take the tradition of American realist painting,and in particular contemporary American Scene painting, and to redeƒne it inMarxist terms. Despite the conscious effort of left-wing artists in the 1930s tofollow Moscow’s directives, Neel did not attempt to import a revolutionarystyle but to revolutionize the style of the status quo. This was the only reasonablecourse, as Charmion von Wiegand discovered when she was Moscow correspondentfor the New Masses. The Soviet authorities there criticized her cityscapesbecause they were unwilling to entertain the notion that socialist realismcould omit the human ƒgure. 40Fire Escape and Rag in Window were painted from apartments on East 107thand 108th Streets respectively in Spanish Harlem. The static spaces of culturalpoverty these paintings represent are not unrelieved by joy, however. The “humanwarmth” Neel admired there colors the façades in Sunset in SpanishHarlem (1958, ƒg. 98), in which the red and coral of the evening sky are siphonedoff to give a cosmetic lift to the greyed faces of the tenements. Shiftedto a diagonal rather than a frontal position, the building on the right providesan opening that leads the eye to the vista of the sky. In 1958, Neel’s own posi-

El Barrio / 107tion was shifting, and she began to move artistically from the community ofSpanish Harlem to the New York art network.In 1962, Neel moved to a more middle-class neighborhood on West 107thStreet and Broadway near Columbia University. Her view out the window nowpermitted a wider vista, and her cityscapes began to include the street life thatshe had until then treated as a separate subject. In the Death and Life of theGreat American Cities (1961), the sociologist Jane Jacobs observed that at thistime the neighborhood around Neel’s apartment on the Upper West Side wasa prime example of the kind of diversity of architectural functions and populationsshe argued were essential to civic health.People’s love of watching activity and other people is constantly evident in citieseverywhere. This trait reaches an almost ludicrous extreme on upper Broadway inNew York, where the street is divided by a narrow central mall, right in the middleof trafƒc . . . [O]n any day when the weather is even barely tolerable these benchesare ƒlled with people for block after block . . . Eventually Broadway reachesColumbia University and Barnard College . . . Here all is obvious order and quiet.No more stores, no more activity generated by the stores, almost no more pedestrianscrossing—and no more watchers. 41For Jacobs, it was the “watchers,” both on the streets and in their apartments,who through their informal monitoring discouraged crime and encouraged asense of community and neighborhood.The publication of Jacobs’s book coincided with Neel’s move to the WestSide. Although she may not have been aware of Jacobs’s argument that thesafety of the sidewalks—secured not by the law but by the inhabitants—is onekey to a habitable city, nonetheless, in the 1960s her cityscapes do broaden outfrom the constricted lives of the poor to include the interaction of various economiclevels and occupations. In an interview from 1980, Neel described herselfas a watcher, although what catches her eye remains the life of the disadvantaged:I really live out my front room windows, which face up Broadway from 107thStreet. It’s like having a street in your living room . . . Since I’ve always been claustrophobic,it is a great escape for me not to feel shut up in a room. From my West EndAvenue window I can see Strauss Park, shaped like a violin with a fountain, andgingko trees. There is one man, a bum, who is there every morning . . . Then hegoes and sits on a stone bench on the Broadway center strip and nurses [his beer]the way the rest of us nurse our breakfast coffee . . . The center strip is like his livingroom. 42

108 / Neel’s Social Realist ArtWhen Neel painted her view of Strauss Park she avoided slumming: the bumand his beer are not included. In Snow (1967, ƒg. 99), a large, unin„ected greyground conveys the dead light of midwinter, but the lea„ess branches of thetree outside Neel’s window seem to reach with all the kinetic energy of aKabuki dancer for the linear tracery of the park’s gingko trees. Even under theconstriction of the snow, the paint seems to rise through the vertically multiplyingelements like blood through capillaries. Life, in muted form, still persists,and in a less tenuous form than that symbolized by the tattered rag hangingfrom the window of the East Side tenement.The greater size and charm of the later cityscapes thus modulates their keyand, with it, their associations to class. Neel’s 107th and Broadway (1976, ƒg.100) is indebted to Hopper not simply in style but now in content as well. Theshadow of death passes across the façade, slowly obliterating the brightness ofa summer afternoon. However, the deliberate fusion of interior and exterior,self and nonself that Neel created in Fire Escape is split apart in the later work,where the building is given a uniƒed volume onto which the shadow is cast.“That was Death, of course, creeping over here,” Neel told Hills, and Neel’smortality may well have been uppermost in her mind, as she had recently hada pacemaker installed. As Hopper does in his work, Neel projects her personalanxieties onto the building in a direct analogy lacking the complex social commentaryof her earlier tenement façades, where interior and exterior are laminated,one to the other.As Raymond Williams has observed, the City of Strangers that became emblematicof modernism has now been absorbed into mass culture, and the“isolated, estranged images of alienation and loss . . . have become the easyiconography of the commercials.” 43 Neel’s cityscapes from 1930 to 1960 exemplifythose exceptional works within the modernist tradition that replacethe alienated “I” with the disenfranchised “we,” suggesting that the boundariesof identity can only be established when crossed. By using the tenementfaçade to join the social body with its social space, creating a meeting groundof exterior and interior, Neel reconƒgured the spaces of modernism into acommunal art.

Part IIIThe New York Art Network: 1960–1980

7A Gallery of Players:Artist-Critic-DealerWhen compiling her proletarian portrait gallery during the 1930s to 1950s,Neel included many writers but relatively few visual artists. After 1960, heroutput is divided between family portraits and portraits of members of the NewYork artworld, the artist-critic-dealer system. This shift in emphasis from amarginal group of writers to mainstream visual artists acknowledges the greatervisibility of ƒne artists within American culture in general after World War II.Although Neel had painted the occasional critic or dealer prior to 1960, for instance,Rose Fried, the director of the Pinocatheca gallery in 1939, or the criticDore Ashton in 1952, these portraits were exceptions rather than a continuingthematic. After World War II, the country’s prosperity and status as a worldpower provided a base for the exponential growth of art institutions and for anexpanding artworld that was able at last to encompass Neel.The years 1958–1962 were thus a period of transition for Neel artisticallyand personally. She actively sought venues for the exhibition of her work. Atthe same time, she began to broaden her artistic allegiances. She had been attendingFriday evening panel discussions at the Club (Eighth Street Club orArtists Club) at 39 East Eighth Street for the previous ƒve years or so in order tokeep “current.” Founded in 1949 by Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, AdReinhardt, Jack Tworkov, and Milton Resnik, the Club was the focal point of111

112 / The New York Art Networkthe New York avant-garde during the early 1950s. At that time, the Club’s membersincluded Alfred Leslie, Larry Rivers, Grace Hartigan, and Joan Mitchell. 1By 1954, when Neel was attending, many of these second-generation artistshad turned to the ƒgure while painting in a gestural manner. Neel’s style wasdirectly affected by the Club’s artists. By 1958, her loose, open facture and painterlysurfaces re„ect her renewed interest in European expressionists like Kokoschkaunder the in„uence of the second-generation abstract expressionists.In 1962, the year Neel ƒrst gained recognition, and Pop Art emerged on thescene, the artworld began its period of rapid expansion. Just as in the 1950s and1960s she had adopted an abstract expressionist facture, so in the 1970s, herpainting became larger and brighter under the in„uence of pop art and thenew realism. In turn, our culture’s image of the artist shifted from that of therebel and loner to the artist as a personality or celebrity. Neel charted thischange in her portraits of Frank O’Hara (1960) and Andy Warhol (1970), twoimportant paintings from her artworld gallery. This new “wing” includes aswell the new generation of femininist artists and critics, who will be discussedin a separate section because of their importance to Neel’s career. In her portrayalsof both male and female artworld ƒgures Neel addresses entrenchednegative stereotypes about artists’ sexuality. After 1969, what had been an acknowledgedbut unmentioned fact became an important topic in contemporaryart and criticism, and Neel, whose sympathies for gay men had been partof her sympathies for oppressed persons in general, explored the changingconƒgurations of professional and sexual identity in her sitters.The transition from the “Proletarian Portrait Gallery” to the “New York ArtNetwork” is exempliƒed by Neel’s participation in the underground ƒlm PullMy Daisy (1959–1960). Although Neel was not part of the ofƒcial membership,the Club provided the connection with the artists involved in the ƒlm.Produced and directed by the photographer Robert Frank and the painter AlfredLeslie and narrated by Jack Kerouac, the short ƒlm’s raw, improvised formis modeled on beat poetry and abstract expressionist painting. Neel was recruitedto play the mother of the priest whom the poets and artists—GregoryCorso, Allen Ginsberg, and Larry Rivers—make the focus of extended mockery.A portly ƒfty-nine, she was perfect for the role, and undoubtedly she enjoyedworking with the members of the new bohemia that had transformedAmerican art of the 1950s (ƒg. 101). Frank and Leslie also asked her to submita statement to their “beat” review, “The Hasty Papers.” In it, Neel made explicitthe connection in her own mind between the old and the new generation,and also ƒrst characterized her project as Balzacian: “I decided to paint ahuman comedy—such as Balzac had done in literature. In the 30’s I paintedthe beat of those days—Joe Gould, Sam Putnam, Ken Fearing, etc.” 2Pull My Daisy has a sort of innocence and spontaneity about it that would

A Gallery of Players / 113be lost as the expanding artworld became an increasingly commercial enterpriseduring the 1960s. As sociologist Diana Crane has documented, “thenumber of galleries handling twentieth-century American art was more thanthree times as great in 1977 as in 1949. 3 After a hiatus of nearly a decade fromher ACA gallery exhibition in 1954, Neel was signed on by the Graham galleryin 1963, shortly after the ƒrst important article on Neel appeared in ARTnews.She exhibited there regularly until 1980, and the consistent exposure resultedin ongoing reviews in major publications and increasing critical recognition.In 1982, shortly before her death, she left Graham for the Robert Miller gallery,where her fellow modernist foremothers Joan Mitchell and Louise Bourgeoisalso exhibited.During these years, as her reputation grew, Neel also beneƒted from showingin cooperative women’s galleries and from articles published by feministcritics, a factor crucial to the careers of many female artists. For as LawrenceAlloway noted in his essay “Women’s Art in the Seventies”:Women’s art in the 1970s emerged in a form unlike that taken by earlier art movements. . . Group shows and co-operative galleries have established the ƒrst publicphase of women’s art . . . It is a measure of the radical social base of women’s artthat it should require changes in the distribution system. 4Apart from the sheer growth charted by Crane, the very structure of the artscene underwent reorganization. Again Alloway provided an analysis of thisshift in Network: Art in the Complex Present:art is now part of a communications network of great efƒciency. As its capacity hasincreased a progressive role-blurring has taken place . . . Critics serve as guest curatorsand curators write art criticism . . . All of us are looped together in a new andunsettling connectivity. 5Neel’s “one plus one” method would seem to be inadequate to depict this “newand unsettling connectivity,” and she did express regret to Henry Geldzahlerthat she had not produced group portraits. Yet, as with the proletarian portraitgallery, the sum of the individual portraits constitutes a representative portraitof the network, the changes in dress and pose indicating the transition fromthe 1960s to the 1970s, from bohemian to business or celebrity artist. In eachcase she documents the psychological costs of an artistic career in New York’sincreasingly competitive artworld with a clarity that cuts through the romantichaze that still surrounded the modern artist.Neel’s artworld portraits, so lacking in the idealized image of the artist familiarfrom art photographs, appeared to some critics to be little more thansour grapes. Neel’s New York Art Network received its ƒrst critical assessment

114 / The New York Art Networkat the time of her Whitney Museum mini-retrospective in 1974. The exhibitincluded her portraits of Red Grooms and Mimi Gross, Peter Homitzky, AndyWarhol, David Bourdon and Gregory Battcock, The Family (John Gruen, JaneWilson and Julia), Duane Hanson, and John Perreault. Reviewing it for theNew York Post, Emily Genauer ƒrst attributed Neel’s “venomous, sadistic laterpictures” to her personal bitterness: “I know the art world, and many of thosesitters, for all their hostilities ƒred by tough struggles, for all their arrogance,they’re not like this ...,” but in the end Genauer conceded that perhaps thecollective picture had validity, permitting her to see for the ƒrst time “the poisonthat lies just under the surface of creative life in New York...” 6The series begins in 1960 with two paintings depicting prominent membersof the New York School, the painters Milton Resnick and Pat Pasloff (ƒg.102), and the poet, critic, and Museum of Modern Art curator Frank O’Hara(Frank O’Hara, No. 2, ƒg. 103). Together the portraits illustrate “art in thecomplex present”: the artist-critic-dealer system. Although respected abstractpainters, Resnick and Pasloff are reduced to participants in a required publicritual, the gallery opening. No longer simply creators, they are ofƒcial greeters,looking like a Rabbi and his wife at a bar mitzvah. Nothing could better serveas a counterweight to the mythologizing of Namuth’s photographs of Pollockpainting than the all-over „ickering pattern of artworld ƒgures, including JoanMitchell, with which Neel surrounds the couple. The occasion is the openingat the Pace gallery of the abstract expressionist work of Pollock’s widow, LeeKrasner. But now, the kinetic energy of the abstract expressionist stroke hasbeen transformed into the crackling interchanges on the art network, and theartist from a producer to an automaton whose recognition rests on being seen,in the scene.Frank O’Hara, No.2 is the more ambitious work of the two in every sense ofthe word. Neel speciƒcally asked him to sit for her, no doubt hoping to interesthim in her work. Frank O’Hara was associated with the Club, and althoughthe exhibitions he organized at the Museum of Modern Art in the early 1960shelped to canonize the ƒrst generation of Abstract Expressionists—Motherwell,Kline, David Smith—O’Hara also wrote sympathetically about the newƒgurative artists, in particular Alex Katz and Larry Rivers. With the criticaldominance of abstract expressionism yielding to a more heterogeneous situation,both in the return of the ƒgure and with the neo-dadaism of Johns andRauschenberg, Neel may have sensed the importance of asking O’Hara topose. Although she was interested in his hawklike face, her request was also anacknowledgment of the practical exigency of cultivating friends in high placesif the importance of her work was to be recognized. Of course, what was a dramaticdeparture for Neel is now considered merely professional routine.O’Hara did not himself elect to write about or exhibit her work, but Lawrence

A Gallery of Players / 115Campbell’s review of Neel’s group exhibit at the ACA gallery in ARTnews inDecember 1960 was illustrated with the portrait. Frank O’Hara, No. 2 thusproved pivotal to her career.During the ƒrst of his two sittings, Neel painted O’Hara in proƒle with hisprominent hooked nose conveying a keen alertness. The second, and in herview deƒnitive, portrait pushes the stock expressionist motif of the torturedartist, which she ƒrst used with Sam Putnam, into a visualization of pure hysteria,a man in the throes of a nervous breakdown. His physical and psychologicaldissolution is as complete as that of the aspiring artist in the contemporaryRandall in Extremis (1960, ƒg. 104). The lower half of his angular body is dislocatedfrom the upper, his boneless hands hang limply, and a black gash of ashadow cuts a deep trough in the side of his torso. The focal point of the painting,the garishly lit head itself, is a skull with tombstone-like teeth and a rectangularear protruding like a red „ag from the side of his face. Perhaps Neel wasaware of the poet’s alcoholism and his conviction that he would not live past40, 7 for she also roughed-in a still life of dead lilacs at the artist’s side. Perchedon the triangular point of the chair seat, he is less a man creatively inspiredthan one living on the edge. In reviving and reinterpreting the legacy of workssuch as Kokoschka’s Father Hirsh (1907), Neel creates a dramatic entrance intothe gestural-realist school and initiates the new direction of her portrait gallery.In May 1962 the Museum of Modern Art would validate the renewed interestin ƒguration that had been gathering momentum over the previous decadewith the exhibition “Recent Painting USA: The Figure.” As would become thenorm in the future, the exhibit at the prestigious MoMA generated satelliteshows—at the Kornblee and the Hirschl & Adler galleries and at the FinchCollege Museum. Neel’s Milton Resnick and Pat Pasloff was included in theKornblee exhibit, which was accompanied by a short catalog by Newsweekcritic Jack Kroll. However, the network’s cooperative venture did not coalescein a new movement that could generate its own critical literature. As ValeriePeterson pointed out in her ARTnews review of these exhibits, “A coherence isbeing enforced where none naturally forms...” 8 Nonetheless, just as the Clubhad granted permission, in a way, for each of the gestural realists to ignore theorthodoxy of abstraction and to pursue their own investigation of the ƒgure, sothe Museum of Modern Art’s “Recent Painting USA” and satellite exhibits legitimatedthat activity.That summer, Neel would enjoy a retrospective exhibition organized atReed College in Oregon by the painter-critic Hubert Crehan. Shortly thereafter,Crehan’s article, “Introducing the Portraits of Alice Neel,” the ƒrst featurearticle to be published in a national magazine, appeared in the October1962 ARTnews. With her portrait of Hubert Crehan (ƒg. 105), Neel visualizesthe “beat” artist archetype, the contentious, rumpled intellectual. Whereas

116 / The New York Art NetworkO’Hara is angular and nervous, the heavy-jowled Crehan appears stolid,squared-off, holding his position. However, he is not as steady as he seems: hiseyes rendered glazed and unfocused by his glasses, his artist’s beret like theproverbial hangover’s icebag, Crehan is the thinker as macho-drinker. Crehan’sprizeƒghter image is an appropriate one, for indeed he went to the matfor her. In his article, Crehan provided biographies of many of her sitters andinsisted that “There is a place for this work. It is an achievement of portraiturein our time and I have no doubt that it will come to be recognized for its rightfulvalue.” 9 When Neel’s show opened at the Graham gallery in October1963, K.L. (Kim Levin) provided further support in her ARTnews review, statingthat this ƒrst New York show in over ten years was “long overdue,” and thatNeel’s work had “the stunning honesty of a Cassandra.” 10As critical recognition began to generate some buyers, Neel painted her patronsas well: Stewart Mott, whose portrait Thomas Hess and Harold Rosenberghad selected to receive the Longview Foundation prize in 1962; ArthurBullowa, lawyer and collector of both American painting and pre-Columbianart (1967); and Walter Gutman, a Wall Street writer (1965, ƒg. 106). Each exudesa conƒdence, even self-satisfaction, lacking in the critics. Of the three,the porcine Gutman is the least elegant-looking. The art patron whose ƒctionalcorporation “g-string enterprises” ƒnanced Pull My Daisy, Gutman isthe image of the self-made-man/art-collector, a Joseph H. Hirshhorn type. Asan art critic in the 1930s, he had the distinction of writing the only negative reviewof Ben Shahn’s Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti series at the Downtowngallery. 11 By the 1960s, he was a wealthy collector. Earthy and unpretentious,Gutman’s portrait suggests that his interest in art had little to do with careerismor social status. He is the relic of a different era.Even though Neel never made group portraits, she did paint artist couples,whose relationships symbolized the complex interconnections of the network.Red Grooms and Mimi Gross, No. 2 (1967, ƒg. 107) exemplify the two-careercouple under strain in the competitive New York market. The assemblage artist,Grooms, and the painter-poet, Mimi Gross, are linked by Grooms’s padlocklikegrip, but by nothing else. Like the later portrait of Benny and Mary EllenAndrews, they are visual opposites, almost Wolf„inian in their contrasts ofpainterly vs. linear, open vs. closed form that oppose not only their personalitiesbut their art. In coloration and eager stance, Grooms is a golden retriever,his orange tie a panting tongue, whereas Gross’s red shirt, which matchesGrooms’s, only points up the coldness of her grey-black hair, white face, andicy boots.On the other hand, The Family (John Gruen, Jane Wilson, and Julia) (1970,ƒg. 108) represents the quintessential artworld establishment team. Gruen, anart critic for the New York Herald Tribune in the 1960s, had written an article

A Gallery of Players / 117on Neel’s 1966 Graham gallery exhibit that was destined to become the mostquoted of her reviews. Entitled “Collector of Souls,” 12 Gruen’s narrative ofNeel’s life from her childhood “in a very puritanical town in Pennsylvania” toher current “underground reputation among whole streams of artists and intellectuals,”provided the outline for the majority of the reviews that would follow,and the sobriquet “Collector of Souls” adhered for the remainder of hercareer.Gruen and his wife, the painter Jane Wilson, were prominent hosts to theNew York artworld throughout the 1950s, and their parties helped forge alliancesand create a sense of group cohesion vital to the strength of the network.Appropriately, then, Neel presents Gruen as the center of a sophisticatedfamily. John and Jane’s casual elegance is as planned and as calculated as thelook on Jane’s face, which both welcomes and sizes up the viewer. So imposingare the adults that the wai„ike ƒgure of their daughter Julia seems suspendedin midair like an afterthought. The couple’s true family, one mightsurmise, was the artworld, and their conspicuous, “dancing” patent leathershoes attest to its glamor, as well as underscoring the increasing connection betweenart and fashion.At the time of the portrait, Gruen had just completed his personal reminiscenceof the ƒfties artworld, The Party’s Over Now (1970). This autobiographyconsists of a series of portraits of the New York artists he befriended at thattime: among them, Virgil Thomson and Frank O’Hara were also painted byNeel. The verbal and visual descriptions of artworld luminaries show strongparallels: Gruen’s description of Thomson’s anti-Semitism could have comeout of one of Neel’s lectures: “In his cups Virgil would expound on the ‘JewishMaƒa,’ and how it was keeping him from being one of the most performedcomposers of the day...” 13 Both Gruen and Neel were willing to speak in publicthe common language of circulating gossip that „ows beneath the system,refusing to dismiss an underground communication pipeline that so decisivelycolors subsequent historical interpretation.Another contribution of Gruen’s book was a frank discussion of the homosexualitythat was an accepted part of the art scene in the 1950s. Its publicationin 1970 established both O’Hara’s poetry and Rivers’s painting as importantprecedents for the emergence of an openly gay art in Warhol’s work of the1960s. Gruen’s book, which links O’Hara to Rivers, in turn provides anotherposition from which to view Neel’s earlier links to O’Hara, Rivers, and the“beat” culture of the 1950s. Neel’s insistence on including in her portraitgallery gay men, a group as invisible as blacks and as despised as communists,was part of her mission to write the truth of society as she saw it. She no doubtwas drawn to the gay subculture because of its unacknowledged role in NewYork’s cultural life.

118 / The New York Art NetworkNeel was not alone in addressing the subject. Elaine de Kooning’s paintingThe Silent Ones (c. 1960), for instance, which was included in the “RecentPainting USA: The Figure” exhibit, depicts an interracial gay couple and obscurestheir faces to point to society’s refusal to acknowledge their bond. LarryRivers’s paintings provide another, more important example. When Neelpainted her portrait of O’Hara, it is doubtful she could have known, much lessimitated, the celebratory homoeroticism of Rivers’s stunning, oversized, standingportrait of O’Hara, arms pressed provocatively behind his head and dressedonly in combat boots (O’Hara, c. 1954, ƒg. 109). Neel’s painting provides nodirect cues to O’Hara’s sexual orientation. Nonetheless in their work bothartists addressed the issue of homosexuality as it relates to the artworld, if fromquite different points of view. Like Neel, Rivers conceived of his art as a formof history stripped of hypocrisy and true to the facts. 14Neel’s portraits of the gay subculture began when she was living in GreenwichVillage. Her ƒrst “gay” portrait, a quadruple image of the critic ChristopherLazare (1932, ƒg. 110) evidences strong visual parallels with Demuth’slast, and for the ƒrst time explicitly homosexual, illustration for Robert Mc-Almon’s Distinguished Air (1930, ƒg. 111). Neel may well have seen the watercolorat Demuth’s exhibition at the Anderson Galleries in 1931. Lazare’s fulllengthƒgure looks like Demuth’s top-hatted fop, turned to face us. Even theimaginative device of having a penis “explode” from Lazare’s head in the proƒleportrait might have been inspired by the phallic projection of Brancusi’s“Princess X” from the fop’s hat.The ƒrst of her “intellectual homosexuals,” Neel’s Lazare, is based on acommonly held social stereotype from the 1920s, whose characteristics rangefrom pose and dress, on the one hand, to the evidence of a sadomasochisticlife-style behind the elegant exterior, on the other. As Jonathan Weinbergpoints out in his study of homosexuality in the early American avant-garde,Speaking for Vice, such overt posturing, as exempliƒed by the prevalence ofdrag balls, was tolerated for the very reason that it conƒrmed stereotypes and“kept difference in its place.” 15By the 1950s, when the gay artist had been forced into the closet, Neel portraitsof gay men were no longer so clearly typecast. Abandoning stereotype forsuggestion, Neel paints homosexuality as one attribute among others, signalednot by physical type but by varying demeanors. As a heterosexual woman, sheemphasized the psychological con„icts and social ostracism these men endured.In the quiet angst of Paul Kuyer (1959, ƒg. 112), the question of sexualorientation cannot be avoided and yet cannot be conƒrmed. At the time theeditor of The Leader, a civil service magazine, Kuyer would later become thedirector of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. According to Ann SutherlandHarris, Kuyer, one of ten children in a poor family, told Neel that he had con-

A Gallery of Players / 119sidered becoming a priest. 16 Neel painted him that way, with a monkish Nehrujacket and gentle, thoughtful gaze. Neel bifurcates the ƒgure, beginning withthe deep shadow that divides his face and continuing via the uninterruptedline drawn down the center of the torso, a compositional duality that establishesthe possibility of a double life. Kuyer’s stability is not internal but willedby the gesture of his hands ƒrmly pressed into his lap. No doubt, for Neel, gaymen in the 1950s, forced to deny their sexuality in order to protect their jobs,were like priests. 17 As a bisexual man, Rivers could paint an underground workof overt homoeroticism during the 1950s, whereas Neel, as a friend of gayartists in many ƒelds, painted what she knew of the struggles they faced in tryingto “pass.”Although Neel’s support of the artworld’s homosexual subculture was clearlylinked to her politics, her position put her in con„ict with the stance of theCPUSA. In his important study Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities (1983),John D’Emilio documents the link between anticommunism and the persecutionof homosexuals by the U.S. government during the McCarthy era.As the anti-communist wave in American politics rose, it carried homosexuals withit. Gay men and women became the targets of a verbal assault that quickly escalatedinto policy and practice . . . Thus the senators’ information culled from the Kinseystudy of the American male . . . [was used] in order to argue that the problemwas far more extensive and difƒcult to attack than they had previously thought. 18In the U.S.S.R., meanwhile, Stalin was as active in persecuting homosexualsas the government of the United States, and according to D’Emilio, “the attitudeof the [American] Commmunist Party toward homosexuality was re-„ected mostly by its silence. Standard histories of the party in the 1930s and1940s give it no mention at all.” 19 For Neel, retaining her allegiance to theCPUSA throughout the 1950s but also maintaining her personal interest inthe plight of the homosexual minority, the Party’s refusal to champion homosexualityas a civil rights issue as they had the blacks must have seemed hypocritical.20In her portrait of the boyish Henry Geldzahler (1967, ƒg. 113) Neel mayhave used coded cues to his sexual orientation. Henry’s pinky appears painfullywrenched from its nearly boneless fellow digits by a huge ring, a likely referenceto his sexuality since “wearing a little ƒnger ring, especially on the lefthand, is a common way of indicating Gayness to other members of the secretor semisecret Gay underground in America.” 21 In this case the cue would behard to miss.At the time Geldzahler agreed to pose, he had just been appointed curatorof the newly created Department of Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan

120 / The New York Art NetworkMuseum. A ubiquitous ƒgure on the art scene, he was the frequent subject ofartists’ portraits. Yet, Neel’s portrayal of the gregarious, hyperkenetic Geldzahlerlooks less like a powerful, sophisticated curator than a bad boy of the artworld.Glasses askew, nostrils distended, mouth drawn down, one hand clutchingthe back of his chair as if to steady himself, Geldzahler displays the revulsionsome gay men feel in the presence of women.Geldzahler’s career would reach its zenith with the exhibit “New YorkPainting and Sculpture, 1940–1970” (October 18–February 1, 1970), whichhe organized to inaugurate the Metropolitan’s centennial year. The lack ofdignity accorded a man of Geldzahler’s in„uence and position is at ƒrst surprising,but as artworld “gossip” Neel’s portrait is „attering by comparison withWarhol’s confession to Emile De Antonio that he never went into the galleriesat the opening of the Metropolitan exhibition. “I just pretended to be Mrs.Geldzahler and invited everybody in.” 22 In one brief aperçu, he “outed” Henryand reduced the exhibition to the status of a cocktail party. With less ironythan outrage, Thomas Hess described “Henry’s show” as follows:The Metropolitan’s version of the New York School plunks you right down into thelush 1960s and leaves you there. The sunlight is ƒlled with money . . . And the senseof history is lost beneath layers of charm . . . The horrible conditions under whichthe New York painters worked in the 1940s with real poverty . . . has been replacedby the problems of af„uence, which are just as bad. 23Perhaps Neel’s depiction of Geldzahler personiƒes her own revulsion at theincreasing commercialization and juvenility of the artworld in the 1960s. Or,perhaps she was simply remarking upon the defensiveness of a curator who isanticipating a request for an exhibition. According to her account, Neel askedoutright to be included in “Henry’s Show.” “He looked straight into my eyesand answered, ‘Oh, so you want to be a professional?’” 24 In any event, the tworemained friends. 25In her most complex artworld portrait, Andy Warhol (1970, ƒg. 114), Neelsummarizes the decade’s major social and artistic trends, as did Warhol himself.The ƒrst and most striking, from the appearance of his torso, is the androgyne.The ideal of slimness and the unisex dressing of the later 1960s and early1970s permitted Neel to play with the blurring of boundaries between themasculine and the feminine as a metaphor for the era’s changing status ofwomen as well as for its questioning of the construction of sexuality. Neel’s androgyne,whether the “mannish” female or the “feminine” male, is not anideal type exemplifying what Andre Breton called “the unifying ƒgure in themale/female polarity” 26 in the ethereal realm of High Art. Instead, androgyny

A Gallery of Players / 121is a disruptive, destabilizing element, attaching itself like a hyphen to the sixtiesbohemian and the seventies celebrity alike, in effect, to split their rolesinto multiple trajectories along the network.In her “Notes on Camp” (1966), Susan Sontag named the androgyne as animportant indicator of the cultural sensibility of the 1960s: “The androgyne iscertainly one of the great images of Camp sensibility . . . Here, Camp tastedraws on a mostly unacknowledged truth of taste: the most reƒned form of sexualattractiveness . . . consists in going against the grain of one’s sex.” 27 In transformingthe tastes and attitudes of the nineteenth-century dandy from a hypersensitiveaesthete to a “connoisseur of Kitsch,” 28 the artist could maintain theaesthetic detachment considered a prerequisite for creative autonomy. Neel’sportraits present a sliding scale from the old aesthete to the new. WhereasDuane Hanson (1972, ƒg. 115), with his long, fur-collared frock coat and muttonchops, represents the continuation of the image of the dandy, Robbie Tillotson(1973, ƒg. 116), with his bouffant hair, décolleté shirt, and skirt-likepants, represents the androgyne.With her portrait of Warhol, Neel suggests that he is not merely androgynousbut a martyr to homophobia. His torso, with its softness and small, droopingbreasts, is also distorted and scarred, thus “baring” two misconceptionsabout homosexuals, ƒrst that they are effeminate, and second that their sexualorientation is a deviation from “natural” heterosexuality. Imposing on the portraita sympathy Warhol never sought, Neel makes the artist the victim of thealternative life-style he so visibly embraced.Perhaps Neel drew her image of sexual martyrdom from Jean Genet’s descriptionof the transvestite Divine, the protagonist of Our Lady of the Flowers,which she had read when it was published in an English translation in 1963:[with h]er pale celestial voice (a voice I would like to imagine being that of a movieactor’s, a voice of an image, a „at voice) . . . Divine retreats into her shell and regainsher inner heaven . . . She will go on living only to hasten toward Death . . . Now thatshe no longer has a body (or she has so little left, a little that is whitish, pale, bony,and at the same time very „abby,) she slips off to heaven. 29Warhol was the ƒrst of New York’s avant-garde artists to be openly gay inboth the subject matter of his art and in his appearance. 30 Neel’s portrait waspainted the year after Stonewall, the uprising in a Greenwich Village bar thatlaunched gay liberation in America, and the painting can be considered a declarationof the importance of Warhol’s personal contributions to that watershedevent. For before Warhol, the strong gay undercurrent within modernismin the visual arts, with notable exceptions such as Rivers, Francis Bacon, or

122 / The New York Art NetworkDavid Hockney, was closeted; afterward, gay artists granted themselves permissionto address homosexual subject matters openly in their work. 31 Accordingto the art historian Trevor Fairbrother,In the late 1950s, when Warhol was at the peak of his success as a commercialartist, homosexuals were an invisible minority in the larger world, yet tolerated as asub-group in a few professions—dance, theater, and the ƒne and applied arts . . .[however,] success rested on a foundation of conformity . . . Warhol did not denyhis sexuality in his daily routine, nor did he repress it in his art. 32Such openness was threatening to some gay artists, who feared “that their carefullycarved-out niches would be endangered as soon as someone publicly portrayedand celebrated their lifestyle...” 33 Obviously, Warhol’s actual woundsdid not result from his gay lifestyle, but Neel’s metaphor rings true.Yet Warhol is in a state of suspended animation that suggests that his time,the pop art sixties, had passed. Calvin Tomkins, writing in 1970, provided aparallel description:Andy has been ripped from grace, shot twice in the stomach by a madwoman whomistook him for a God . . . his life nearly extinguished and still not wholly restored tohim . . . Afterwards, he would say that . . . he could not be sure whether he was aliveor dead. Nor can we. Andy kept his cool, but things are not the same . . . Will hisface inhabit the Seventies as it has the Sixties? . . . Andy, in what one fervently hopesis just another put-on, begins to look more and more like the angel of death. 34Undeterred by Warhol’s postmodernist feint, Neel stripped away his carefullyconstructed shell to reveal a suffering modernist artist who was the victim ofhis own success. From the waist up, Warhol is a St. Sebastian whose woundsdisplay the suffering his “cool” self-portraits belie. From the waist down, he is adandy in designer clothes. Is this disjunctive portrait the result of a surrealistgame of Corps Exquis? With his ashen face and hands, Andy is an exquisitecorpse, recently resurrected from the dead and „oating in a sky-blue surround.The famously vacant eyes ƒrmly shut, Andy has seemingly renounced theworld (and the arrows aimed at him), even as his shiny shoes tie him to it. Byrevealing the Catholic Warhol, divided between his religious background andhis earthly desires, 35 Neel presaged in an uncanny way the motifs of Warhol’slate paintings. Neel believed that “the same things are involved in art as are involvedin religion. For one thing this willingness to sacriƒce for it, to give otherthings up for it ...” 36 As a camp-dandy who had publicly renounced all personalfeeling, Neel made Warhol appear to have made the ultimate sacriƒcefor his art. 37

A Gallery of Players / 123Neel’s courage in painting a portrait of the man whose postmodernism hadexposed the rapidly eroding base of realist-expressionist art was impressive. IfNeel assumed that her portraits could strip her sitters of their shells to revealtheir inner self, Warhol, felling the traditions of modernist portraiture and artphotography in a single blow, insisted, “If you want to know about AndyWarhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and ƒlms and me, and there Iam. There’s nothing behind it.” 38 Yet Warhol’s own deadpan visage has beenread with some justiƒcation as a strategy for protecting the self in an age ofmass communication, and Neel elected to depict Andy in that light. Neel wasas yet unwilling to admit that the postcapitalist era required some visual acknowledgmentif art was to remain a form of history, and so she had little sympathyfor his art. To her, Warhol was “the greatest advertiser living, not a greatportrait painter.” 39 I would argue that by publicly courting wealthy patrons,Warhol called attention to the fact that the artist was as constricted under latecapitalism as under communism. 40 Warhol did not sell out, any more thanNeel did, even though both enjoyed the notoriety and ƒnancial rewards thatdeƒned artistic success during the boom years.Neel’s friendship with Warhol also provided her with the opportunity torecord the surfacing of the gay underground at a key point of origin, Warhol’sentourage. If the picture of Neel attending evenings at the Club in the late1950s in order to establish a line to the expanding artworld network is reasonableenough, it is surprising that in her seventies she was able to befriendWarhol and the members of his Factory. Yet, in her lectures she stated thatwhen she ƒrst met Warhol in 1963, he wanted to put her in one of his moviesand requested that she paint his portrait. 41 Perhaps her Mae West-like persona,her “ƒrst strike wit” and “ability to turn sexuality into a weapon against the acceptednorm,” would have had great appeal to the gay subculture. 42 Althoughshe never participated in a Warhol ƒlm, she and Warhol did appear in thesame issue of the underground publication Mother (no. 6, 1965), where theƒrst public exposure of Joe Gould was followed by stills from Warhol’s “TenMost Beautiful Women.” In April 1979, Neel’s photograph, her 1929 poem“Oh the men, the men . . .” and her 1929 nude double portrait Bronx Bacchuswere considered sufƒciently outré to be published in Night 2 along with photographsof Mary McFadden and Ultra Violet dancing at Studio 54. Finally,her last dialogue on art, with Henry Geldzahler, was published in Warhol’s Interviewin January 1985.And so the Factory came to Neel. The ƒrst was Gerard Malanga (ƒg. 117),who posed in 1969, shortly after his seven-year collaboration with Warholended. As Ellen Johnson has noted, Malanga’s pose is as open as Warhol’s isclosed, 43 and he averts his glance to permit the viewer to survey his body. Histousled hair and sensual, parted lips evidence a modern homoerotic ideal

124 / The New York Art Networkfound in Warhol’s “Boy” drawings from c. 1957, and found as well in the motorcyclemacho of Tom of Finland’s drawings.The 1970 paintings of Jackie Curtis and Rita Red (ƒg. 118) and David Bourdonand Gregory Battcock, (ƒg. 119) are her earliest portraits of “gay” couples.All were players in Warhol ƒlms and participants in life at the Factory. The formerwere two of Warhol’s Superstars, the latter were important contemporarycritics. Neel identiƒes her sitters by name only, and in the former portrait, thenaive viewer would automatically categorize the sitter on the left, in jeans anda t-shirt, as male, “Jackie Curtis,” and the one on the right, in the 1940s dresswith the „aming hair, as the female, Rita Red, whereas in fact the opposite istrue. Initially, then, their masquerade succeeds. Like most transvestites, however,the female is dressed to mimic rather than duplicate male-female dresscodes. 44The challenge for Neel was to make those differences recognizable, whichshe does by reproducing the dominant-subservient convention of male to female.Cocker-spaniel like, Red nuzzles against Curtis, whose sweeping lateralkick assures that the dog will heel. “Her” aggressive self-presentation contrastswith Red’s self-effacing gentleness. Moreover, Curtis’s stiffened, angular bodyand bony face lack any “feminine” sensuality (compared, for instance, withMalanga’s or Kuyer’s portrayal). Thus, “Rita Red,” bearing only the nicknamebestowed by Jackie, plays a female while retaining his male dress; Jackie, onthe other hand, adopts female dress but retains his male position. The coupleis joined at the feet, where Red’s hush puppy meets Curtis’s pump, with hisphallically protruding toe. Both shoes would ƒt either foot, just as Jackie’sname could be either male or female. Because, without fuller information, theviewer is left in doubt about which name and which gender to assign to whichperson, traditional categories are effectively frustrated. We are not permitted toidentify either sitter as male or female, but only to peruse an intermediate wayof being, “the transvestite,” which in the androgynous Red’s case need not entailcross-dressing. Neither of the pair is able to establish the so nearly perfectan ambiguity between male and female as Warhol, when dressed as a bothand,while retaining his media image (Christopher Makos, Andy Warhol,1987, ƒg. 120). Such “performance-photographs” would establish a precedentfor contemporary cross-dressing artists such as Ru Paul. The couple does epitomize,nonetheless, the castoffs drawn to Warhol in hope of becoming stars.They are the raw material from which Warhol forged a postmodern, gay art.In David Bourdon and Gregory Battcock, Neel uses their opposing dress,staid business suit vs. colorful underwear, to suggest that for gay men, as well asfor heterosexual women, sexual identity may be a matter of masquerade. 45Bourdon, who played a leather-clad living bedpost in Warhol’s unƒnished

A Gallery of Players / 125“Batman-Dracula” (1964), appears here as an establishment ƒgure, the sophisticatedcritic for the Village Voice and Vogue. Because both his suit and hisshoes seem too large to quite ƒt, Bourdon becomes a “suit,” playing his conservativerole whether or not it ƒts him. Battcock, on the other hand, is out in theopen, his existence displayed as unself-consciously as in his part in “13 MostBeautiful Boys.” If Bourdon protects his private life, Battcock reveals his, andhis exposed position seems to leave him vulnerable. 46 Battcock’s joyless emergencefrom the closet in 1970 is one that Neel pictures as threatening to hisperson, which in social terms, of course, it remained. 47Why, when gay men had long been accepted as part of the New York artworld,did the post-Stonewall era frequently ƒnd them still in the closet? Theanswer, of course, is that both public and private patronage tends to come fromconservative sources, which are often stridently homophobic. But by 1985,The Pennsylvania Academy, ninety-nine years after its dismissal of ThomasEakins, put a color reproduction of David Bourdon and Gregory Battcock onthe cover of its catalog, Alice Neel: Paintings Since 1970. By this time the artworldhad caught up with Neel, and over the next decade gay and lesbian artwould be widely exhibited and performed. Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency(1986), the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe (The Perfect Moment,1988) and Ru Paul’s video Supermodel (You Better Work) (1992) are afew among the many examples of the increasing visibility of the subjects of homoeroticdesire and gender „uidity in the mainstream artworld. The consolidationof a movement of gay art in the 1980s is comparable in many ways tothat of feminist art in the 1970s, especially in its establishment of its own networkand the focus on the topic of sexual identity. Neel’s art presages both.If her portraits had charted the uneasy position of the gay male in straightsociety, Neel’s portrait of John Perreault (ƒg. 121) is the apotheosis of the liberatedgay male. Completed in 1972 when Perreault visited her studio to borrow“Joe Gould” for an exhibition “The Male Nude,” which he was curating forthe Emily Lowe gallery at Hofstra University, John Perreault is a deliberate rethinkingof the ideal male nude. The critic wrote frequently and admiringly ofNeel’s work in the 1970s, and she returned the favor with a painting that is „atteringbut not idealizing. The pretty-boy type of Malanga is replaced by theeven, alert features of an intellectual face propped on a sleek body whose sensuallycurving body hair signals “satyr.” Coincidentally, the pose nearly replicatesa photograph made by Eakins of one of his students at the Art StudentsLeague, Bill Duckett in the Rooms of the Philadelphia Art Students League(1887–1892, ƒg. 122). Although Eakins’s nude photographs were not exhibitedor published until recently, Neel expressed her ongoing admiration forthe artist to Karl Fortess in 1980, adding that when she entered life drawing

126 / The New York Art Networkclass, “One of the ƒrst things I did was a male nude!” 48 The similarity betweenthe photograph and the painting is further evidence that Neel had absorbedthe tradition of the unidealized male nude that Eakins had established.By the 1970s Neel was no longer alone in exploring this genre, however, asmany feminist artists were turning to the subject, Sylvia Sleigh prominentamong them. Although as a curator, Perreault’s interest in the sensuous malenude in art was established with his 1973 exhibition, and Neel’s portrait is anunambiguous celebration of his eroticism, Perreault would not announce thathe was gay until 1980. At that time, he began to directly address the issue of gayart in his critical writing. His article “I’m Asking—Does It Exist? What Is It?Whom Is It For?” in Artforum in November 1980 probed the subject in question-and-answerformat, distinguishing between a pre-Stonewall homosexualartist, who would re„ect oppression, and a gay artist, who might express his orher liberation. Perreault noted the contribution of feminism to re-eroticizingand repoliticizing art, providing a space for the emergence of gay art, and then,in speculating about why “the art world has not welcomed gay liberation,” explainedthat the continued silence on the part of the mainstream artworld was“economic.” 49John D’Emilio agrees that feminism assisted the cause of gay liberation inthe 1970s:Feminism’s attack upon traditional sex roles and the afƒrmation of a nonreproducutivesexuality . . . paved a smoother road for lesbians and homosexuals who werealso challenging rigid male and female stereotypes and championing an eroticismthat by its nature did not lead to procreation. Moreover, lesbians served as a bridgebetween the women’s movement and gay liberation . . . Feminism helped removegay life and gay politics from the margins of American society. 50A contemporary Adonis, Neel’s John Perreault rides the crest of the wave madeby feminism and gay liberation, openly celebrating at last modern art’s debt tothe gay community.

8The Women’s Wing:Neel and Feminist ArtSince God was made a man and all the symbols of strength and power havebeen made men, naturally women are male chauvinist enough to wish toidentify utterly with these magniƒcent beings, so there can be no femininesensibility because per se it would be inferior. I have always wanted to paintas a woman but not as the oppressive and power mad world thought awoman should paint . . . The enemy is perhaps not men but the very systemitself which also encourages men to oppress each other.Alice Neel, unpublished statement, January 24, 1972,Neel Arts, New York City.Sisterhood! . . . Why there’s nothing more competitive than the women’smovement. It just shows the competitiveness in American life.Neel interview with E. G. Porter, Jr., St. Louis Post Dispatch,December 14, 1975.To Neel, the three-pronged liberation of the 1960s—of blacks, gays, andwomen—must have seemed like the successful realization of the undergroundbattle she had fought in her art. During the 1970s, feminist activists in particularprovided her with ƒrm connections to the alternative artworld network that127

128 / The New York Art Networkthey were creating, and although Neel had ambivalent feelings about some ofthe rhetoric of 1970s feminism, she gratefully accepted the support and recognitionof younger feminist artists and art historians. As her artistic stature grew,so did the size of her canvases. Critical acceptance was re„ected visually in increasingartistic conƒdence, which compensated for her declining health andpermitted her to enjoy a particularly fertile late period. As the critic ThomasHess noted, now that “the spur of neglect and misunderstanding isn’t so sharp. . . [t]he light in her pictures has turned milder, almost rosy.” 1 Her belatedartistic success did not blunt her critical edge, however, and her portraits of themembers of the women’s art network look dispassionately at the professionalwoman of the 1970s, as she assumed new roles and new identities.For their part, the emerging generation of feminists drew from Neel an empiricalexample of their arguments and a living inspiration. The rewriting ofart history to include women required role models, and Neel personiƒed thecharacteristics those models demanded. Lawrence Alloway noted in 1974 that“Neel has a special status among women artists: she is a symbol of persistentwork and insufƒcient recognition.” 2 In 1981, the president of the Women’sCaucus for Art and dean of the Wayne State University Art School, Lee AnnMiller, described Neel as the “symbol of women’s struggles.” 3 To female arthistorians who had gone through years of classroom training without everstudying a woman artist’s work, the discovery of art of outstanding quality bywomen was part of their consciousness raising, providing an initial impetus forthe rewriting of art history. As Linda Nochlin argued in an in„uential early essay(1971), 4 if there were no great women artists, it was because women hadhad no access to the system, not because genius was exclusively male.Like Neel’s own con„icted status as rebel and celebrity, however, the feministeffort to rewrite art history was not without its own contradictions. Althoughbreaking down the barriers to entry into the system required the dismantling ofconcepts such as artistic “genius,” which had been couched in biased and outdatedterms, feminists nonetheless would ƒnd themselves reverting to the verycategories they had declared outmoded when describing an older artist’s accomplishments.For instance, one of Neel’s earliest and strongest supporters,Ann Sutherland Harris, confessed in her catalog essay for the retrospective sheorganized at Loyola Marymount University in 1979, “I am not easily impressednor inclined to hero-heroine worship but Alice seemed to me then and[seems] still a real genius.” 5 Neel understood the artworld too well not to noticethe contradictions within feminist criticism: its claims of sisterhood, onthe one hand, and its competitiveness on the other. 6 Neel’s own attitude towardthe movement was equally contradictory: both celebratory and critical,she alternately claimed herself as a foremother and distanced herself from therhetoric of women’s liberation.

The Women’s Wing / 129Neel’s ƒrst portrait of a modern feminist was a commissioned piece, a portraitof Kate Millet for the cover of Time magazine’s “Politics of Sex” issue, August31, 1970 (ƒg. 123). Millet’s Sexual Politics, released that July, had donefor feminist intellectual history what Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique(1963) had done for social history: it had challenged the very assumptions onwhich the category of woman rested. The sculptor/author thus served as ameans for Time, which used its portrait covers to exemplify historical events, topersonify women’s liberation. Ignoring the recent history of feminist writing,Time claimed, “Until this year, the movement had no coherent theory to buttressits intuitive passions, no ideologue to provide chapter and verse for its assaulton patriarchy.” 7 Millet had no interest in serving as an ideologue, and ina precursor to Neel’s interchange with Gus Hall in 1980, Millet told the artistthat she would not pose because she felt the movement should not have a singlespokesperson.” 8 Neel rarely worked well from photographs, and the visualresult is a fairly lifeless, cardboard ƒgure, an inadvertent demonstration of thevalidity of Millet’s argument. Time, which still devoted one of its issues annuallyto “The Man of the Year,” required an establishment image of leadershipthat neither the sitter nor the artist was prepared to fulƒll. Despite its deƒcienciesas a work of art, the stilted portrait has the virtue of exposing the contradictionof picturing a feminist leader in patriarchal terms.The following year, on June 1, 1971, Neel’s alma mater, the Moore Collegeof Art, which had held a major exhibit of her work in January, awarded her itsƒrst honorary doctorate. Neel had recently garnered several prestigious awards,but this recognition must have been a particular source of pride. 9 Her doctoraladdress to an emerging generation of artists provided Neel with the opportunityto re„ect on her views of women’s liberation. “The women’s lib movementhas given the women the right to openly practice what I had to do in anunderground way. I have always believed that women should resent and refuseto accept all the gratuitous insults that men impose upon them.” However, shedenied the implication that men, as part of the patriarchy, were the “enemy.”“Injustice has no sex and one of the primary motives of my work was to revealthe inequalities and pressures as shown in the psychology of the people Ipainted.” For Neel women’s liberation was important as part of the fundamentalchanges occurring throughout the culture: “Everything is being questioned,all relationships, education, western man, and the very ethos of the west . . . Itis a great time to be starting as an artist; who knows where these new investigationswill lead?” Neel’s talk offered no prescriptions or simple answers, no solutionsto what she considered the aesthetic confusion of the day, and no utopianformulations of the future. Instead it envisioned an unprecedented opportunityfor women to “ƒnd out what they want.” 10For Neel, as for older feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir, the means of

130 / The New York Art Networkopposing female oppression was not, as Betty Friedan had suggested in theFeminine Mystique, “the lifelong commitment to an art or science, to politicsor profession,” but rather, in de Beauvoir’s phrase, the political skills “to sapthis regime, not play its game.” 11 Shortly before the movement was forced toacknowledge that it represented primarily the concerns of white, middle-class,liberally educated women and had ignored the voice of the lower class or ofminorities, Neel used crude speech, as she always had, as an outrageous gesturethat would strip shallow thinking of its pretense: “What amazed me wasthat all the women critics respect you if you paint your own pussy as a women’slibber, but they didn’t have any respect for being able to see politically and appraisethe third world.” 12 In an article in the Daily World published in April1971, Neel used more judicious language, placing her support of women’s liberationin the broader context of left-wing politics:[W]omen’s real liberation cannot occur without some change in the social organization. . . Property relations which reduce everything to the status of “things” and“objects” have also reduced women to the status of “sexual objects” . . . [I]n thelast two years especially, I have become known, perhaps because, even though somany terrible things are going on, there are great changes taking place: the BlackPanthers struggle for ƒrst class citizenship, the revolt of the youth against a moribundeducational system, and also women’s liberation opening new horizons andhopes for half the human race. 13Appropriately enough, one of Neel’s ƒrst portraits of the new feminist artworldmerged feminism with Marxism. Irene Peslikis, one of the founders ofRedstocking artists in 1971, is titled, not feminist woman, but Marxist Girl(1972, ƒg. 124). Peslikis posed for Neel at the time she and Cindy Nemser initiatedthe Feminist Art Journal (1972–1979). 14 Peslikis’s radicalism is signaledby her pose: she is one of the few women to whom Neel granted the aggressivelycasual “slung leg” position, that spreading out and claiming of physicalspace that Nancy Henley had identiƒed with male body language. With hersevere black pants and shirt and unshaven underarm, she is the personiƒcationof the 1970s radical. However, Neel plays with Peslikis’s rejection of all conventionalindicators of femininity: her pose is simultaneously a reference tothe liberation from old roles and a pun on Matisse’s odalisques.The ƒrst issue of the Feminist Art Journal in April 1972 not only reprintedthe full text of Neel’s doctoral address but also published “The Whitney Petition,”which demanded “the admission of Alice Neel into the Whitney PaintingAnnual.” One of two such petitions, the Women in the Arts petition, writtenby Cindy Nemser, was a „at statement of the feminist position vis-à-vis theartworld establishment: “To us the Whitney’s neglect of an artist like AliceNeel is a symbolic action. It is a gesture which embodies completely the un-

The Women’s Wing / 131just and biased treatment that women artists have received from the big ‘establishment’museums all over the world.” 15 Over the previous two years, theWhitney had been the target of criticism of several feminist organizations.Women Artists in Revolution (WAR), which had seceded from the Art Worker’sCoalition in 1969, protested the low percentage of women included in theWhitney’s annuals (8 percent in 1969); in 1970, the Ad Hoc Women Artists’group, founded by Brenda Miller, Lucy Lippard, Faith Ringgold, and PoppyJohnson, pressed for 50 percent representation. The petitions and picketsproved effective, and the representation of women artists increased substantially.16 Although claiming not to have bent to women’s pressure groups, theWhitney did include Neel in its 1972 painting annual. 17 The same issue of theFeminist Art Journal also summarized the open hearing on the question “AreMuseums Relevant to Women?” that was held at the Brooklyn Museum onDecember 12, 1971. The event was chaired by Faith Ringgold and PatriciaMainardi, and altogether twenty-nine people delivered prepared statements,among them Alice Neel. Most speakers objected to the exclusion of women onthe basis of “quality,” which as Faith Ringgold noted, “is all about maleWASPS who have had their stingers removed.” 18Such vocal feminist criticism of current museum policy helped prepare theground for Neel’s one-person exhibition at the Whitney Museum of AmericanArt in 1974 (February 7 to March 17). As thrilling as the recognition was for Neel,the exhibition was a rather perfunctory showing of ƒfty-eight portraits on one„oor, sandwiched between the “Flowering of American Folk Art” and “FrankO’Hara: Poet Among Painters.” Neel’s portrait of the museum’s emeritus director,John I. H. Baur (Jack Baur, 1974, ƒg. 125), with his grey suit and Germanicfeatures, is the very image of the artworld functionary, attuned to businessrather than art, more Fuller Brush Man than Frank O’Hara. And althoughNeel became friends with Baur, who would provide an eloquent testimonial toher at the Whitney’s memorial service in 1985, Lawrence Alloway made clearin his exhibit review in The Nation that the museum’s recognition was begrudging.Assessing the exhibit “in the kind of political terms that forced the museum’shand,” Alloway wondered why neither of the painting curators, Marcia Tuckeror James Monte, was assigned to organize the show, which was delegated tothe curator of prints and drawings, Elke Solomon. “It is not the fault of Neel’swork, but the show looks terrible, badly hung and incoherently selected...” 19The weaknesses of the exhibition provided fuel for conservative critics suchas Hilton Kramer, who charged: “There are ineptitudes here, in the renderingof the ƒgure, in the handling of design and in the overall control of the motifthat are not a matter of style but of basic competence.” 20 Perhaps because Neelhad served to personify the feminist art movement’s cause from its inception,Kramer lost no opportunity throughout the seventies to criticize her work, and

132 / The New York Art Networkby extension, that of her feminist supporters. Several years later, commentingon the predominance of gallery exhibitions of ƒgurative over abstract work,Kramer complained that museums were not showing what he believed to bethe best examples of contemporary ƒguration, such as the work of FairƒeldPorter: “Thus the Whitney, which can usually be counted on to do the wrongthing, devoted a solo exhibition to Alice Neel, whose paintings (we can be reasonablycertain) would never have been accorded that honor had they beenproduced by a man.” 21 In retrospect, the open bias and sexism of Kramer’swriting provide an unequivocally clear historical document that legitimatescontemporary feminist arguments and explains why 1970s feminists adoptedNeel as an example of courage and persistence. The in„uence and authorityof the New York Times is not easy to counter, and required the concerted effortsof a generation of women. 22As a result of their efforts, women’s art in general, and Neel’s art in particular,continued throughout the 1970s to be integrated into the artistic mainstream.In a special issue of Time devoted to “The American Woman,” onMarch 20, 1971, Robert Hughes wrote a lengthy article on contemporarywomen’s art, “Myths of Sensibility,” that substantiated the premises of Nochlin’sargument in “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” by citingstatistics that quantiƒed the poor representation of women in galleries, exhibitions,and museum collections. “At the Whitney, eight out of 129 one-artistshows in the last decade were by women,” 23 Hughes noted, using numbers nodoubt supplied by WAR. Hughes also mentioned Neel as an example of anartist who had worked in obscurity for forty years and who deserved to be creditedwith preserving “the expressionist portrait as a live art.” 24 Such articles, addressedto a broad general public, may not have convinced a Kramer, but theyhelped to garner indispensable, broad-based acceptance of the feminist cause.Art with feminist content had emerged simultaneously in Los Angeles andNew York in the late 1960s, but by 1972, arts organizations devoted to the supportof art by women had been established all over the country. According toMary D. Garrard, “The near-simultaneous explosions across the country offeminist activism in the arts . . . can only be explained by the special phenomenonof women’s networks.” These networks, she argues, were based on friendships.Prominent women artists, such as Harmony Hammond, Miriam Schapiro,and Joan Snyder, “crisscrossed the country to speak on college campusesand to women’s groups, bringing news and spreading ideas.” 25 Neel was an integralpart of this grassroots network, and in the last decade of her life therewere few cities in the United States she did not visit. Among the reasons shewas so in demand is that she could be counted on to demolish “male chauvinist”attitudes with her wit. At a WIA panel discussion on the status of women inthe arts in New York in 1972, for instance, a male member of the audience si-

The Women’s Wing / 133lenced the discussion by shouting, “The reason women don’t succeed is theydon’t have balls.” Neel’s now-famous retort, “Women have balls. They’re justhigher up,” 26 had the ego-reinforcing effect of Billy Jean King’s aces againstBobby Riggs.One reason that she was able to follow a schedule of approximately two appearancesper month—either a lecture, a panel discussion, or a talk at an exhibitionopening—and continue to paint, is that many of the administrative detailsof her burgeoning career were handled by her daughter-in-law Nancy.Nancy also posed frequently for Neel as a member of the family, but in Nancyand the Rubber Plant (1975, ƒg. 126), one of Neel’s most monumental portraitsfrom the 1970s, she posed as the professional she was. Seated in front ofthe towering house plant, Nancy’s torso is like a lean trunk from which springsa syncopated canopy of dancing green leaves, a visualization of that vital, organicnetwork to which Neel was connected through Nancy’s tireless assistance.Peering through the leaves is Neel’s 1940 portrait of WPA ofƒcial AudreyMcMahon, whose glowering stare contrasts Neel’s past artworld rejectionswith the open, intelligent acceptance found in Nancy’s face. At 80 inchesone of Neel’s tallest paintings, it is a literal measure of the importance of thenew generation of feminists, as exempliƒed by Nancy, to her artistic career. 27In contrast, feminist artists portrayed the network through group portraits,for instance, Sylvia Sleigh’s diptych Soho Twenty Gallery (1974) or May Stevens’sMysteries and Politics (1978). According to May Stevens, Neel was uninterestedin ideas of collaboratively produced art or in art about group cooperation.And although she willingly participated in conferences, panels, andartist residencies, she remained a loner, with few close women friends. 28 At thememorial service for Neel at the Whitney Museum on February 7, 1985, PatHills publicly acknowledged the struggles she had had with Neel in writingthe ƒrst monograph devoted to her work in 1983. “Along the way Alice and Ifought, and, for several months, we didn’t speak.” In her fair-minded analysisof the cause of the difƒculties, Hills summarized Neel’s attitude toward the“network”:Many people regard her as difƒcult, stubborn, egocentric, and opinionated. Butwhat they forget is the context—the milieu in which she worked . . . namely, the artworld centered in New York City. (“The rat race,” Alice used to call it.) In thisworld, she was determined ƒrst to gain a foothold, then to achieve the recognitionher talent deserved, and to do it on her own terms . . . She became singlemindedand unsentimental about her goals. She began to join artists’ groups, started callingcritics, and established a relationship with the Graham gallery . . . In this hectic “ratrace” Neel found herself in, a favorite motto became “I’d rather be shot as a wolfthan a lamb.” 29

134 / The New York Art NetworkThis lone wolf attitude, a single-minded determination to write herself intohistory, explains why Neel was an inspiration but never a true mentor to theyounger generation of women artists.Nevertheless, to all appearances Neel was an integral part of the women’smovement, for she was ubiquitous. Neel’s participation at one of the earliestand more important of women’s conferences in these years, “The Conferenceof Women in the Visual Arts” at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington,D.C., April 20–22, 1972, merits further discussion. Almost all feminist eventswere held in the egalitarian panel format, and Neel was one member of apanel with M. C. Richards (potter), Lila Katzen (sculptor), Agnes Denes(painter), Elaine de Kooning (painter, critic), and June Wayne (printmaker,critic). Little interested in the democratic format or the topic of discussion,Neel wrested control of the platform to show slides of her work. Although itwas the most memorable of the conference’s disruptions, it was not atypical. Atthe panel “Critical Judgments,” with Lisa Bear, Lucy Lippard, Marcia Tucker,Linda Nochlin, Josephine Withers, and Cindy Nemser, June Wayne “jumpedup and demanded a place on the platform, insisting that ‘only artists shouldjudge artists.’” In reviewing the conference, a bewildered Cindy Nemser commented:“It seemed to me that the basic antagonism, the love-hate relationshipbetween artist, critic and curator, was undermining our common ground aswomen that had brought us to the conference.” 30 Skeptical about the possibilityof disinterested action in the commercialized New York artworld, Neelwould have found such comments naive. 31In addition to Ann Sutherland Harris, who had co-founded the Women’sCaucus for Art at the CAA in Los Angeles in 1972, Cindy Nemser, who hadco-founded the Feminist Art Journal that same year, was Neel’s earliest andstrongest supporter. In 1973, Nemser wrote an article for Ms. magazine, “AliceNeel: Portraits of Four Decades,” and the following spring and summer publisheda two-part interview in Feminist Art Journal that formed the basis of herinvaluable interview with Neel in Art Talk: Conversations with Twelve WomenArtists in 1975. In the same year she wrote a catalog essay for Neel’s retrospectiveat the Georgia Museum of Art (September 10–October 19), the full retrospective(83 paintings) that the Whitney failed to do. Nemser’s essay includeda description of the portrait Neel had painted the previous June, Cindy Nemserand Chuck (ƒg. 127). The only one of Neel’s portraits of feminist art critics inwhich the subjects are naked, the two are the Adam and Eve of feminism. Thetitle, Cindy Nemser and Chuck, rather than Cindy and Chuck Nemser or Mr.and Mrs. Chuck Nemser, emphasizes what the composition makes evident:Chuck, although an editor of the Feminist Art Journal, is in the background,supporting Cindy and pushing her forward, while she, as the powerhouse,emerges phallically from his torso.Nemser read the portrait in terms of her marriage: “We sat close together,

The Women’s Wing / 135holding hands in an attitude of mutual support. My body concealed Chuck’ssexual parts while his hand rested on my waist in a gesture of affectionate protectiveness.”32 However tender the portrait may be, Neel was no doubt lookingat the broader social picture. In place of the brave rhetoric of Nemser’sopening FAJ editorial—“Women Artists, we now have our own place to beour own selves in print. The battle has begun . . .”, 33 Neel advances the viewshe expressed to Nemser in Art Talk: “I don’t think we should ƒght each other. . . Both men and women are wretched and often it’s a matter of how muchmoney you have rather than what your sex is.” 34 Neel’s visual argument is,apparently, that women are put forward now, but they are still hesitant andvulnerable, and must join hands with men to affect social change. Neel thusstripped Nemser of her militant rhetoric in order to substitute her own feministviews.Between 1971 and 1973, Neel was consistently included in important exhibitionsorganized by New York–based cooperative galleries such as the A.I.R.(Artist-in-Residence founded 1972) and SoHo 20 (1973). The largest and mostsigniƒcant of these early exhibitions was the “Women Choose Women” exhibition,organized by WIA (Women in the Arts) and held at the New York CulturalCenter from January 12 to February 18, 1973. The jurors—Pat Pasloff,Ce Roser, Sylvia Sleigh, Linda Nochlin, Elizabeth Baker, Laura Adler, andMario Amaya—selected and hung a total of 109 works, including Neel’s PregnantWoman (1971). Douglas Davis’s review in Newsweek criticized the exhibitwith some justiƒcation as too large and lacking in focus. 35 As at the conferences,the ideal of equality prevailed at exhibits curated by and for womenin these years. Neel’s painting was the only one reproduced with Davis’s article;it was provided with the caption, “Breaking Stereotypes.” The one consistenttheme of the exhibition was the exploration of women’s sexuality, andNeel’s nude looked shocking even in the context of work by emerging artistssuch as Martha Edelheit, Hannah Wilke, and Joan Semmel.Another link in Neel’s feminist art network was the painter-curator JuneBlum, who, while at the Suffolk Museum in Stony Brook and, after 1978, atthe gallery at Valencia Community College in Florida, consistently includedNeel’s art in her group exhibitions. 36 Neel painted Blum in 1972 (ƒg. 128), asdid the feminist artist and critic Pat Mainardi. The contrast in their approachesexempliƒes the differences between Neel’s social realism and the idealized visionsof an essentialized womanhood characteristic of the early years of feministart. The two portraits were reproduced in Feminist Art Journal 3/2 (summer1974), along with a transcript of an interview with Mainardi, Neel, andMarcia Marcus. 37 In response to Judith Vivell’s question, “What are you peopledoing in the twentieth century painting portraits?” Neel replied: “I’m writinghistory!” whereas Mainardi answered, “I painted [Blum] four times beforeI realized that an idea was emerging—Wonderwoman!” 38 Neel created an im-

136 / The New York Art Networkage of power, but avoids cartoon stereotypes. With her mane of hair, regal smile,and maroon bell-bottomed pants suit, Neel depicted an artworld authority as abuyer for Bloomingdale’s, somewhat snidely equating feminist professionalismwith commercialism.By the end of the decade, feminist artists working in nontraditional mediawould critique the search for a mythic essential womanhood. Dara Birnbaum’s“Technology Transformation: WonderWoman,” which mocked theabsurdity of the TV series’ image of the female superhero, coincided with thepublication of Gloria Feman Orenstein’s in„uential article, “The Reemergenceof the Archetype of the Great Goddess in Art by Contemporary Women,”which valorized the very ideas Birnbaum’s video art parodied. 39 Orenstein’sargument posited that the goddesses of preliterate, matriarchal civilizationsprovided archetypes for a contemporary art based on “transpersonal visionaryexperiences.” The culmination of the trend Orenstein charted was Judy Chicago’s“Birth Project” (1980–1985) and Ilise Greenstein’s “Sister Chapel”(1974–1979), the latter a monument commemorating “women’s contributionto civilization.” While Birnbaum examined the ways in which our culture constructsnotions of womanhood, Orenstein was engaged in an ahistorical searchfor its origins.Because Neel’s portraiture had more in common with Birnbaum’s deconstructiveproject than with the “great goddess” trend in early feminism, it iscurious that the one collaborative feminist project in which Neel consented toparticipate was the “Sister Chapel.” 40 However, in place of a goddess, Neelchose to paint a politician, Bella Abzug (1977, ƒg. 129). Although Abzug wasnot the only nonmythological ƒgure in the group, the other political ƒgures,such as June Blum’s Betty Friedan as the Prophet, were accorded divine status(1976, ƒg. 130).That same year, 1979, Neel traveled to Washington to receive from JimmyCarter the lifetime achievement award initiated by the Women’s Caucus forArt, an honor she shared with Selma Burke, Louise Nevelson, Louise Bourgeois,and (in absentia) Georgia O’Keeffe. According to Newsweek’s accountof this crowning moment in the history of women’s art, Neel apparently askedoutside the oval ofƒce: “Where is Bella Abzug now?” referring to her removalfrom her position as co-chairwoman of the president’s National Advisory Commissionfor Women. 41 Neel considered the construction of new pedestals foridealized womanhood less important than keeping real women in power. 42When painting Abzug, Neel stated that she deliberately emphasized the ballshapedbreasts to “show that she would nurture the electorate,” 43 that is, thatAbzug would have the courage to defend women’s issues.With her double portrait of Linda Nochlin and Daisy (1973, ƒg. 131), Neeldepicted another art historian who had provided her with critical support, notsimply by including her in important exhibitions but by placing her work in

The Women’s Wing / 137historical context. On an immediate level, it is a portrait of the new workingwoman balancing career and motherhood, intelligently addressing the viewerwhile calmly keeping an active, curious daughter in tow. No doubt Neel rememberedher own frustrated efforts to walk that tightrope, which she hadrecorded in The Intellectual (ƒg. 20). If the languid Fanya Foss had been thecounterfeit item, we have here the real McCoy: the faceted oval of Nochlin’shead, pressing against the top of the picture plane, is a powerful metaphor for atowering, crystalline intelligence, providing clear evidence that this is an intellectualworker. The riveting intensity of Nochlin’s gaze is matched by the fullsaturation of the primary and secondary colors linking mother and child. Inthis portrait, Nochlin is accorded the masklike imperturbability and intensecoloration of van Gogh’s portrait of Mme. Roulin. 44 Perhaps the painting’sstyle is a deliberate reference on Neel’s part to the scholar’s work.Nochlin’s articulate defense of the realist tradition in twentieth-century artprovided yet another validation, apart from femininism, of the principles onwhich Neel had based her art. The year Neel painted her portrait, Nochlinpublished an article assaulting the prevailing critical methodology, the formalistcriticism of Clement Greenberg, which insisted that abstraction was theinherent goal of modernism. Titled “The Realist Criminal and the AbstractLaw,” the essay questioned formalism’s key premises by asking “Why are thedemands of the medium more pressing than the demands of visual accuracy?”Why is purity better than impurity?” Tracing an idealist, Platonic bias in arthistorical writing from the Renaissance to the present, Nochlin deƒned visualrealism in the same way it had been deƒned recently in literature, as: “the creativeacknowledgement of the data of social life at a recognizable moment inhistory.” 45 Having chosen a phrase that could well serve to summarize Neel’sart, Nochlin concluded; “To condemn contemporary realism as resurgent academicismor trivial deviation from the mainstream—Modernism—is to falsifythe evidence...” 46In an article from the following year, 1974, Nochlin joined the feminist debateover the question of a “female sensibility.” In “Some Women Realists,”Nochlin wrote, “I was concerned to discredit essentialist notions about the existenceof an ahistorical, eternal “feminine” style, characterized by centralizedimagery or delicate color, at the same time that I wished to demonstrate thatthe lived experience of women artists in a gendered society at a certain momentin history might lead in certain speciƒc directions.” 47 In section 4, “Painters ofthe Figure,” which included Neel, she argued that the decline of the Westernportrait tradition was due not merely to the invention of photography but to a“male” fear of content:Fear of content . . . which has marked the most extreme phases of the modernmovement in recent years, is at least in part responsible for the demise of the por-

138 / The New York Art Networktrait as a respectable ƒeld of specialization . . . In the ƒeld of portraiture, womenhave been active among the subverters of the natural laws of modernism. Thishardly seems accidental: women have, after all, been encouraged, if not coercedinto making responsiveness to the moods, attentiveness to the character traits . . .of others into a lifetime’s occupation . . . in no other case is the role of the artist asmediator rather than dictator or inventor so literally accentuated by the actual situationin which the art work comes into being. 48Nochlin’s essay exempliƒes the strengths of feminist art history in the early1970s. By rejecting the dominant art historical bias against both realist art andart by women, Nochlin demonstrated that Neel was working within an alternative,if uncharted, tradition within modernism. 49The year of the national bicentennial celebration, 1976, was an especiallyactive one for Neel, and exempliƒes the frenetic schedule she maintained duringthis decade. As the following list makes clear, the momentum of her careerwas fueled to a great extent by the women’s movement. The year culminatedin the opening of the landmark exhibition “Women Artists, 1550–1950” at theLos Angeles County Museum of Art in December. Organized by Linda Nochlinand Ann Sutherland Harris, it was the ƒrst museum survey of women’s art,and its catalog offered an initial exploration of an alternative history of art.Neel entered the historical tradition of women’s art with T. B. Harlem. Theyear began with the opening of her Graham gallery exhibit on January 31;Linda Nochlin and Daisy was reproduced on the announcement, perhaps as apreview of the Los Angeles show. On January 25, she was elected a member ofthe National Institute of Arts and Letters, as was Meyer Schapiro. 50 In Februaryshe was given a two-person exhibition with Sylvia Sleigh at A.I.R. gallery,which was reviewed by David Bourdon in the Village Voice. In March, she wasincluded in the Studs Terkel PBS documentary on the WPA. That same month,she had an exhibition at the Old Mill Gallery in Tinton Falls, New Jersey, runby Geza De Vegh, who had in 1957 restored some of the paintings slashed byKenneth Doolittle; from March 31 to April 16, she had a one-person exhibitionat Beaver College, where she again met her chum from the PhiladelphiaSchool of Design, Rhoda Medary, who ran the art store there. In April shespoke at the Brookdale Community College in Vermont, as part of a feministlecture series. In July, her portrait of Jean Jadot (1976) represented one of 360religious leaders whose portraits were exhibited in the Liturgical Arts exhibitionorganized by Philadelphia Inquirer critic Victoria Donohoe and held atthe city’s Civic Center. In the fall, she was included in an exhibition of Timecover portraits organized by the USIA and shown at the American Embassy inLondon. In September, the Fendrick gallery in Washington, D.C., opened anexhibit of Gillespie/Neel/Robinson/Sleigh, which was a distant satellite to the

The Women’s Wing / 139“Three American Realists: Neel/Sleigh/Stevens” exhibit held at the EversonMuseum in Syracuse. The same month, after participating in a panel discussionat the Everson, Neel juried a watercolor exhibition for the WadsworthAtheneum in Hartford. (Lengthy interviews with Neel appeared in local papersin both Hartford and Syracuse.) In October, she participated in “Close ToHome,” an exhibit of thirty-three still life artists at the Genesis galleries. OnOctober 31, she was included in a New York Times article, “The Art of Portraiture,in the Words of Four New York Artists,” which accompanied the exhibit“Modern Portraits: The Self and Others” at the Wildenstein gallery. Octoberalso saw the premier of the ƒlm Alice Neel by Nancy Baer, at the Second InternationalFestival of Women’s Films at Cinema Studio in New York. In November,she was included in a show of fourteen members of the Visual ArtistsCoalition (founded 1973) at Adelphi University’s Alumni House in GardenCity, Long Island. On January 9, 1977, after the opening of the Los Angelesshow in December, “Alice Neel: A Retrospective Exhibit” opened at the WashingtonCounty Museum of Fine Arts in Hagerstown, Maryland.Without question, Neel was now an integral part of the art establishment,but as the above list indicates, she was part of the women’s art establishment, anetwork that continued to present work in alternative exhibition spaces ratherthan in prestigious New York museums or galleries. So, too, the majority ofreviews of her exhibitions remained conƒned to the women’s pages (the socalled“Living” sections) of newspapers rather than the arts section. Despiteher growing reputation, her citizenship in the artworld, like that of mostwomen, remained “second class.” Yet the written record, the prerequisite forthe entry into history, had been established.The female members of Neel’s New York art network are primarily the activistswho sought Neel out in order to include her in their projects. The verynumbers of these professional women attest to their increasing importance inthe artworld, especially when compared with the dearth of female representationin Neel’s proletarian portrait gallery. As with her portraits of male artists,many of her female sitters are androgynous. The androgynous woman hadenjoyed as wide a cultural currency throughout the century as the male artistaesthete,tracing her historical roots to the Modern Woman—the slim, activeideal that emerged in the 1920s—and beyond that to the nineteenth-centurytradition of the female bohemian artist in pants. According to Joanna Frueh,by the 1970s the new generation of feminists “adopted androgyny as a symboland enactment of male/female and feminine/masculine equality.” 51Most of Neel’s androgynous portraits were painted in the mid-1970s, whenthe debates about the relationship of androgyny to feminism were most vociferous.For Jungian psychologist June Singer, whose book Androgyny: Toward aNew Theory of Sexuality was published in 1977, androgyny simply mooted all

140 / The New York Art Networkother concepts of sexual identity. Like Alfred Kinsey in 1949, she argued thatsexual orientation was not stable: “Most people are convinced that they . . . are,by nature, heterosexuals, homosexuals or bisexuals . . . It is my belief that thesesexual categories ƒx an idea in mind that need not be ƒxed but can be extremely„uid.” 52 In her view, the answer to sexual confusion was to look withinto ƒnd the spiritual wholeness of one’s inherent androgyny. Many feminists,such as Carolyn Heilbrun, were initially drawn to this argument. 53 But counterargumentssoon emerged. Within feminism, Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology(1978) attacked the notion of androgyny as expressing “pseudo-wholeness inits combination of distorted gender descriptions...” 54Unlike their male counterparts, many of Neel’s female androgynes appearasexual, and the very contrasts between them indicate that the ideal of androgynyhad not erased questions of “difference.” For instance, the redoubtable, elegantOberlin College art historian Ellen Johnson (1976, ƒg. 132) is reducedto an old maid schoolteacher. 55 The slightly later portrait of Marisol (1981, ƒg.133), though more forceful, is still asexual. Like her sculptures, she appears tobe made of wood, and, with her high cheekbones and straight black hair, shebecomes a “wooden Indian,” inscrutable, unbending. For this group of womenborn well before mid-century, androgyny is equated with repression, suggestingthat the sitter had been forced to choose between marriage and career.For the younger generation, Neel permitted a wider but still primarilyrather negative range of meanings. Louise Lieber, Sculptor (1971, ƒg. 134) representsone point along the scale: the „eshless ideal of beauty enforced by contemporaryfashion. An artist, Lieber appears to have consciously sculpted herbody into a cultural artifact of chic. The angular shoulder emerging from her“toga” references the image of the sensual half-draped female from GreekKore to Renoir, but it is now reduced, by design, to bone rather than „esh.This ideal, which refuses the woman any material reality at all, gave feministsone basis for questioning whether slim Modern Woman was a positive goal. 56In 1977, Neel painted the prominent feminist art historian Mary D. Garrard(ƒg. 135), the young counterpart to Ellen Johnson. The second presidentof the Woman’s Caucus for Art, the Washington-based art historian wouldsubsequently co-edit two important anthologies of art historical writings thatserved to “question the litany.” Garrard, in tan pants, navy pea coat, and rakishknit cap, is a model of the androgyne as a militant feminist activist. Seatedsquarely in her chair, Garrard appears to converse with the viewer, while thehorizontal of Garrard’s interlaced ƒngers, a gesture Neel highlights with thered scarf, speaks of calm rationality and balance as well as of a defensive wall orbarrier, of political equality as well as protection of privacy. In Lieber androgynyis a sign of oppression; in Garrard it signals a political and sexual liberationthat must as yet be carefully guarded.

The Women’s Wing / 141There exist but a few hints in Neel’s art of an interest in exploring the relationbetween the culture’s lesbian stereotype and the complicated issue of lesbianidentity that she had consistently addressed in her portraits of gay men.Certainly there are no paintings from the 1970s that celebrate lesbian activismin the way that John Perreault does gay liberation. Nor did Neel provide anyverbal commentary on the increasingly visible efforts of lesbian women artistsover the course of the decade. This absence may in part be explained by thefact that what one might term a lesbian sensibility in contemporary art did notemerge until the very end of Neel’s life. The symbiotic relationship describedby D’Emilio between gay liberation and women’s liberation was, ironicallyenough, not immediately extended to gay women. 57 It was not until 1980 thata “movement,” in the sense of a signiƒcant number of artists addressing thetopic, can be said to have been established. 58 The portrait of Garrard is an indicatorof the tentative emergence of that sensibility.Neel offers two alternatives to her artworld androgynes, both young and old:the fecund ƒgure of Faith Ringgold (1978, ƒg. 136) and the „amboyant one ofHungarian-born multimedia artist Sari Dienes (1898–1992) (1976, ƒg. 137).In a portrait as coloristically magniƒcent as Neel’s portrait of Nochlin, Ringgoldis the embodiment of the 1960s phrase “Black Is Beautiful.” Neel emphasizesthe splendor of Ringgold’s ethnic dress by tipping the familiar tub chairforward to suggest the round ceremonial stools used by leaders of Africantribes. Splendidly arrayed in her red costume, Ringgold represents the changein the formulation of racial identity in the 1970s from black (skin color) toAfrican American (ethnicity). In contrast to Neel’s contemporary portrait ofthe African businessman Kanuthia (1973, ƒg. 138), whose neckless head appearsglued onto his tan, western-style, business suit, Ringgold takes pride inadopting African fabric art as a sign of her cultural heritage. Kanuthia, rigid inhis corporate attire, becomes a “suit,” the representative of Western colonialismin Africa. Ringgold is an African American, Kanuthia an AmericanizedAfrican. Each uses dress rather than skin color to establish identity.Like Neel, Sari Dienes was a role model for feminist artists, and becausea number of them, including Martha Edelheit, had painted portraits of her,Dienes’s dealer at the Buchfer/Harpsichord gallery planned to include a selectionin her 1976 exhibit there. Neel agreed to contribute a portrait as well, anddepicted the seventy-eight-year-old artist, two years Neel’s senior, garbed in amulticolored muumuu, in full bloom. Smiling as if in delight at her clownishappearance, she is the bawdy comedienne, whose self-presentation need nolonger contain any element of irony or anger, for she is past the age where criticalopinion or neglect can harm her. An artworld Persephone, she has been reborninto a vital, springlike old age; the red, purple, and green polka dots onher caftan have the bold simplicity of Matisse’s late cutouts. Neither a Great

142 / The New York Art NetworkGoddess or a Wonderwoman, Dienes is an older artist who exudes creative energy.In this sitter, Neel found a kindred spirit.Dienes wrote that “Bones, lint, Styrofoam, banana skins, the squishes andsquashes found on the street: nothing is so humble that it cannot be made intoart.” 59 Although not widely known to the general public, Dienes, who hadstudied with Fernand Léger, André Lhote, and Henry Moore in Paris andLondon, was a ƒxture on the New York art scene. The artistic pluralism andthe political climate of the 1970s brought into the mainstream four new artistictypologies: the gay male androgyne, the African American, the militantfeminist, and the „amboyant elderly female, represented by Perreault, Ringgold,Garrard, and Dienes respectively.The last of her elderly artworld matriarchs was Neel herself, presentedin her natural element: as a painter. (Self-Portrait, 1980, ƒg. 139). The selfportraitis a standard modernist subject, but a portrait of a painter who is anaked, eighty-year-old woman is not, and so the effect is initially comic: everthe bawdy woman, her antic makes us laugh at this breach of conventionalbarriers. Yet unlike the one obvious precedent, the octogenarian Picasso, wizenedbut still horny in his 347 suite from 1968, Neel presents a noneroticizedbody shocking only because what is supposed to be a source of disgust andshame is merely old. Because Neel’s aged body is so schematically rendered,its grotesque or pathetic implications are minimized, and its current conditiongranted limited relevance to the task at hand.With this summary work, Neel quite deliberately places herself in art historythrough citation. The pose is based on Rembrandt’s well-known etching,Woman Seated On a Mound (1631), and the lava-like cone of her „esh out ofwhich her head spews with such force recalls Rodin’s Balzac (1897). Yet whileBalzac’s towering form is absorbed in contemplation, Neel, like Eakins beforeher, presents herself as a worker, holding her brush with the authority Eakinsaccorded Dr. Gross’s scalpel. Passing across her heart, it is a lifeline, pointingboth to her lineage (realism) and to her legacy (feminist art). She had spent alifetime creating her own comédie humaine, which she presents as a product ofhuman effort, created in the shadow of past art history. Although her „esh issagging, her brush creates a boundary between her head and her body, demarcatingthe triumph of mind over matter. Although elderly, she is still a productivelaborer. In The Coming of Age, her pessimistic account of the inevitablemiseries of old age, Simone de Beauvoir reserved special praise for the old personwhose world remains “inhabited by projects: then, busy and useful, he escapesboth from boredom and from decay.” 60 Neel personiƒes proliƒc old age,and she might have added that, for a woman released from caretaking responsibilities,from the body’s reproductive demands, and from any accusations ofantisocial behavior, the last stage of life represents the ƒnal liberation.

The Women’s Wing / 143Looking back, she would note, “I could accept any humiliation myself, butmy pure area was art, and there it was the truth . . .” 61 Recognizing throughpose the nineteenth-century origins of her approach, both European andAmerican, she painted herself as “the last of the buffalo,” in her words. 62 Neel’slate self-portrait is her own monument to her oeuvre, the product of an adultlifetime of sustained effort. No network, just work.

Part IVThe Extended Family

9Truth Unveiled:The Portrait NudeIn the process of dismantling the artiƒcial barriers between public and privatein her portraits, Neel also reconƒgured the meanings of the body, and in particularthe unclothed body. Whereas when naked the human body is in itsleast public state, when depicted as a nude it is the most prevalent and publicof artistic genres, the genre that signiƒes art. 1 For Neel, whose portraits violatedecorum and insist on the validity of all observed experience, the depictednude was necessarily to appear to be naked. Her approach to nakedness, andthe sexual charge it carries in this culture, was matter-of-fact. Whether clothedor unclothed, the sexual component of the body is never absent in Neel’s portraits.A constant throughout her work, Neel’s most innovative portrait nudesoccur at either end of her career, during two decades of “sexual liberation,” the1930s and 1970s.In The Female Nude, Lynda Nead has argued that the classical nude ofWestern art history was deƒned in terms of containment, metaphorically andmetamorphically “a sheath, as regular and structured as the column of a temple.”2 This girding of the wayward form of the body is, Nead argues, a doublyregulatory act—regulartory “of the female body and of the potentially waywardviewer whose wandering eye is disciplined by the conventions and protocols ofart.” 3 The site of this discipline is the art academy, where the representation of147

148 / The Extended Familythe nude is maintained under strict supervision. There, the naked model is nota person but a mold from which is extracted a restricted range of meanings.The model’s very anonymity is thus a form of dress, draping her in an academicpseudonym, “Study.” The shock and embarrassment beginning art studentsoften experience when ƒrst confronted with a naked stranger is routinelydismissed by their professors. By making that initial confrontation the subjectof her portraits, Neel removed the nude from the ideological realm of the academicclassroom and returned the body to its central position in the formationof identity.Neel’s portrait nudes are a signiƒcant contribution to the modernist demystiƒcationof the body. Like her contemporaries, Neel’s concept of the relationshipbetween identity, the body, and sexuality was in„uenced by theFreudian theories prevalent in the Village in the 1930s. Neel was fully as capableof violating taboos and of celebrating the release of the repressed sex driveas her literary contemporaries, James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, whom sheƒrst read in art school. Of the two writers, her work most closely parallels thatof Joyce, who, unlike Lawrence, did not make a religion of the sexually liberatedbody. Rather, Joyce considered the body “matter-of-fact . . . a tragically rebelliousservant, and . . . also comic.” 4 The private body is both uncivilizedand unprotected; lacking the veneer of propriety, aware only of its own needs,it is scandalous when in public, often humiliating in private.From such an emperor’s-new-clothes approach to the tradition of the idealnude in art came Neel’s invention of the portrait nude. The word “invention”may seem too strong a claim; after all, the full-length male and female nudesof both Eakins and Henri at the turn of the century gave equal attention to theface and body, and so could be considered portrait nudes. Moreover, the Austrianexpressionists Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele had developed the portraitnude by 1910 as a means of depicting the “sex drive,” although in the1930s Neel was not familiar with their radical work. Other precedents includePaula Modersohn-Becker’s ƒgure drawings made in Paris in 1906, and SuzanneValadon’s nudes from the early 1920s, which also have the speciƒcity of portraits,even though they are not named.Although Neel’s portrait nudes are a logical and not unexpected developmentwithin modernist art and literature, she remains the only American artistof her generation to strip from the naked subject all reference to the model.Between 1930 and 1980 she observed the changing deƒnitions of sexuality andgender identity as they were inscribed on the bodies of her sitters. Neither simplyobjective recordings of the individual body nor expressionist exposures ofsexual obsessions, her naked men, women, and children present identity aspart and parcel of embodied experience.Like all professional artists, Neel had learned to paint the nude in art

Truth Unveiled / 149school, where she worked from both plaster casts and live models. During the1930s, when Neel invented the portrait nude, the tradition of the unidealizedrendering of the female nude was continued at the Art Students League,where John Sloan taught. The New York–based urban realists Isabel Bishop,Raphael Soyer, and Reginald Marsh all painted “Art Students League” nudesmarked by academic competence; of the three only Marsh courted the lewdnessof modern romance book covers—the others were pointedly detached.Perhaps because Neel never held a long-term teaching position, she wasable to crack the Art Students League’s academic mold. In 1930, after Carloshad departed for Havana with Isabetta, Neel returned home, and for severalmonths in the summer before her psychic collapse, painted in the studioshared by her school friends Ethel Ashton and Rhoda Medary. As they paintedtogether, they also served as each others’ models. Whereas Ashton and Medaryproduced nudes in the Ashcan School style, much like those Carlos had madeof Alice in Cuba, Neel represented instead the experience of modeling, theembarrassed confrontation of two differently positioned individuals, subjectand model. She returned thereby to that individual personality which is evacuatedfrom the nude model in the academic setting. Sitting for her portrait,Rhoda was able to affect a feigned nonchalance, but Ethel, a painfully shywoman, evidently could not help but let her discomfort show.In Ethel Ashton (1930, ƒg. 140), Neel abolishes the distance required forobjectivity and brings the ƒgure forward into the viewer’s space, where she isliterally too close for comfort. At that close range, we are forced to look inEthel’s eyes, there to ƒnd the vulnerability we feel when required to removeour clothes and present our bodies, on one pretext or another, for ofƒcial inspection.With eye contact comes recognition, and with recognition, the constrictiveconvention of the nude collapses with the same gravitational force asthe folds of Ashton’s „esh. The genre of the nude has undergone a seismicshift, for the subject is no longer the artist’s fantasy, erotic or otherwise, aboutthe model, nor an objective anatomical rendering, but the ways in which themodel’s relationship to her body conditions her interpersonal relationships.The arrowhead shape of Ashton’s face, thrust down into her chest like a turtle’sinto its shell, is doubled in her pendulous breasts. The body is now part of aperson’s permanent psychological baggage.One wonders whether Eakins’s iconoclastic approach to the nude was aprecedent here. While at the PSDW, Neel surely heard the popular lore of hisdismissal from the PAFA in 1886 for removing the loincloth from a male modelin a coed life drawing class. Eakins’s frank nudes, such as Study of a SeatedNude Woman Wearing a Mask (1896), may have been on view at the PhiladelphiaMuseum when Neel returned home in 1930. By “removing the mask,” soto speak, Neel transformed Eakins’s ƒgure study into a psychological portrait.

150 / The Extended FamilyLike Eakins’s nudes, Ethel is a modernist revision of the allegorical ƒgureof the Truth Unveiled. With her female nudes from the 1930s, the Truth isthat in our culture the image of the woman’s body is so thoroughly manipulatedthat very few women ƒnd it to be a source of ego reinforcement. Instead,their bodies are evidence to them of their own inadequacies, their failure tomeasure up. By 1930, the ideal of the Modern Woman, as streamlined and activeas the products of modern industrial design, had replaced the passive,voluptuous Victorian ideal. 5 Popular images of the Modern Woman, whetherpersoniƒed by a Zelda Fitzgerald, Coco Chanel, or Marlene Dietrich, wereubiquitous. Moreover, the new ideal had garnered the power of medical authorityas early as 1908 when a Dr. Louis Dublin, having linked obesity to decreasedlongevity, developed the ƒrst height/weight charts, which have servedever since as the medical counterpart to high art’s ideal nude. 6 When Ethel’snaked body is measured against the Modern Woman’s, it simply does not ƒt.Because Ethel’s body fails to meet the requirements of the decade’s imageof the Modern Woman, she endures a tragic collapse of the ego. Moreover,with her hands and feet amputated, she is helpless to move from her position,but is forced to remain identiƒed with/as her torso. Her departure from thecultural norm reduces her to a grotesque, traditionally deƒned as a “monstrousquality, constituted by the fusion of different realms as well as by a deƒnite lackof proportion and organization.” 7 Ethel cannot contain herself, and so shelacks a culturally sanctioned feminine identity. By granting the “Academy”subjectivity, Neel created the antitype of the Modern Woman, thereby posingquestions that remained pertinent throughout the century.During 1932–1933, when she had moved to Greenwich Village, Neel continuedher dialogue with the tradition of the nude, speciƒcally with the turnof-the-centuryimage of woman’s bestial sensuality in visual art and its psychoanalyticcounterpart, Freudian theory. At this time, her model was her closefriend Nadya Olyanova, whom she had ƒrst met in New York in 1928. Nadya(a.k.a Edna Meisner from Brooklyn) was petite and dark, and apparently Neelaccepted the exotic, gypsy fortune-teller persona the woman had adopted forher career as a graphologist. Although quite perky in the photograph of the twoof them as “Modern Women” in Greenwich Village (n.d., ƒg. 141), Nadya isprematurely aged and hardened in Neel’s portrait from 1928 (Nadya Olyanova,ƒg. 142). Seated at a carved table, Nadya, cigarette in hand, appears to besizing up a customer. Hardly the Modern Woman with the streamlined bodyand glamorous career, Nadya is the marginalized woman whose business, whateverit may be, is more than slightly disreputable. 8Nadya Nude (1933, ƒg. 143), the most traditionally posed of her portraitnudes, seems to revert to the tradition of the physical and moral lassitude, “thedecadence,” of the ƒn-de-siècle female nude. Like Ethel’s body, the weight of

Truth Unveiled / 151Nadya’s „esh succumbs to gravity, pulling the thighs open, not in provocationbut in fatigue. Her tiny head has no control over her material bulk which, loglike,rolls forward under the force of its own weight. Nadya Nude reopens thequestion of sexual identity that had been deƒned in the Ashton portrait interms of lack—the shapeless body fragment, the black hole of the pubic region,all of which denied Ethel an intact sexuality. Whether intentional onNeel’s part or not, the profound sense of inferiority, even shame, conveyed byher expression makes Ashton an almost textbook illustration of Freud’s conceptof the female as a castrated male. Nadya’s utter lassitude, in turn, appearsillustrative of Freud’s deƒnition of feminine personality traits, such as irrationalityand passivity, that result from her discovery of her “castration.”In his essay “Femininity,” which was published in New Introductory Lecturesto Psychoanalysis in 1933, the year Nadya Nude was painted, Freud locatedthe key to feminine psychic experience in the moment when a girl discoversthat she is not fully human, for she lacks a penis. From that time forward she isdestined to “fall a victim to envy for the penis.” The three corollaries of femininepsychology that result from penis envy are passivity, masochism, and narcissism.9 As Kate Millet argued in Sexual Politics, any woman who resists herrole “is thought to court neurosis, for Femininity is her fate as ‘anatomy is destiny.’”Nadya could be considered a textbook case of female neurosis. Mindless,lacking will or consciousness, Nadya passively and without any anticipationof pleasure opens herself to observation. Blanketing her “hapless defect” isa luxuriant growth of pubic hair, which Freud described as “the response of‘nature herself ’ to cover the female fault.” 10 If depilation had historicallyserved as a convention that visually deprived the classic nude of any evidenceof the model’s own sexual desire, Neel’s overcompensation suggests thatNadya suffers from a surfeit of sexual freedom.Published in the United States during the Depression, Freud’s theory of femalesexuality marked the end of the ƒrst wave of feminism. Looking back in1969, Millet could argue convincingly that,Coming as it did, at the peak of the sexual revolution, Freud’s doctrine of penis envyis in fact a superbly timed accusation, enabling a masculine sentiment to take the offensiveagain . . . The whole weight of responsibility, and even of guilt, is now placedupon any woman unwilling to “stay in her place.” 11Is that the “argument” of Nadya? If she is the half-civilized force Freud described,will the exercise of sexual liberty drag her further toward animality? Inan era of free love, this modern Olympia need not be paid for, but, even gratis,a mindless body is not much of an offer. The Freudian sexual revolution hasnot liberated Nadya in any signiƒcant way.

152 / The Extended FamilyIn a double nude portrait from the same year, Nadya and Nona (ƒg. 144),Neel attacks the nineteenth-century theme of lesbian lovers, used both to doublethe amount of female „esh per painting and as a sort of proof of women’snatural perversity. She may have been responding to the nudes of the Frenchémigré Jules Pascin, whose portraits of prostitutes were shown in New York inthe late 1920s and early 1930s. According to Raphael Soyer, it was Pascin “whocreated a cult among the younger artists for painting and drawing the femaleƒgure nude and semi-clothed.” 12 Pascin’s women, however, are clearly prostitutes,and their individuated bodies speak less to personality than to the type ofthe decadent woman, morally misshapen. 13The sexual tension in Nadya and Nona is of a different nature. The nakedwomen’s nocturnal moonbath is a private ritual that de„ects the potentiallyjudgmental gaze. 14 Although their dirty feet and Nadya’s drugged expressionconvey “decadence,” the ƒxed beam of light from Nona’s blue eye returns theviewer’s stare and unplugs fantasy. We cannot feel certain, as we can withPascin, that we are witnessing a lesbian encounter. Neel has reinterpreted thetheme of transgressive erotic activity by asserting their right to privacy.In the same years, Neel turned to the subject of male sexuality in a series ofnude drawings of Kenneth Doolittle that are the companions to her Nadyapaintings. Despite the fact that he had provided her ticket to the New York intelligentsia,Neel never included Doolittle in her proletarian portrait gallery.His place is not as an intellectual but as a lover. In her two full-length nudedrawings of Doolittle, one reclining, one standing, she transforms the lean,sinewy body type found in Eakins’s boxers. In a brilliant, sacrilegious spoof ofevery Sleeping Venus in art history, Neel depicts the sleeping Kenneth Doolittle(1932, ƒg. 145) splendidly spread-eagled in unconscious abandon, hishands folded prayerfully in dream-worship of the God of sex. Even thoughNadya Nude assumes a similar pose, her body lacks the angular tension ofDoolittle’s bony frame, which appears to be gathering energy from the coiledsprings beneath him as he sleeps. 15 When the male rather than the female isexposed and unconscious, the power relations within the artist-model paradigmbecome explicit. Based loosely on Michelangelo’s Dying Slave, whoseplaster cast Neel had copied in drawing class, Kenneth Doolitte removes fourcenturies of ƒg leaves. The male nude is exposed as no longer heroic, but asmuch the victim of his “unconscious drives” as is Nadya.In another drawing from 1932–1933 (Kenneth Doolittle, ƒg. 146), Doolittle’swiry body collapses under the in„uence of drug withdrawal. As in EgonSchiele’s drawings, the lack of musculature equates to lack of control, but neitherinsanity nor sexual obsession is the subject here. An early representationof drug addiction, this decadence has consequences more dire than that of

Truth Unveiled / 153Nadya’s addiction to sex. In retrospect, her Picassoesque drawing of Doolittlein long underwear (Kenneth Doolittle, 1931, ƒg. 147) becomes a red „ag warningof the destruction he would cause to both himself and to her.Neel found refuge from that decadence in her relationship with John Rothschild,which began in 1932 when they met at the Washington Square Parkannual outdoor exhibition. A loyal friend until his death in 1975, Rothschildhad a keen appreciation of her art; in addition, he assisted her ƒnanciallythroughout her years of obscurity. A Harvard-educated businessman, John washer bourgeois lover, and Neel, the communist sympathizer, was unapologeticabout her own enjoyment of the middle-class comforts he offered as an escapefrom the stresses ƒrst of Doolittle and then of life in Spanish Harlem. The cosmopolitanlifestyle they enjoyed together is absent from the portraits, however.In the ƒve portrait busts Neel painted between 1933 and 1958, John is depictedas emotionally withdrawn. In the three 1935 watercolors to be discussedhere, Joie de Vivre, untitled (Bathroom Scene), and Alienation, Neel depictstheir sexual relationship, and male and female desire in general, as a danceending in disappointment.Like Kenneth Doolittle asleep, Joie de Vivre (ƒg. 148) is a parody, in this instanceof modernism’s investment in sexuality as the originating or motivatingsource of human behavior. Neel’s cartoon version of Matisse’s modernist monumentmetamorphoses the circle of female dancers into pigs. In the center,Rothschild-Bacchus, penis „apping, kicks his red pointed boot between thepig-Alice’s legs. In 1980, Neel bragged with considerable justiƒcation to reporterJerry Tallmer, “If the world hadn’t discouraged me, I would have donesome magniƒcent pornography.” 16 Yet, although the piggies are raunchy, theyare also far too lighthearted in their turning minuet for their barnyard personaeto become degrading. And although the pigs also reference the legendof Circe, which fathered some of the most bestial of all of the representationsof female sexuality in turn-of-the-century art, Neel reverses the story: it is theman’s lust that turns her into a pig. Nor does Neel condemn John as the paintingsof Circe condemned her; she seems to enjoy her temporary metamorphosis,which draws together in one image the playfulness of Disney’s animatedcartoon The Three Little Pigs (1933), the aplomb of Astaire and Rogers in TopHat (1935), and the sly naughtiness of Aubrey Beardsley’s “decadent” turn-ofthe-centuryillustrations.As in her painting of the lecherous Joe Gould two years earlier, Neel’s genitalsare represented in triplicate. The multiplication in this instance has the effectof increasing rather than decreasing sexual potency, an insatiable lust thatRothschild tries to quell with a well-aimed boot. What Matisse omits from hiscanonical representation of the dance, the female genitals, Neel aggressively

154 / The Extended Familyasserts. Neel’s active self-display is comparable here to the Greek mythologicalƒgure of Baubo, who shook Demeter out of her mourning for her child Persephoneby displaying and playing with her pudenda, an act Peter Wollen hasdescribed as a “display to another woman [whose] effect is to provoke laughter...”17 In postmodern parlance, Neel, like Baubo, is “a ƒgure who residesoutside the regime of phallocentrism, undermining its logic.” 18Neel’s uninhibited, female version of the Bacchanal may refer as well to theconventions of modern dance. At the turn of the century, the founders of moderndance such as Ruth St. Denis, Mary Wigman, and Isadora Duncan hadtransformed their socially assigned traits of animal sexuality and irrationalityinto expressive ones. Modern dance, unlike other modern art forms, was considereda uniquely, indeed essentially feminine medium. So convincing weretheir representations of elemental female sexuality that D. H. Lawrence’s descriptionof the newly sexually liberated Lady Chatterley makes a generalizedreference to them: “She . . . ran out with a little wild laugh, holding up herbreasts to the heavy rain . . . and running blurred in the eurhythmic dancemovementsshe had learned so long ago in Dresden.” 19 For Lawrence, however,the “lady” is an animal who performs for his own pleasure: “bending sothe rain beat and glistened on the full haunches . . . then stooping again so thatonly the full loins and buttocks were offered in a kind of homage towards him,repeating a wild obeisance.” 20 As Kate Millet would point out in Sexual Politicsin 1969, Lady Chatterley is Mellor/Lawrence’s sexual slave.Neel may have accepted Lawrence’s notion that “The body’s life is the lifeof the sensations and emotions,” but may not have acquiesced to Lawrence’sversion of its cosmic signiƒcance, in which the “balance of male and female inthe universe” was maintained through the worship of the male principle. Johnis a participant in rather than the choreographer of this primitive performance;it is he who is the “„apper,” whereas Neel herself effects the metamorphosis ofwoman into animal that Lawrence imposes through his look. Since she is playingat being an animal, she cannot actually become one—her guise is thus herprotection. Was she deliberately mocking Lawrence’s charge that the new Villagebohemians failed to give sufƒcient respect to (his version of) sexuality?“These young people scoff at the importance of sex, take it like a cocktail . . .The body of men and women today is just a trained dog. And of no-one is thismore true than of the free and emancipated young.” 21Maybe for the cocktail-snorting dancing pig, sex was not the origin and endof existence. Maybe, like Mike Gold, she was mocking the decade’s obsessionwith sex: “You can read essays by American intellectuals to prove . . . that AbeLincoln made the civil war because he was undersexed; that history is sex; thatAmerica is sex; that sex is soul; that soul is all; Oom, oom, pfui!” 22 On the other

Truth Unveiled / 155hand, Gold’s Marxist perspective may not have been necessary, for this wittysend-up of sexual liberation in Greenwich Village in the 1930s exempliƒeswhat June Sochen called the ribald laughter of the bawdy woman, for whomsex does not entail “obeisance.” 23Neel’s „irtation with pornography in the “John” watercolors permitted herto transgress the boundaries of both middle-class values and modernist “high”art. Whereas Joie de Vivre was aimed at the latter, untitled (Bathroom Scene,ƒg. 149), is aimed at the former, and particularly at its concepts of modesty thathad been assailed by both Lawrence and Joyce. Two years after the ban onUlysses was lifted in the U.S. District Court of New York, Neel staged a littlesideshow to Joyce’s monumental comedy of the body. A genuine contributionto the underground tradition of bathroom humor, untitled depicts the practicalpreparations for sexual intercourse. The lovers are not swooning in a rapturousembrace; rather they are each urinating so that their subsequent activitieswill not be interrupted. In place of the closeted boudoirs of Degas’s bathers,Neel’s “toilet” (she is undoing her hair) occurs on the commode. For his part,John, like the sailor in Ulysses, has the „exibility to pee where he pleases, inthis instance into the sink. Bourgeois gentleman that his delicate physique ifnot his action reveals him to be, he has a condom at the ready to slip onto hisaroused male member. Both John and Alice close their eyes to fantasize aboutthe coming encounter: John empties himself into the vagina-shaped sink,while Neel squats on the toilet, with its phallic base. The viewer’s fantasies, onthe other hand, rapidly fade before the stark black-and-white reality of thescene of bodily preparations in the modern bathroom. In isolating this subject,Neel has not simply violated all norms of modesty, privacy, and decorum, shehas demystiƒed the sex act.Neel’s humorous approach to transgressive subjects, like that of womenwriters such as Djuna Barnes and Mary McCarthy, is at the opposite pole fromthat of male artists, who use it to celebrate a revised, modernist heroism: theirdangerous courting of debasement and death. In Georges Bataille’s surrealistnovel, The Story of the Eye (1928), 24 for instance, sex represents the realm ofthe primal, characterized not by positive male-female union but by base instinctswhose “release” is not merely impolite but potentially destructive of allsocial codes. Urination is not a mundane bodily function, it is part of the uncontrolleddebauchery of the sexual act. 25In countering the view that the avant-garde’s transgression of social codeswas subversive, Kate Millet has pointed out that “contemporary literature hasabsorbed not only the truthful explicitness of pornography, but its anti-socialcharacter as well.” 26 Bataille acknowledges only his own fantasies, whereasNeel acknowledges that both men and women have sexual fantasies, fantasies

156 / The Extended Familythat function in counterpoint to the banal physicality of sexual activity. Unlikeher male contemporaries, sex for Neel is neither liberation nor transgressionbut one bodily act requiring speciƒc preparation, blunt, awkward, and yet fun.If the 1935 watercolors are placed in a narrative sequence, the reality principleis extended to the bedroom as well, where it suffers its tragic denouement.In Alienation (ƒg. 150), Neel is posed voluptuously on the bed, butJohn, still in his slippers, stands immobile before her, his legs crossed, his armsfolded, head bowed in shame. If the priapic male is a staple of modernist artand literature, impotence is a subject largely absent from the art of a Picasso,Bataille, Lawrence, or Joyce. (Dali is an exception.) The distance between thecultural myth of male sexual potency and the reality of its performance has ledto personal disappointment for both parties in Neel’s depiction, a commonenough real-life occurrence. Instead of the supposed transcendent experienceof sexuality, we must share the humiliation of the body’s malfunction, a malfunctionnot based on biological deƒcit but on con„icted emotions: “He hadjust left his wife and a couple of kids,” Neel commented, years later.The evidence of Neel’s portrait nudes from the early thirties suggests thatNeel did not subscribe to Freudian ideas of an essential womanhood, but,rather, interpreted the various effects of the period’s ideologies of sexuality, includingFreud’s, on her friends and lovers. Ethel’s and Nadya’s destinies hadbeen determined as much by the decade in which they came to maturity as bytheir biology. Similarly, with her pregnant nudes from the 1960s and 1970s,Neel examined procreation as experienced by her children’s generation, in adifferent era.Between 1964 and 1978, the active years of the women’s liberation movement,Neel painted a series of seven pregnant nudes, a subject virtually unprecedentedin art history. (The rare exceptions include Gustave Klimt’s Hopefrom 1903 and Picasso’s life-sized bronze Pregnant Woman from 1950.) In aperiod of “revolutionary changes” when “everything was questioned,” Neelquestioned what pregnancy might mean to the 1970s version of the liberatedwoman. For in choosing the subject of pregnancy, she chose the one subjectthat threatened to “prove” that anatomy was destiny, sending women back totheir suburban prisons. (Erica Jong would conclude a celebration of her ownsexual potency with a confession stated in precisely those terms: “I havedreaded pregnancy as a loss of control over my destiny. I had fantasies of the . . .death of my creativity during pregnancy, the alteration of my body into somethingmonstrous.” 27 ) Having faced her own con„icts over creativity vs. procreativity,Neel must have been interested in observing how the next generationwould resolve the issue. Neel’s pregnant nudes posed the question: How doesthe mater matter to individual women at this historical moment? 28Despite Neel’s 1978 claim that “I did begin to paint pregnant nudes before

Truth Unveiled / 157others were doing them,” 29 Raphael Soyer must be credited for introducingthe subject as early as the 1950s. Soyer also came to the pregnant nude matterof-factly:he could hardly help but notice that many of his models becamepregnant, and simply decided to continue painting them in that condition.However, because Soyer’s pregnant nudes retain the air of the studio, they occupythat netherworld in which personality is suspended (Nude, 1952, ƒg. 151).In comparison, Neel’s ƒrst pregnant nude, Pregnant Maria, from 1964 (ƒg.152), seems to take pleasure in the viewer’s possible discomfort. The difference,as always, between her nudes and those of her urban realist contemporarieslies in the speciƒcity she gives her models, who are as re„ective of theirperiod and social status as Soyer’s models are detached from theirs.In 1964, when Pregnant Maria was painted, the birth control pill was becomingwidely available, 30 and the ƒrst rumblings of the 1960s rebellions,emerging from the counterculture of the 1950s, had begun. As with NadyaNude, Neel again references Manet’s Olympia, in this instance borrowing herprototype’s look of aloof indifference not simply to her nakedness but to thedisplay of her pregnancy. The pill had promised sexual pleasure freed fromfear of the consequences, and at the very historical moment that sex and reproductionwere disconnected, Neel reunited them. Even in the era of the pill,after all, pregnancy remained a “basic fact of life” resulting from the sexual act,a causal relationship suppressed in the history of erotic imagery. In BlancheAngel Pregnant from 1937 (ƒg. 153), Neel had depicted a friend who, like herself,had chosen to bear children without the legal sanction of marriage. Thesimilarity in their facial expressions suggests that Neel considered Maria to bethe representative of the next generation of openly rebellious bohemianwomen. Taut and well-proportioned, Maria’s body projects a sexual autonomycomparable to that of the nude portrait of her daughter Isabetta, painted thirtyyears earlier.By the 1960s, Freud’s postulate of women’s “weak libido” was being overturnedby sexual research. In The Human Sexual Response (1966) Masters andJohnson found that women are multiorgasmic and that their bodies are possessedof numerous erogenous zones, as opposed to just one. Dr. Mary JaneSherfey’s contemporary ƒndings suggested that the female sexual response,rather than diminishing during pregnancy, actually increased. 31 With Freud’sauthority on the defensive, women’s sexuality could be pictured differently.Neel painted Pregnant Maria the year after Betty Friedan’s The FeminineMystique was published and the year that the word sex was added to Title VIIof the Civil Rights Act. Because the second wave of feminism was directedprimarily at workplace equity, just as earlier it had narrowed its agenda tosuffrage, pregnancy was increasingly seen as inimical to liberation. As SusanBrownmiller wrote in 1975, “Pregnability . . . has been the basis of female

158 / The Extended Familyidentity, the limit of freedom, the futility of education, the denial of growth.” 32If pregnancy had been seen as the fulƒllment of a women’s biological destinyin the 1940s, by the mid-1970s Ms. magazine’s premier issue would depict it asthe badge of her slavery (1972, ƒg. 154). In her essay “Stabat Mater,” Julia Kristevawould point out that the feminist repudiation of pregnancy was based onthe very false image of maternity propounded by Jung and Freud:When feminists call for a new representation of femininity, they seem to identifymaternity with this idealized misapprehension; and feminism, because it rejects thisimage and its abuses, sidesteps the real experience this fantasy obscures. As a result,maternity is repudiated or denied by some avant-garde feminists, while its traditionalrepresentations are . . . accepted by the “broad mass” of women and men. 33Pregnancy in the 1970s was thus a disputed territory. While disdained as uninhabitableby “avant-garde” feminists, the terrain of pregnancy was celebratedby women’s health advocates, such as the authors of Our Bodies/Ourselves(1971), who argued, for instance, that natural childbirth in the home, beyondthe borders of the medical establishment, would be a way for women to reclaimtheir property. The medical establishment, in turn, tried to re-establishits hold on the woman’s body by arguing that “the occasional woman who isfanatic in her zeal for ‘natural childbirth’” is emitting “danger signals, frequentlyindicating a severe pathology.” 34The second of Neel’s portraits of her pregnant daughter-in-law, PregnantWoman (1971, ƒg. 155), provides a metaphor for the societal pressures enduredby the educated white woman who became pregnant in the 1970s. Althoughher pose recalls that of the reclining Maria, it evidences none of theease of Maria’s lithe body. Rather, her arms and the rivulet of her hair sever thehead from the body, and her head, in turn, is pictorially at one remove fromthe disembodied image of her husband, Richard. The tripled framing and thehusband’s ghostly image, as much absence as presence, transform her monumentalisolation into alienation, from her husband and from her body. 35 Herphysical condition has transformed Nancy into a “pregnant woman,” a categoryin„ecting, infecting identity. Gone is any reference to pregnancy as aform of bohemian rebellion. The distended belly threatens to rend the body intwo, and the chartreuse-brown color chord lends the pall of disease to the torsoand its womblike surround. Both the fecal coloration and the deƒnition of thebuttocks call forth associations with Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalas the embrace of the “material, bodily lower stratum . . . the zone in which excretionand conception occur...” 36 The carnival of sex has released degenerationas well as regeneration.This image of pregnancy as a battleground over which con„icting forces

Truth Unveiled / 159are played would be analyzed ƒve years later by Adrienne Rich in Of WomanBorn (1976). In this now classsic text, Rich distinguished between the potentialmeanings of a woman’s reproductive capacities and those institutionallyimposed upon her, just as Neel had done in her series of nudes from the 1930sand 1970s:I try to distinguish between two meanings of motherhood, one superimposed onthe other: the potential relationship of any woman to her powers of reproductionand to children; and the institution, which aims at ensuring that potential—and allwomen—shall remain under male control. This institution . . . has withheld overone-half the human species from the decisions affecting their lives; it exoneratesmen from fatherhood in any authentic sense; it creates the dangerous schism between“private” and “public” life; it calciƒes human choices and potentialities. In themost fundamental and bewildering of contradictions, it has alienated women fromour bodies by incarcerating us in them. 37With her belly separating from her torso, Nancy’s body bears the evidencethat pregnancy, that most “essential” of female conditions, was a sore subjectindeed in the 1970s, the very site of the ƒssures within the social body, dividingwomen from women. The fact that the pregnant nudes are pictured as of anera and yet alone with their bodies, conveys both their historical status andtheir psychological reactions to their condition.Neel’s last pregnant nude, Margaret Evans Pregnant, from 1978 (ƒg. 156),is perhaps her most complex. In her ninth month of pregnancy with twins, thewife of the painter John Evans clings tightly to the „uted pedestal that serves asthe woefully inadequate support for the larger oval of her belly. 38 Ramrod stiffwith her effort, she would have the regal bearing of an Old Kingdom queen,were not her condition and her perch so unstable. Evans’s condition has invaded,ƒlled, every part of her body: her womb has taken over her torso, hernipples her breasts, so blockading the central region that the blood pools in herlower legs.The image re„ected in the mirror, composed in a series of relaxed curves,contrasts with the contractions along Evans’s breast, waist, and chair, thus suggestinga postpartum state. Familiar throughout the history of art as a device forpresenting different aspects of the sitter, the mirror functions in a particularlyapposite way here. For in her monumental verticality, Evans seems to picturethe Phallic Mother, the woman who in Freudian terms has compensated forher lack of a penis by producing a child. But the mirror denies the phallicunity projected by her swollen imposing form. If the re„ected image is seen asEvans herself, at that moment she appears to conƒrm the studies of “body image”researchers that the pregnant woman perceives her womb as separate

160 / The Extended Familyfrom her body. In Body Schema and Body Image, for instance, Douwe Tiemersmanoted that “The identiƒcation of the mother with the child decreasesfrom the sixth month of pregnancy onwards, especially when the child growstowards the front . . . The mother sees herself more as standing behind thechild.” 39 Tiemersma declines to pursue the ramiƒcations of such radical bodilydualism, but in both Pregnant Woman and Margaret Evans Pregnant thecompositional disjunction between head and body as well as the advancedstages of their pregnancies suggest a radical disjunction of body and mind. Themoment when one is most fully identiƒed culturally “simply as a pregnantwoman,” in Rich’s words, is also the moment of greatest alienation from thebody.This disjunction is pictured as well by the placement of the mirror, whichdisrupts the cohesion of the pictorial space, creating an image within an imageby effacing the corner of the room, cutting off the re„ected body image preciselyat the subject’s belly and, ƒnally, by a sort of magnetic effect, shifting theground plane up, thereby undermining its stability. Within this disjunctivespace, the black triangular wedge—that female symbol—lodged between theimage and its re„ection can only be that gap, that void through which thechild will pass. It is also the passage that Margaret must simultaneously traversebetween Margaret Evans Pregnant and Margaret Evans Mother.The element of time, inseparable from pregnancy, when the sense of selfpermits no clear, stable boundaries, thus also refers representationally to themother/child relationship (as conveyed in the double meaning of the noungeneration). Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering (1978) arguedthat the woman’s need to “turn to children to complete a relational triangle,or to re-create a mother-child unity, means that mothering is invested witha mother’s own con„ictual, ambivalent, yet powerful need for her ownmother.” 40 Contrary to Freud, this theory posited that in giving birth thewoman does not gain a penis but reproduces the mother. The mirrored Evansdoes indeed look like a different person, an older woman—both herself as themother of a growing child and as her own mother. This tripartite identity, assplit between self-mother and self-daughter is suggested by Evans’s shadow, amirror image of the image in the mirror and the ghost of her former-future self.The trope of the mirror, traditionally a symbol of female vanity, is foundthroughout feminist literature and criticism in this period. In 1960, Anne Sexton’spoem “The Double Image” linked the mirror and the painted portrait, aswould Neel in 1978:And this was the cave of the mirrorthat double woman who staresat herself, as if she were petriƒed

in time—two ladies sitting in umber chairs . . .I, who was never quite sureabout being a girl, needed anotherlife, another image to remind meAnd this was my worst guilt . . .I made you to ƒnd me. 41Truth Unveiled / 161The French feminist Luce Irigary described feminine identity in comparableterms: “You look at yourself in the mirror. And your mother is already there.And soon your daughter . . . Between the two what are you? . . . Just a scansion:the time when one becomes the other...” 42From the 1920s, when Neel began to explore the theme of the family andwomen’s role within it, her work had shown strong parallels with that of EdvardMunch. In 1978, Munch’s Puberty (1893, ƒg. 157) was shown in the retrospectiveexhibition in Washington, D.C., and reproduced in the accompanyingcatalog, which Neel owned. It is likely, then, that the modernist’s depictionof the uncanny splitting of self at the onset of menstruation and the hystericalrigidity it induced in the subject in„uenced Neel’s analysis of gestation.Both the shadow in the Munch and the strangely disassociated mirrored otherin the Neel speak to the unbidden, the unacknowledged, the unidentiƒable,those aspects of a woman’s being which mediate between the self and nonself.As Margaret Miles has pointed out, “Pregnancy, like menstruation, revealsthat woman’s body is not the ‘closed, smooth, and impenetrable’ body thatserves as the symbol of individual, autonomous, and ‘perfect existence.’” 43When Neel began the series in 1964, the Pill had promised sex without reproduction.Now, with in vitro fertilization and surrogacy, medical technologyprovides reproduction without sex. 44 The consequence, according to culturalhistorian Barbara Stafford, is that “reproduction has become part of the textualizedand symbolized world of duplicable or disposable goods.” 45 In retrospect,then, Neel’s pregnant nudes become the last of their breeders: Neel haspictured pregnancy at the ƒnal moment in history when from conception toparturition the process was identiƒed with the woman. A humanist to the last,Neel provided these dinosaurs not only with evidence of their discomfort, theirmalaise, but with courage, strength, and endurance. The pregnant nudes enterthe portrait gallery as heroines representing a revised humanism based noton the stable, intact ego but on a concept of identity as a node, linked, throughsexuality, to lovers and offspring.

10Shifting Constellations:The Family (Dis)MemberedThe individual portraits in Neel’s gallery are metaphorically the basic buildingblocks of reality, atoms whose energy radiates out from the nucleus to theperimeter of their universe, there to combine with others to form elements, orunits. In bourgeois culture the fundamental unit is the family, the initial convergenceof energies from which identity is constructed. For Americans thefamily has been and continues to be deƒned in terms of the “nuclear” family:the constellation of mother-father-son-daughter that generates “related” identities,such as brother-sister. The sociologists Arlene and Jerome Skolnick havetermed this “the nuclear family ideology,” promulgated through the snapshotand popular illustration, which includes the “half-myth” that the nuclear familyis universal. “In our own society, the nuclear model deƒnes what is normaland natural both for research and ‘therapy’ . . .” 1 The myth that the nuclearfamily is timeless, natural, and stable, while it has endured, has been counteredby a long literary tradition, as well as con„ict theories of the family developedearly in our century by Freud and the sociologist George Simmel, andmore recently by feminist psychologists like Nancy Chodorow. 2Neel followed the well-worn path of modern art and literature in recognizingthe instability of this supposedly supportive unit. From 1927 on, Neel’swork could be characterized as an extended meditation on the family, in162

Shifting Constellations / 163which both the nucleus and the circulating orbits are dismantled and reconƒgured,forming shifting constellations which are unfamiliar. In this, Neeladopted the attitude of the bohemian Villagers, whose “experimental” attitudestoward the family were charted by Caroline Ware. In 1935, 86 percentbelieved women should have independent interests, 76 percent believed thatit was not wrong for unmarried couples to live together, 70 percent believedthat husbands should share in household tasks, and 65 percent believed thatmarried women should be self-supporting. 3These attitudes were hardly re„ected in popular culture. From the turn ofthe century, when the Kodak camera was invented, photographs of familymembers gathered for ritual occasions, such as religious holidays or weddings,provided assurance that the family was a cohesive unit. Similarly, in Americanillustration, works such as Norman Rockwell’s bountiful Thanksgiving table inFreedom from Want (1943) became as emblematic of patriotism as the „ag. 4Neel’s family album contains no family ritual and little evidence of who is relatedto whom. Her relations are not necessarily next of kin, but nephews, stepsons,or people whom she includes by “elective afƒnity.” Her portrait gallerythus blurs the distinction between relationships and blood relatives.Neel’s critique of the construct of the American family reads from the pointof view of a woman who dared to „out its norms and who suffered the consequences.Like Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot before her, she examines thewoman’s realm, but unlike her nineteenth-century upper-class predecessors,she will ƒnd in that shared space of interpersonal relationships discord and isolationas well as intimacy and privacy.In the private wing of the portrait gallery, the family is portrayed as a sitepermeated by social and political pressures. The meaning of each portrait residesin its juxtaposition with associated portraits: one must be interpreted as it“relates” to another. In 1965, for instance, Neel painted three works that referredmetaphorically to the Vietnam War. The most monumental of the threedepicts her son Hartley at the end of an emotionally stressful ƒrst semester atTufts Medical School (Hartley, 1965, ƒg. 158). Posed with his hands on top ofhis head like a captured prisoner of war, his elbows forming visual road signspointing in opposite directions, Hartley registers his dilemma over what coursehis life should take. Representing the moral quandary of so many Americanmen of his generation, Hartley was “in a trap,” as Neel put it. Drafted Negro(ƒg. 159), in turn, shows a dejected young man whose number has come up;he is of the wrong race and class to be eligible for deferment from service inVietnam. Finally, when placed with the two portraits, the Soutine-like Thanksgiving(1965, ƒg. 160) can be interpreted as Neel’s comment on the escalatingslaughter of the war and the wrenching internal con„ict into which it thrustour citizenry: the capon is a „ayed corpse and the contiguous dishrag its dis-

164 / The Extended Familycarded „esh. Stuffed into the shallow grave of the sink, the fowl embodies a violentdeath suffered with no higher purpose beyond the commercial productsthat loom above it. The photojournalistic images of massacre, self-immolation,and mutilation that formed the daily diet of Americans at that time had comehome to roost. Norman Rockwell’s Freedom from Want has been reinterpretedin terms of the black humor of the 1960s, so to speak. The three together pointto the folly of conceiving of private life as a refuge from the war in SoutheastAsia.Neel’s family saga encompasses three generations—her parents, her own,and her adult children’s—but it is only in the last that the nuclear family is representedin recognizable form. Her parents and siblings are represented interms of death or loss, perhaps metaphorically referring not only to her rejectionof the conventional family life, but also to the process of growth and maturationthat leads inevitably to the splitting of the family unit. As head of herown household, Neel represented the family in terms of her experience of parenting,and to do so, she turned to the conventions of surrealism. AlthoughNeel’s portraits of her parents are contemporary with her portraits of her matriarchalfamily, I will structure the discussion along the model of a family treeand place them ƒrst.Neel’s immediate family consisted of her father, George Washington Neel,her mother, Alice Concross Neel, and four children: Albert, Lily, Alice, andGeorge (called Peter). If one tries to ƒnd a picture of that family in Neel’s portraits,one ƒnds that the elemental structure, the parental nucleus with fourorbiting offspring, has been altered. There are no signiƒcant portraits of hersiblings, and after 1927, the progenitors, the parents, exist not as a formativepresence but only as loss. The theme of loss as the deƒning characteristic offamily life originates, as we have seen, with Requiem (1928).In Neel’s ƒrst and only picture of her family unit, the Family (1927), Neel’sfather is the personiƒcation of drudgery, his days on earth marked by dullingroutine. In his only signiƒcant subsequent portrait, he has died. Dead Father(1946, ƒg. 161) is an image as brutally frank as its title. Reminiscent of thedeathbed photographs that were a staple of family albums before the twentiethcentury „ed in fear from the face of death, Dead Father is a memorial withouta eulogy. The corpse in the cofƒn, presented from the point of view of amourner, depicts death as a fact of life without larger meaning. Only the featherlikelilies and the two pink roses suggest the gentleness that inhabited thebody in life.Initially too numbing to open out to metaphor, nonetheless Dead Fathermay well be linked to its historical moment. Because Neel connected signiƒcantevents in her personal life with important events in American history,she was able to use the former as a metaphor for the latter. Just as Childbirth

Shifting Constellations / 165was a metaphor for the acute anxiety of bringing a child into a world of povertyand war, so Neel’s portrait of her father’s corpse may have served as a memorialnot just for those who were killed in World War II but for the death of Rooseveltthe previous year and perhaps for the collapse of the U.S.A.-U.S.S.R.alliance as well. In February 1946, when Stalin declared capitalism and communismincompatible, the journalist Eric Sevareid commented that “theComintern, formalized or not, [was] back in effective operation.” 5 Coexistencewas impossible, as it meant appeasement. Neel’s father lies within thisstate of affairs.As she customarily did, Neel registered her personal feelings of loss in hernonƒgurative work. Both The Sea (ƒg. 162) and Cutglass Sea (ƒg. 163) werepainted after a walk to the ocean from her house at Spring Lake, New Jersey,the summer following his death. Although Neel had pasted into her scrapbooksthe announcement of her father’s retirement from the Ofƒce of SuperintendentCar Service of the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1931, and kept snapshotsof him as a young man, 6 she never painted a portrait of her father at theirsummer house, and so the seascapes mourn the loss of someone who, pictoriallyspeaking, was never there. Signiƒcantly, both are nocturnal landscapesprecipitated by her father’s “going into the night”; they are not portraits of herfather but of her own feelings. Although references to the seascapes of JohnMarin and Milton Avery can be found in The Sea and Cutglass Sea respectively,Neel weights the works with metaphorical meaning absent from thework of the two American modernists, whose reputations were then at theirheight. The expressionist turmoil in The Sea and the motionless Cutglass Seaproject the extremes of feeling—anger and depression—characteristic of thegrieving process. Neel returned to the landscape of mourning in 1957 in SunsetRiverside Drive (ƒg. 164). This warmly colored “tropical” sunset may havebeen a memorial to Carlos, as it was painted after learning, via a terse notefrom her estranged sister, that the artist had recently died. 7Her pictures of her mother from the early 1950s do not so much address thesorrowful aftermath of death as the suffering leading to it. In Last Sickness(1952, ch. 2, ƒg. 16), her mother’s chair resembles an old-fashioned wheelchair,her bathrobe a shroud or body bag. In recording this frail, elderly woman,helpless and afraid, Neel offers little sense of her once forceful, dominatingpersonality. During the last year of her life, Neel’s mother moved in with her.Neel thus assumed the position of caretaker/mother, and so the mother in turnis positioned as a dependent.Despite her terminal cancer thirty years later, Neel would deƒnitively rejecther mother’s fearful, helpless resignation, replacing fear with willfuldeƒance in her self-portrait at eighty. Her extraordinary discipline and will tocreate are exempliƒed by her last painting, the portrait of Dr. James Dineen

166 / The Extended Family(ƒg. 165), an unusually caring physician who treated her during the summerof 1984. Although she liked him personally, in his portrait he becomes “Dr.Death,” the image of the unspoken reality of the imminent death she was thenfacing. Like Picasso’s last self-portrait (1972), it speaks to the unwelcome momentof realization that the end of life has arrived. Despite severe incapacitation,which affected her draftsmanship, she continued to speak the truth.As with her parents, so with her sisters and brothers. From the visual evidence,one might conclude that Neel was an only child, for her siblings areerased from her gallery. Only her nephew, Peter’s son Georgie, is recorded instages from a troubled adolescence to marriage to a woman who could be hismother (Georgie Neel, 1947, ƒg. 166; Annemarie and Georgie, 1982, ƒg. 167).As the portraits of Georgie and the later portraits of Sam’s sons (Julian andDavid Brody) and José’s family attest, the boundaries of the family unit areopened up so that it is no longer coincident with its container, the home, andrelations are no longer based on biology. This “nomadic” family, cut off fromnational, racial, and social roots, deƒes a coherent deƒnition.The transition from one generation to the next was ƒrst pictured in The Family,when Neel was in the anomalous position of residing at her parents’ homewith a child of her own: a child with a child, a mother without a husband. InThe Family from 1928 (ƒg. 168), Neel depicts the reunited family unit—husband,wife, and infant daughter. In it, Neel assumes her mother’s crouchedposition from the previous year. Dressed like a native in her sarong and barebreasts, Neel-as-Cuban-peasant bears the burden of her husband and child.A„oat in the striped bloodstream of the daybed, the infant Santillana, in turn,forms a linchpin joining father and mother. The undulating sea that engulfedAlice and Carlos in grief in Requiem is now calm, but the burden of family stabilityis a weight borne by the woman. Forty years later, in her portrait of PregnantJulie and Algis (1967, ƒg. 169), Neel recreated the dominant-subordinate,male-to-female compositional structure of The Family. In Berkeley at a time oftremendous social change, the oppressive family structure reproduces itselfagain. It was this structure that she would examine in light of the second waveof femininism.Neel told Patricia Hills that she felt only disdain for women’s roles in conventionalmarriage: “I thought they were stupid because all they did was keepchildren and dogs in order . . . I thought the most they ever did was back someman they thought was important.” 8 This criticism of the patriarchal family wasvoiced for Neel’s generation by Emma Goldman’s “Marriage and Love”(1917): “The institution of marriage makes a parasite of woman, an absolutedependent. It incapacitates her for life’s struggle, annihilates her social consciousness,paralyzes her imagination, and then imposes its gracious protection,which is in reality a snare, a travesty on human character.” 9 Given her be-

Shifting Constellations / 167liefs, it is hardly surprising that Neel should have depicted her own nuclearfamily in negative terms; the surprise is that she married in the ƒrst place, evenif she had convinced herself that she was marrying into a life in art.Despite her decision to bear children, Neel consciously decided never toremarry lest she be cast in the role of housewife and jeopardize her artistic calling.Neel’s uprooted family tree is a matriarchal one, like the families of theculture of poverty in Spanish Harlem. When the primary relationship is thelover rather than the legally sanctioned husband or wife, the family is indeedtransformed from a unitary circle into a biomorphic entity of constantly changingshape. Neel visualized the dismembered family unit, with its continuallyshifting positions, twice, once in 1942 and again in 1964 (Subconscious, 1942,ƒg. 170; The Flight of the Mother, 1964, ƒg. 171). These two paintings constituteher most radical meditation on the family.Painted in 1942, when the center of the surrealist movement was in theUnited States and the in„uence of European surrealism on New York artistswas at its height, Subconscious both in title and style bears witness to its impacton Neel. In March 1942, the Pierre Matisse gallery held an exhibit of “Artistsin Exile” that included Matta, Tanguy, Ernst, Chagall, Masson, Tchelitchew,Kurt Seligmann, and Eugene Berman. 10 In October, the exiled surrealistsexhibited at the Reid mansion on Madison Avenue; the exhibit, “The FirstPapers of Surrealism” included Duchamp’s infamous installation with a labyrinthof twine. In addition, important exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art—“Picasso: Forty Years of His Art” (1939), which exhibited his surrealist workfrom the 1930s, and “Salvador Dali” (1941)—also provided models on whichto base an indigenous response to surrealism. In Reframing Abstract Expressionism,Michael Leja explains that in wartime culture, “the unconscious was,like the primitive, an essential ideological construction, mobilized in the effortto cope with the trauma and perplexity induced by recent historical events. Ina broad array of cultural productions, fascism and modern evil were portrayedas products of the mysterious depths of the unconscious or of the unnaturalfunctioning of the mind . . .” 11 During these years, Neel also turned to theprecedent of surrealism in order to place her project within the context of herexisting artistic exploration of family psychodynamics. The goal of her battlewas not simply the oedipal destruction of the patriarchal family; it had a highercause, just like the “good” war being fought at the time: that of Richard andHartley and a re-visioning of the process of the formation of identity within andthrough the family unit. 12Like her American contemporaries, then, Neel adapted surrealist biomorphismto her own uses. When the birth of Richard prompted a a restructuringof her family, the centrality of both Freud’s and Jung’s psychoanalytic analysisof the mother-father-child relationship as constitutive of the individual psyche,

168 / The Extended Familywas particularly germane. Leja has pointed out that both Freudian and Jungiantheories enjoyed prestige during the war years, but that women analysts,in particular those associated with the New York–based Analytical PsychologyClub, were drawn to the writings of Karl Jung because “the attention given to‘the female’ by Jung—his emphasis on the role of the mother in the Oedipuscomplex, the prominence given to female archetypes, his notion of an ‘anima’(the female component in the male unconscious)—coincided with ongoingsocial and ideological changes in the U.S. regarding women.” 13 In Jung’s essay“The Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype,” published in Englishby the Analytical Psychology Club of New York in the spring of 1943, 14 he describesthe mother as at once human and necessarily archetypal:Why risk saying too much . . . about that human being who was our mother, the accidentalcarrier of that great experience which includes herself and myself and allmankind . . . [A] sensitive person cannot in all fairness load that enormous burden ofmeaning, responsibility, duty, heaven and hell, on to the shoulders of one frail andfallible human being . . . Nor should we hesitate for one moment to relieve the humanmother of this appalling burden, for our own sakes as well as hers. It is just thismassive weight of meaning that ties us to the mother and chains her to her child, tothe physical and mental detriment of both. A mother-complex is not got rid of byblindly reducing the mother to human proportions. 15Neel painted Subconscious the year before this text was published in English,but it can be seen nonetheless as a response to the Jungian ideas thatwere in the air. The social realism of the Spanish Harlem portraits has been replacedby surrealist biomorphism, and the child-doll of Symbols (Doll and Apple)metamorphosed into an armless, subhuman, maternal automaton with atumorlike child appendage, an externalized fetus. This grotesque image of the“mother’s burden” con„ates the psychological and the physical toll of childrearing,presenting the interpyschic con„ict in terms parallel to Dali’s The ArchitectonicAngelus of Millet, exhibited at MoMA the previous year (1933, ƒg.172). Because until the age of two the infant’s helplessness requires that themother carry it constantly, Neel pictures motherhood as an abnormal extensionof pregnancy, distorting the “natural” form of both mother and child tocreate a monstrous hybrid.Although there is no evidence that she read Jung’s work at this time, shemay have become acquainted with his theories through her friendship withthe painter John Graham, whom she met in 1939, and who gave her a copy ofhis in„uential book The System and Dialectics of Art (1937). A strange, pedantictext structured in question-and-answer format, System attempts a comprehensiveanalysis of the nature of art and of the creative act. For Graham the

Shifting Constellations / 169origin of art was “the human longing for enigma, for the miraculous,” which isaccessed by the unconscious mind: “Our unconscious mind contains therecord of all our past experiences—individual and racial, from the ƒrst cellgermination to the present day...Artoffers an almost unlimited access to one’sunconscious . . . Thus art is the best medium for humanity to get in touch withthe sources of its power.” 16 This is the Jungian collective unconscious.The in„uence of Graham’s painting and by extension his philosophy is evidentin Neel’s portraits of women artists during the late 1930s and 1940s. InDorothy Koppleman (c. 1940) and Bessie Boris (1947, ƒg. 15), the harsh, nocturnalchiaroscuro that obliterates half of the sitter’s face creates a Jungian connectionbetween woman-night-moon similar to that found in Graham’s paintingsfrom the 1920s (Head of Woman, 1926, ƒg. 173). Perhaps Neel saw inGraham’s work the Jungian concept of the two aspects of the mother-image:fertile, protective, and benign, or devouring, seductive, and poisonous, “theloving and the terrible mother.” 17 Seen in the context of the theory and imagesavailable to her in 1942, Neel’s Subconscious presents an interpretation of theMother Archetype, with the two halves of the face, the son/sun and mother/crescent-moon, pointing to the intimate psychological relation betweenmother and son, female and male.Subconscious is exceptional in critiquing via surrealism modern society’sideological investment in the role of the mother. In the 1940s, the origin fromwhich psychoanalysis set out was the mother, a ƒgure who was never visiblebut was present only as the cause, the source of the neuroses of her offspring.As Barbara Ehrenreich points out in For Her Own Good, Freudian theory hadspawned the concept of the “libidinal” mother dominant in these years; “Notonly would she naturally fulƒll her child’s needs, but she would ƒnd her ownfulƒllment only in meeting the needs of the child.” 18 In a radical reversal ofthe causal relationships established in the “science” of psychoanalysis, Neelmakes the subject of her painting not the effect of the mother on the child, butthe effect of the child on the mother. The exclusiveness of the child’s demands,and the woman’s consequent lack of autonomy, are imaged in terms ofa monstrous Siamese twin. The juxtaposition of her crescent proƒle and hiscircular face, beyond its evocation of the Jungian female to male relation, initiatesthe process of separation. That such a fall into individuated selfhood is aprecarious one is suggested by the jutting club of Sam’s chin, which hoversabove the child’s head, waiting to strike. Isolated and trapped on all sides bytotemic male ƒgures that ring the perimeter like jagged coral reefs, the motherchilddiad is in a visibly vulnerable position. Neel’s hallucinatory vision bringsto the surface the fear and exhaustion, as well as the potential for psychic collapse,that can result when a mother is a primary caretaker.In its depiction of the appalling burden of motherhood, Subconscious again

170 / The Extended Familyanticipates concerns that would be voiced by the later feminist and psychoanalyticinvestigations of the writers Adrienne Rich and Nancy Chodorow. BothOf Woman Born and The Reproduction of Mothering address motherhood as acultural phenomenon, as learned behavior that “does not come by instinct.” 19For Rich, the con„ict between the mother’s need for self-preservation and hermaternal feelings was experienced as “a primal agony.” 20 Chodorow describedthis con„ict from the point of view of object-relations analysis: at ƒrst the childdoes not differentiate at all between self and nonself (the mother), after which“The mother functions, and is experienced, as the child’s ‘external ego’ . . . thechild behaves as if it were still a unit with its mother . . . The infant’s behavior isfunctionally egoistic, in that it ignores the interests of the mother... 21 Counteringthe view predominant in psychoanalysis that, “Just as the child does notrecognize the separate identity of the mother, so the mother looks upon herchild as part of herself and identiƒes its interests with her own,” 22 Chodorowcontends that a mother’s experience of her infant is informed by her relationshipto her husband as well as her societal expectations. 23The mother/child relationship to the male guardian ƒgure is the subject ofNeel’s most excruciating drawings and watercolors from 1940 to 1942, four ofwhich record Sam beating her year-old son. In a lost drawing from 1940, Samand Richard (ƒg. 174), Neel depicts Sam as what we now term a “child abuser,”venting his rage on the terriƒed infant. To the right Neel scrawls a surrealistautomatic drawing situating this scene within the realm of uncontrollable impulse.This is not the psychoanalytic Oedipal drama, but a lived trauma.Although a common occurrence, neither spousal nor child abuse has beenpictured as part of family life until recently. According to the sociologist RichardGelles, it was not until Henry Kempe and his colleagues published theirpaper on the “battered child syndrome” in 1962 that the issue of child abusegained national attention. 24 When Gelles began his research in the 1970s hewas surprised to ƒnd that despite the predominance of violent subjects in themedia, child abuse was never portrayed in normal, average families, but onlyin deviant ones. 25 Thus, Neel’s image is unprecedented not only in Americanart but in American culture at large in 1940, for she represented it before it hada name. 26 Because it would be another thirty years before statistics would begathered to document its widespread practice, Neel could do little more at thetime than to serve as a “silent witness” (as she titled one painting). Her portraitof Richard at Age Five (1944, ƒg. 175) could bear the same title. Solemn andrigid, his face, like Margarita’s in The Spanish Family from the previous year,is a rigid mask of suppressed pain.In another drawing from the 1940 series, Neel borrowed from the Minotaurtheme from Picasso’s Vollard Suite (1937) (Minotaur, 1940, ƒg. 176). Here,Sam, with claw-like hands and horned head, bars access to the helplessly cry-

Shifting Constellations / 171ing child. The mythological theme exempliƒes the shared concern of Americanartists with the terror and tragedy of modern life during the war years, asseen in the mythological paintings of Pollock, Newman, and Rothko from themid to late 1940s. Mythology, attached to the “universal unconscious,” was evidencethat modern man’s essential condition—his destructive and violent impulses—hadremained unchanged from the time of the caves. In 1945, the anthropologistBronislaw Malinowski stated that “Impulses to beat a wife or ahusband or an antagonist are personally known to all of us. They are ethnographicallyuniversal and timeless.” 27 In other words, to the extent that child orspousal abuse was discussed publicly, it was considered part of man’s tragicfate, not a social problem. One can only assume that Neel adopted the devicesof surrealist automatism, biomorphism, and mythological subject matter inher portraits of Sam from 1940 to 1943 in order to refer the paintings to therealm of the psychic, the private realm. But just as Goya’s Caprichos were allegoriesfor the bestiality spawned by the superstitions as well as by the livingconditions of the lower classes in late eighteenth-century Spain, so Neel’sdrawing is an allegory for the con„icts generated within the family as thenstructured.In the broadest sense, then, her allegory remains a social realist one, especiallywhen read as part of a constellation that includes the portraits of Peggy,one of her white neighbors in Spanish Harlem. The oil Peggy (1949, ƒg. 177)presents a sullen ƒgure with awkwardly „ailing elbows who appears to be sufferingfrom a hangover. But the manner in which her hand pushes against hershadowed left cheek hints that her disjointed appearance may result from havingbeen beaten. In 1979, Neel provided Peggy with a literary biography in ahard-boiled style worthy of her friend Kenneth Fearing:In 1943 I was living in Spanish Harlem. I met Aef Grattama who built shelves for mypaintings. He was a very intelligent man but a terrible drunkard . . . Peggy was hissweetheart . . . They used to go out and get drunk together and her classic remarkwhen she posed for the painting was “Aef said he didn’t do it.” She had “no bruise”covering a black eye . . . One night she took sleeping pills and Aef coming home latedead drunk slept with the corpse all night—not realizing she was dead.” 28A commercial product, “no-bruise,” existed to erase the evidence of a widespreadproblem society had yet to address.In 1964, after Richard had married Nancy Greene, Neel restaged themother-son drama on her kitchen wall. Returning to the surrealist mode shehad abandoned after the end of the war, Neel literally followed Leonardo’s adviceto ƒnd artistic subjects by staring at a wall spotted with stains. Neel’s apartmentbuilding on West 107th Street dated from circa 1910 and the plaster

172 / The Extended Familywalls on the interior had developed long, irregular cracks. At the time ofNancy’s marriage to Richard, Neel began to trace them. What “emerged”from her “subconscious” into the space that was the center of her family lifeand the site of many of her portraits was “The Flight of the Mother,” the processof disconnection from the primal unitary bond represented in Subconscious.Richard stands full-length with his legs facing toward the doorway leadinginto the hall, but with his head facing back into the kitchen, staring across a femaletorso, whose one large breast is pressed against his arm. The maternalbreast, of course, is the symbol of the narcissistic unity the child imagines it haswith the mother. According to the psychoanalyst Michael Balint, all adult loverelationships attempt to replicate the primary mother-child bond: “This primarytendency, I shall be loved always, everywhere, in every way, my wholebody, my whole being . . . is the ƒnal aim of all erotic striving.” 29 In marrying,Richard leaves home but at the same time looks back toward his primary attachment,forcing his body into an unnatural posture.The maternal body, in its turn, is losing its head. Neel’s own wizened proƒlesweeps away from the torso and appears ready to defend itself against theencroachment of a cloudlike, amorphous, one-eyed “head” „oating up againstits right side, ƒnding its point of access at the ghostly right breast. Presumably,if this head-cloud-womb can get past the vigilant, threatening stare of theharpie/sphinx above her, the body will no longer be a fragment, but a new,complete whole. Neel’s body, dismembered in the process of being displaced,forms a treacherous bridge between Richard and the object of his desire.Like Tom Wesselman’s pop art multimedia works from the early 1960s,which may have served as a source here, Neel’s “installation” piece combineseveryday objects with painted fantasy. In Wesselman’s work as well, the breastis revealed as a fetish object comparable to the consumer items that surroundit. Yet in contrast to the pop art cool of Wesselman’s bathrooms, it is hot in thiskitchen. This mural looms large, and the battle it depicts, the battle Leonardoforesaw emerging from the spots on the wall, is a life and death struggle overthe ownership of the product of her own body, „esh of her „esh. Akin to grafƒtiart, it is a message scrawled from the unconscious to the New Hampshire–born Nancy: “Yankee Go Home!” Thus when Neel turned brie„y to the muralform, shortly before its revival in the politically concerned art of the late 1960s,she chose an internal rather than an external wall to make, not a public, but aprivate statement. Within the conƒnes of the kitchen, she broadcast the sceneof a bitter dispute over the body’s domain.Loneliness (1970, ƒg. 178) depicts the inevitable aftermath of that battle.Like all of her nonportrait work, the painting served as an object of mourning.As the painter May Stevens eloquently noted, “The paintings painted when noone was there to sit for her show us what she sees when she is a woman alone

Shifting Constellations / 173by the windows, by the sink, or by the dining room table with its empty drawnupchairs, feeling the life in the inanimate world and the death that comesclose in the pain of absence.” 30 Painted after Hartley was married, it is a compellingvisualization of the trauma that goes under the trivializing nomenclatureof “empty nest syndrome.” One of her densest metaphors, this exceptionallytall, narrow painting opposes stasis to movement within a conƒning frame. Inthe play of rectangles in the upper half, a black shade is drawn down as if tocover the framed view of the two empty windows on the opposite facade. In thelower, the oxblood leather chair, unmoored by the amorphous shadows on theground plane, turns away from the view toward the interior of the room. An ontologicalmetaphor for the mother’s loss of self when her children leave home,Neel painted her body as her apartment, with her children now permanentlyoutside its boundaries and her identity (the chair) consequently destabilized.In the last ƒfteen years of her life Neel charted the growth and changes inher grandchildren as she had done for her own children and her extended“Spanish Harlem family.” Her narrative of her experience of parenting, culminatingin Loneliness, had been a chronicle of con„ict and loss. The picture ofher children’s families is, at least superƒcially, a quite different one, dominatedby attractive women and charming children. As her grandchildren grewfrom infancy into childhood, Neel painted their portraits, one at a time, as individualsas well as part of a family or mother-child unit. Because Richard andNancy lived only seven blocks south of her West Side apartment, and becauseNancy was her administrative assistant as well as her daughter-in-law, many ofher portraits were of Nancy and of her ƒrst child, Olivia. In this sense, her familyportraits do replicate the family album in that the majority of pictures are ofthe ƒrstborn. As such, they belong more properly to a biography; for our purposesthe importance of the later work lies in Neel’s continued meditation onlife cycles and their relation to speciƒc moments in history.The softening of Neel’s critique of the construction of the family in herlater work may be due to her increased ƒnancial stability as well as her justiƒablepride in her sons’ successful professional careers. And even though theyhad adopted conventional life-styles, her children were living through whatNeel knew were “revolutionary changes,” when “The Madonna has been replacedby abortion and the wife and helpmate has become woman the aggressorand so she should.” 31 While indulging in her role as the doting grandmother,Neel kept her eye on how those revolutionary changes were playingout. Returning to the Madonna and Child motif permitted her to examine thechanges in the woman as wife-helpmate and mother-caregiver, while pointingout that child rearing remained the sole responsibility of the mother. The newworkplace equity had not taken into account the workplace in the private home.Her earliest portrait of Nancy and the infant Olivia is typical of the series. As

174 / The Extended Familya mother, Nancy may not evidence the same preternatural calm of Mary Cassatt’smothers: Mother and Child (Nancy and Olivia), 1967 (ƒg. 179); nonetheless,the pose at ƒrst signals the return of the Western idealized “misapprehension”of maternity. Yet Nancy is no modern madonna, nor is the infant asaint. In her embroidered shift, she sits awkwardly astride her kitchen chair,struggling to restrain the child, just as Neel had done in The Intellectual.Olivia tries equally vigorously to stand on her own two feet, while Nancy’sarms bind the child to prevent its inevitable fall. Head to head, each has amind of her own. In her green dress, Nancy is a “tree of life,” but her relationshipwith her child is not a naturally harmonious one: she is learning what isentailed in being a mother. By 1974, with the birth of her fourth child, Victoria(Nancy and Victoria, 1974, ƒg. 180), Nancy is an old hand at holding babies:one arm propped casually on the kitchen table while the other buttressesthe child, she is now a true master of her unpaid profession.That free arm had but recently held twins, Antonia and Alexandra, whowere born in 1971. In Neel’s portrait of Nancy and the Twins (5 months) (1971,ƒg. 181), one of her most delightful paintings, the infants launch eagerly forwardfrom the support of their mother’s body, crawling vigorously toward thefuture. Reclining on the couch, Nancy resembles a dog with her puppies. Isthis the new natural mother of the 1970s, a feminist rather than a Freudian interpretationof the old theme? During the “back to the earth” movement of thelate 1960s, women had embraced the idea of natural childbirth and nursing.Between the publication of Thank You, Dr. Lamaze (1965) and the Women’sHealth Collective’s Our Bodies/Ourselves (1971), the advocacy of natural childbirthoutside the hospital became a feminist stance, another way for women toreclaim their bodies from the medical establishment. Unfortunately, the appealto nature played into the very formulations the new earth mothers weretrying to escape. In 1967, using the familiar strategy of naturalizing socialstructures to make them appear inherited rather than historically mutable, thebiologist Desmond Morris argued that if one took a group of suburban familiesand placed them in a primitive environment, the family structure of this newtribe would not change. The men would go off to hunt for food; the womenwould remain in their caves with the children. 32 Nancy’s body thus representsa contradictory construct: both emancipated woman and “natural” mother, ahybrid phenomenon whose structural faults were bound to lead to problems.These tensions surface in The Family (1980, ƒg. 182), a portrait posed as afamily snapshot. The “V”-shaped composition funnels the eye downward fromthe bookends of Antonia and Alexandra to the seated ƒgure of Nancy holdingher “baby,” Victoria, now a chubby six-year-old. As in The Family from 1929,Nancy is weighed down. Her eyes disarticulated and unfocused, Nancy appearsshell-shocked, and the unit as a whole seems to be slowly sinking into the

Shifting Constellations / 175void below them. As a single mother, Neel had improvised an alternative familystructure; her children in turn had returned to the nuclear ideal in a periodin which one out of two marriages would end in divorce. In Richard in the Eraof the Corporation, painted the previous year, her son is the traditional breadwinnerlocked in his professional role. Here, the women in his family areconƒned to an arrangement that conforms to Morris’s biologically determineddivision of labor. The home (the house at Spring Lake) is light and sunny, butthe women are trapped by a model of family life that supposedly orginated inthe caves but that is now an anachronism.These paintings recognize the nuclear family as the locus of colliding socialforces. By painting separate portraits of Richard and of Nancy and theirchildren, Neel replicated the sexual division of labor that feminism in its variousformulations had been challenging for a century. In 1971, a wol„ike Nancyhad released her “Romula and Rema” into the world, swimming toward a futureof social change. But by 1980, American society was still structured accordingto the binary oppositions of public and private, masculine and feminine,and so Neel’s meditations on sexual identity and the family continue to picturethe stresses caused by those oppositions. Isolated from the bright outside world,the women are bound together by what Jung would term “this massive weightof meaning that ties us to the mother and chains her to her child...”In her study Motherhood as Representation, E. Ann Kaplan cites recent sociologicalresearch that addresses “the inadequacy of our institutions to newsocial developments regarding the mother . . . North America retains the nineteenth-centuryconcept of the nuclear family as its predominant concept forchild rearing, despite the fact that the social roles, and the division of labour requiredin such a family, no longer routinely apply...” 33 It is for this reason thatNeel’s family portraits retain their relevance.Concluding RemarksArtistically, Alice Neel’s achievement was the revival of portraiture not as a valorizationof the individual, but as a cumulative record, perhaps the only validway of picturing twentieth century America in all of its complexity. Whatsaved her project from turning into a Tussaud’s museum is her ability to readthe evidence presented by her sitter’s appearance and to interpret it in terms ofthe historical moment. Unlike the elect in the National Portrait Gallery, hersitters do not represent a single concept, either leadership or achievement, buta con„uence of forces that had to be indicated through subtleties of expressionand pose. The themes traced here are some of the historical trends that may begleaned from her work; potentially there are many others, which, when brought

176 / The Extended Familytogether, would picture American society in a somewhat different light. Likeany individual, the portraits, and the historical moment they personify, cannever be completely known nor their meanings permanently ƒxed. Neel’sAmerican portrait gallery provides not proof but evidence, visual evidence fora visually based culture to examine. Her realist charge remained to elicitrecognition. In answering James Joyce’s call for the “Ineluctable modality ofthe visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes,” 34 Neel not onlyconstructed herself but brought us into confrontation with ourselves. This interchange,based on a reading of facial and bodily signals, permits the viewer tosituate him/herself along various axes, to posit identity as located on a series oftrajectories. Now that interpersonal exchanges frequently occur on-line ratherthan face to face (or face to portrait), and images themselves proliferate andmetamorphose electronically without connection to a body, identity has becomeever more mobile and mutable. In our current world of electronic interchange,Neel’s portrait conventions constitute an invaluable database, a resourceas well as an historical record.

NOTESIntroduction. The Portrait Gallery (pp. xvii–xxi)1. Patricia Hills, Alice Neel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1983, 1995), 184.2. Ibid., 185.3. Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and The Worms (Harmondsworth, Eng.: PenguinBooks, 1976; 1982), xii–xv.4. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1980), 231.5. Paul Ricoeur, “The Metaphorical Process,” in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 142.Chapter 1. The Creation (of a) Myth (pp. 3–12)1. In Patricia Hills, Alice Neel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1983, 1995), 12.2. Ellen Landau, “Tough Choices: Becoming a Woman Artist, 1900–70,” in RandyRosen and Catherine C. Brawer, Making Their Mark: Women Artists Enter theMainstream (New York: Abbeville Press, 1988), 33.3. Lawrence Alloway, “Patricia Hills, Alice Neel” (review), Art Journal 44/2 (summer1984), 191–92.4. Hills, Alice Neel, 28.177

178 / Notes5. Transcript of Bloomsburg State College Lecture, March 21, 1972. Alice Neel papers,Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.6. Marcelo Pogolotti, Del Barro y las Voces (Mexico City, c. 1955), 191–223. In his accountof the early Cuban avant-garde, Pogolotti describes Neel as naive but exceptionallytalented. See also Gerald L. Belcher and Margaret L. Belcher, CollectingSouls, Gathering Dust: The Struggles of Two American Artists, Alice Neel and RhodaMedary (New York: Paragon House, 1991), ch. 1. In describing Neel at the PhiladelphiaSchool of Design for Women, the Belchers write: “At twenty-one years ofage, Alice still approached life tentatively. She had little experience with creativepeople . . .” (12).7. June Sochen, Enduring Values: Women in Popular Culture (New York: Praeger,1987), 61–62.8. So compelling was the image she forged that four biographical ƒlms were madeabout her. In addition, she conducted numerous TV and radio interviews, includingtwo appearances on the Johnny Carson Show in 1982 and 1983 where, even inher ƒnal illness, she was far more lively than Carson’s other guests. As she remarkedto the critic Harry Gaugh in 1978, “In a culture like ours, anything is better thananonymity.” Harry Gaugh, “Alice Neel,” Arts (May 1978), 9.9. Alice Neel lecture, Harvard University, March 1979. Oral History Collection,Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.10. If asked to vary her routine, Neel became evasive or even rude. When the artist KarlFortess taped an interview with her at Boston University in September 1975, he declaredin frustration: “I want to press you on your work. Please cut out your fascinatingpersonal life.” Neel responded with another anecdote. Questioned about herartistic sources, she claimed disingenuously that she “never looks at other artists.”Thus Neel the performance artist carefully concealed the tracks of Neel the painter,transforming a sophisticated and visually educated artist into an “original” and de-„ecting attention from the deeper issues her art raised. To be fair, she may havewanted not simply to distract the listener but also to mask her own pain. When Fortessasked her which of her teachers was most supportive of her work, Neel started tocry, and for a moment the long-suppressed emotional strain of forging an artistic careeron her own surfaced. Her nonstop patter perhaps kept both critics and her ownfeelings at bay. Karl Fortess’s taped interviews with artists, Oral History Collection,Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.11. This and most of the quotes in this paragraph are from Carolyn Heilbrun’s study ofthe genre of women’s autobiography; Writing a Woman’s Life (New York: W. W.Norton, 1988).12. Quoted in “Introduction” to Heilbrun’s Writing a Woman’s Life, 11.13. Hills, Alice Neel, 103.14. Heilburn, Writing a Woman’s Life, 17–18.Chapter 2. From Portraiture to Pictures of People (pp. 13–28)1. George Biddle, Reality 3 (summer 1955).2. Frank O’Hara, “having a coke with you,” 1959.

Notes / 1793. Emile de Antonio and Mitch Tuchman, Painters Painting: A Candid History of theModern Art Scene, 1940–1970 (New York: Abbeville, 1984), 126.4. The photographer-artist has occupied an intermediate ground, a terrain with shiftingboundaries, between the artworld, peopled by a small group of cognoscenti, andthe world of high-end commercial publishing, directed to a broader but welleducatedpublic. During the 1920s and 1930s, Edward Steichen’s portraits of Brancusior Jacob Epstein could appear in Vanity Fair along with his portraits of Hollywoodstars, musicians, novelists, journalists, and polititians. The visual artist therebytook his place among the realm of the country’s cultural elite. In the context of amonographic art book devoted to the work of Steichen, however, the portraitsweigh in as evidence of the photographer’s interpretation of the artist’s personality,that is, as the photographer’s artistic expression. Thus, the type of publication inwhich the portraits appeared served to deƒne the portrait photograph either as an illustrationof cultural ideals or as art.5. Barbaralee Diamonsteen, Inside New York’s Artworld (New York: Rizzoli, 1979), 254.6. Gerrit Henry, “The Artist and the Face, A Modern Sampling,” Art in America 63/1(January-February 1975), 40.7. Ibid., 34.8. Ibid., 40.9. Neel began in illustration, where her classes were taught by the muralist GeorgeHarding. A pupil of the well-known illustrator Howard Pyle, Harding had also studiedwith George Bellows at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Harding’sconservative work provides a tenuous link at best with the Ashcan School, however.Neel considered Paula Balano a more challenging teacher.10. Gerald L. Belcher and Margaret L. Belcher, Collecting Souls, Gathering Dust: TheStruggles of Two American Artists, Alice Neel and Rhoda Medary (New York: ParagonHouse, 1991), 19.11. Ibid.12. Patricia Hills, Alice Neel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1983; 1995), 15–17.13. Ibid., 21.14. William Innes Homer, Robert Henri and His Circle (Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress, 1969), 182. It is unlikely that Neel ever met Henri, as he died in 1929, shortlyafter Neel moved to New York City.15. The artists speciƒcally mentioned as exemplars of these principles were Velasquez,Hogarth, Goya, Daumier, Titian, Homer, Corot, Manet, and Cézanne. Degas andEakins do not appear in the book, although Ryerson and Homer assert with authoritythat he did hold them up as models.16. Robert Henri, The Art Spirit, ed. Margery Ryerson (New York: J. B. Lippincott,1923/1930), 80–81; 85–86.17. Edmond Duranty, “La Nouvelle Peinture” (1876), quoted in Carol Armstrong,Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1991), 76.18. Quoted in Hills, Alice Neel, 134.19. Ibid., 167.20. Henri, The Art Spirit, 10–11.

180 / Notes21. Hills, Alice Neel, 143.22. Ibid., 77.23. Annette Cox, Art-as-Politics: The Abstract Expressionist Avant-Garde and Society(Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1977; 1982), 19–20.24. Blacks appear in numerous genre scenes throughout nineteenth-century Americanart, usually in stereotyped roles. Henri was one of the ƒrst artists to paint portraits ofblacks, as individuals, with (ƒrst) names.25. Homer, Robert Henri and His Circle, 158.26. Henri, The Art Spirit, 215.27. Ibid., 95.28. Sheldon Nodelman, “How to Read a Roman Portrait,” Art in America 63/1 (January-February 1975), 28.29. Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991),110.30. Ibid., 68.31. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1980), 3.32. The authors cite a third category, structural metaphors, in which one concept isstructured in terms of another. These metaphors are inapplicable to the physicalmedium of painting.33. Ibid., 59.34. Hills, Alice Neel, 182–83.35. In her important discussion of Neel’s portrait conventions, “Alice Neel’s Fifty Yearsof Portrait Painting,” Studio International 193 (March 1977), Ellen H. Johnsonprovided a wonderful list of Neel’s animal metaphors: “She has herself remarkedthat the portrait of Virgil Thompson [sic], for example, suggests an elephant in itscolour and leatherish texture . . . The elegantly long, thin Kristen Walker looks likea Russian Wolf Hound . . . One sitter was disturbed when the artist inadvertentlyasked her to move her left ‘paw.’ About a well-known ƒgure, Alice Neel remarkedgleefully, ‘She looks like a ferret, doesn’t she?’ and of another, ‘His hands are like aracoon’s . . .’ She sees a man’s arms as a carp, a leg as a zucchini and a woman’s buttocksas the foot on a Queen Anne Chair” (179).36. Hills, Alice Neel, 167.37. Ibid., 141.38. Nancy M. Henley, Body Politics: Power, Sex and Non-Verbal Communication (EnglewoodCliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1977), 18.39. Ibid., 38.40. Gerald I. Nerenberg and Henry H. Calero, How to Read a Person Like a Book(1971), quoted in Henley, Body Politics, 126.41. Quoted in Fritz Graf, “The Gestures of Roman Actors and Orators,” in Jan Bremmerand Herman Roodenburg, eds., A Cultural History of Gesture (Ithaca: CornellUniversity Press, 1992), 41.42. Lynn F. Miller and Sally S. Swenson, Lives and Works: Talks with Women Artists(Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1981), 125.

Notes / 18143. Gombrich, “The Experiment in Caricature,” Art and Illusion (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1960), 355.44. Paul Enkman and Wallace Freisen, Unmasking the Face (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:Prentice Hall, 1975), 24–27.45. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 34.46. Ibid.47. Sanford Sivitz Shaman, “An Interview with Philip Pearlstein,” Art in America 69/7(September 1981), 122.Chapter 3. Starting Out from Home (pp. 29–41)1. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich,1929; 1957), 103–105.2. Sculley Bradley, Richmond Croom Beatty, and E. Hudson Long, eds., The AmericanTradition in Literature, vol. 2 (New York: W. W. Norton/Grosset and Dunlap,1967), 1027, 1029.3. Married in the summer of 1925, Alice, evidently con„icted about married life, didnot follow Carlos to Cuba until January 1926. According to the Belchers, after Santillanawas born on December 26, 1926, Neel “complained that Carlos’s familynever left her alone . . . [W]hen she relented and took her daughter to visit them,she was forced, despite her protests, to defer to their social mores and sit apart—with the women.” From their interviews, the Belchers draw the conclusion that“Her departure seems to have been an attempt to force him [Carlos] to choose between. . . the world of independence and the continued dependence on this fatherfor whatever income he received.” Gerald L. Belcher and Margaret L. Belcher,Collecting Souls, Gathering Dust: The Struggles of Two American Artists, Alice Neeland Rhoda Medary (New York: Paragon House, 1991), 83.4. Neel provided a narrative of her breakdown in her autobiography (Patricia Hills,Alice Neel [New York: Abrams, 1983], 29–40), which is summarized with greaterdetail and coherence in Belcher and Belcher, ch. 9.5. Charlotte Willard, “In the Art Galleries,” New York Post, (January 16, 1966).6. Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 28.7. Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in American Culture(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925; 1929), 129.8. James Patterson, America in the Twentieth Century: A History (San Diego: Harcourt,Brace, Jovanovich, 1989), 193.9. The Lynds noted that “It is perhaps impossible to overestimate the role of motionpictures, advertising and other forms of publicity in this rise in subjective standards. . . [A]dvertising is concentrating increasingly upon a type of copy aiming to makethe reader emotionally uneasy” (Ibid., 82). Lillian Breslow Rubin’s Worlds of Pain:Life in the Working-Class Family (New York: Basic Books, 1976) documents the factthat “in the working class, the process of building a family, of making a living for it,of nurturing and maintaining the individuals in it costs ‘worlds of pain.’” (215).

182 / Notes10. Neel was commissioned by their mutual friend Katherine Cole to paint Lynd’s portraitin 1969. Then on the faculty at Sarah Lawrence College, Lynd was to Neel a“lion,” and the artist gave her face the appearance of intelligence and strength sheneeded to rise, as a woman, to the top of her academic ƒeld.11. Perhaps for similar reasons, the regionalist painter Grant Wood would borrow thestiff poses and architectural conventions of Currier and Ives prints for some of hispaintings such as Dinner for Threshers (1933), a quite conscious parody of our culture’soversimpliƒed, idealized vision of farm life.12. Isabetta was born on November 24, 1928, at the Fifth Avenue Hospital where theWell-Baby Clinic was located.13. Susan Noyes Platt, Modernism in the 1920s: Interpretations of Modern Art in NewYork from Expressionism to Constructivism (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985),67.14. Rom Landau, “Modern Movements in German Art,” The Arts 14/1 (July 1928), 28.15. Neel must have learned about Munch’s work in the same way she absorbed thein„uence of German expressionism; through periodicals. Although Munch wasshown in the 1913 Armory Show, his paintings were not exhibited in this countryagain until 1950. However, publications available in English, from Julius Meier-Graefe’s 1907 Modern Art on, cited Munch as a precursor of expressionism, so nodoubt Neel was familiar with the artist. Although Gustav Schie„er’s two-volumecatalogue raisonné of Munch’s graphic work was published in Berlin in 1927, thereis no evidence that Neel had access to a copy.16. Hills, Alice Neel, 22.17. Michel Foucault, “The Birth of the Asylum,” from Madness and Civilization,(trans. Richard Howard [New York: Random House, 1965]), quoted in Paul Rabinow,ed., Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 159–60.18. Hills, Alice Neel, p. 37.19. The French surrealists are the obvious example here.20. Hills, Alice Neel, 32.21. From 1928 to 1930, Carlos, a Cuban aristocrat, tried to keep the family a„oat bytaking commercial art jobs. His parents also sent money, and promised to sendAlice and Carlos to Paris. On May 1, Carlos took Isabetta to Cuba for a visit so thatthey would be free to go to Paris. When, with the onset of the Depression, Carlos’sparents had to withdraw their offer, Carlos went on to Paris on his own. Accordingto Isabetta’s friend, Maria Diaz, Carlos felt that his actions were necessitated bywhat he felt was neglect of his child. During the winter of 1929 to 1930, Carloscame home to ƒnd Isabetta in her bassinet on the ƒre escape, slowly being coveredby the falling snow while Neel painted. For Alice, the loss of both her husband andher child was devastating. On August 15, having lost over twenty-ƒve pounds sinceCarlos left, she collapsed and was hospitalized.22. See, for example, Dick Polsky, interview with Alice Neel, tape no. 2, April 29, 1981,Oral History Collection, Butler Library, Columbia University. The quote is fromCindy Nemser, Art Talk (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975), 125.23. Poems such as Alice Walker’s “Now That the Book is Finished” (c. 1975) situatethe con„ict in the body, as did Alice Neel’s painting forty-eight years earlier: “Now

Notes / 183that the book is ƒnished / Now that I know my characters / will live / I can love mychild again / She need sit no longer / in the back of my heart / the lonely sucking ofher thumb / a giant stopper in my throat.”24. Lawrence Alloway, “Patricia Hills, Alice Neel” (review), Art Journal 44/2 (Summer1984), 191.25. Robert Storr, “Alice Neel at Robert Miller, Art in America 70/9 (October 1982),130.26. Lucy R. Lippard, “Introduction,” From the Center: feminist essays on women’s art(New York: Dutton, 1976), 6.Chapter 4. Art on the Left in the 1930s (pp. 45–66)1. The couple had met in 1924 at the Pennsylvania Academy’s summer school programin Chester Springs; they were married in the spring of 1925, but Neel refusedto accompany Carlos to Cuba until the following winter (see Gerald Belcher andMargaret Belcher, Collecting Souls, Gathering Dust: The Struggles of Two AmericanArtists, Alice Neel and Rhoda Medary [New York: Paragon House, 1989], 71–75).After overcoming her indecision, she found her stay in Cuba a seminal one. As sheconfessed to Hills: “My life in Cuba . . . conditioned me a lot.” Patricia Hills, AliceNeel (New York: Abrams, 1983, 1995), 21.2. Hills, Alice Neel, 33.3. Juan A. Martinez, Cuban Art and National Identity: The Vanguardia Painters,1920s–1940s (Ph.D. Diss., Florida State University, 1992), ch. 1.4. Ibid., 90.5. Ibid., 97.6. Marcelo Pogolotti, Del Barro Y Las Voces (Havana: Editorial Letras Bubas, 1982),n.p. My thanks to Prof. Lynette Bosch for translating the quoted passage.7. Letter from Neel to Robert Stewart at the National Portrait Gallery, summer 1969.8. These artists are discussed by Juan A. Martinez in “Cuban Vanguardia Painting inthe 1930s,” Latin American Art 5/2 (fall 1993), 36–38.9. John Dos Passos, “Margo Dowling,” The Big Money (New York: Harcourt, Brace,1933), 253.10. Two pieces of anecdotal evidence suggest that Neel never abandoned her “Cuban”identity. In 1983, she told Johnny Carson (and the television audience) that shehad moved to Spanish Harlem with José Santiago in 1939 in order “to correct themistakes I made with the ƒrst Latin.” During the 1960s or 1970s, after Carlos’sdeath and Isabetta’s emigration to Miami, Neel drafted a letter to Fidel Castro (c/othe Center for Cuban Studies in New York) praising his regime and requesting permissionto paint his portrait, explaining: “I have wanted for years to do a portrait ofyou for your government to give to the people of Cuba. My experience, my politicalallegiances as well as my work as a painter have been in„uenced by the same forcesas those which brought about the Cuban revolution . . .” [Draft of a letter at NeelArts, New York, New York.] Although the letter is undated, it may well be from thetime of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The June 1962 issue of Mainstream fea-

184 / Notestured a wooden bust of Castro by the Russian artist V. Telishev, and the confrontationbetween the United States and the Soviet Union that October may have precipitatedher note.11. While she was living in Cuba, Carlos had painted a ƒne portrait of the turn-of-thecenturyCuban revolutionary leader Jose Martí. For Neel, no doubt, Castro’s regimewas the realization of Martí’s vision of a Cuba independent of North Americanpolitical interference. Prevented by practical exigencies from portraying thiscommunist leader, she instead represented his martyred comrade, Che Guevara.An undated drawing inscribed “Aij-Aij-Aij” was no doubt done from the newpaperphotographs of Che Guevara’s corpse, circulated by the Bolivian government in1967 as proof of the guerilla leader’s death. As might be expected from her Cubanconditioning, Neel saw American imperialism at work in the charismatic Guevara’sdemise: “The Green Berets murdered him.” Hills, Alice Neel, 128.12. Matthew Baigell has written that although Herman Baron’s ACA gallery, whichwas speciƒcally devoted to politically engaged, left-wing art, was founded in 1932,Baron did not feel that social realism as a movement could be said to exist until afterJoe Jones’s exhibit there in 1935. Matthew Baigell, The American Scene: AmericanPainting of the 1930s (New York: Praeger, 1974), 58.13. The Communist Party will not release the dates of her membership, and a requestto the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act elicited the following bureaucraticevasion: “We have located documents which may pertain to your request andwill assign them for processing . . . In view of the large volume of requests on hand,delays in excess of one year are not uncommon.” Letter of February 4, 1994, fromJ. Kevin O’Brien, Chief, Information Resources Division, FBI. As this book goes topress, the FBI has still not answered my request.14. Among the canonical texts in her library are: Marx and Engels, The CommunistManifesto (1948 trans.); “Workers of the World Unite” (Literature of the CentralOrgan of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers, 1931); V. I. Lenin, TheState (1919); The War and the Second International (1930); Imperialism: The HighestStage of Capitalism (1939); Joseph Stalin, The Problems of Leninism (1934),Mao Tse-Tung, On Contradiction (1953). With thanks to Antonia Neel for compilingthis list.15. Annette T. Rubenstein, “The Cultural World of the Communist Party: An HistoricalOverview,” in New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism, ed.Michael E. Brown, et al. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993), 241.16. Irwin Granich (Mike Gold), “Towards Proletarian Art,” The Liberator 4/2 (February1921), 21–22.17. Barbara Melosh, Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New DealArt and Culture (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 95.18. Ibid., 14.19. Reviewing the exhibition for Art Front, Harold Rosenberg argued that the “socialcauses” that motivated van Gogh’s artistic expression can be better understood in1936 than they could in his own time: “in our own day, van Gogh might not havefound his original efforts to speak to the working people in whose society he lived soinconsistent with the movement of art . . . [T]hough van Gogh converted his art

Notes / 185into a language of temperament, he did so not through temperamental but throughsocial causes.” Harold Rosenberg, “Peasants and Pure Art,” Art Front 9 (January1936), 5–6.20. Hills, Alice Neel, 60.21. Stuart Davis, “Why an Artists’ Congress?,” in Matthew Baigell and Julia Williams,eds., Artists Against War and Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists Congress(Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 67–70 passim.22. E.G. (Emily Genauer), “New Fall Art Exhibits Featured by Tyros’ Promising Efforts,”New York World Telegram, September 12, 1936. The exhibiting artists, recipientsof honorable mention in a competitive exhibition of members of the AmericanArtists Congress, held at the ACA galleries June 15–30, 1936, were ElizabethOlds, Louise Nevelson, Amalia Ludwig, and Neel, all women.23. Hills, Alice Neel, 61. For its part, the United States Government would not recognizethe systematic extermination of European Jewry until 1944, with the establishmentof the War Refugee Board.24. Such blunt, unambiguous messages were revived in socially concerned art duringthe 1980s, in, for example, Judy Baca’s “We Fight Fascism Abroad and at Home,”which commemorates a 1940s struggle for equal housing in Los Angeles.25. Meyer Schapiro, “The Public Use of Art,” Art Front (November 1936), 10. In a recentissue of the Oxford Art Journal (17/1, 1994) devoted to Meyer Schapiro, AndrewHemingway (“Meyer Schapiro and Marxism in the 1930s,” pp. 13–29), andPatrica Hills (“1936: Meyer Schapiro, Art Front, and the Popular Front,” pp. 30–41) both argue that Schapiro’s criticism was the most coherent and consistently radicalMarxist criticism in the mid-1930s.26. Ibid., 6.27. Hills, Alice Neel, 36.28. “Migratory Intellectuals,” New Masses 21 (December 15, 1936), 27; quoted inHills, Alice Neel, 38.29. Ibid., 38.30. Garnet McCoy, “The Rise and Fall of the American Artist Congress,” Prospects 13(1988), 339.31. Philip Evergood, “Sure, I’m a Social Painter,” Magazine of Art (November 1943),259.32. Luis Quintanilla’s drawings of the war in Spain had been exhibited at the Museumof Modern Art in 1938.33. In 1940–1941, Jacob Lawrence also documented this death toll as part of his monumentalseries of sixty gouache paintings, “The Migration Series,” his visual historyof the exodus of the Negro from the rural South to northern cities after World WarI. No. 55 in the series depicts three men, their black triangular bodies carrying a tanrectangular cofƒn. Lawrence’s laconic text states the facts simply: “The Negro beingsuddenly moved from out of doors and cramped into urban life, contracted agreat deal of tuberculosis. Because of this the death rate was very high.” Image andtext reproduced in Elizabeth Hutton Turner, ed., Jacob Lawrence: The MigrationSeries (Washington, D.C.: Rappahannock Press in association with The PhillipsCollection, 1993), ƒg. 55.

186 / Notes34. Hills, Alice Neel, 53. Rahv’s “sidekick” was William Philips, whose pseudonym wasWallace (not Lionel) Phelps.35. Belcher and Belcher, Collecting Souls, 158.36. Solman was instrumental in keeping Neel on the WPA and in obtaining several exhibitionsfor her at the ACA gallery.37. Caroline Ware, Greenwich Village, 1920–1930, A Comment on American Civilizationin the Post-War Years (Boston: Houghton Mif„in, 1935), 5.38. Ibid., 85.39. Ibid., 235–40.40. Ibid., 424.41. Writing in 1935, Malcolm Cowley observed that the Lost Generation “had enjoyedthe beneƒts of the revolt against gentility, and its ƒnal limitations are revealed intheir careers. They had been liberated from the narrow standards that developed ata certain stage of American middle-class society. But a principal result of this liberationhad been to uproot them, to cut them off from the daily hopes and worries oftheir communities . . . They still saw the world as middle-class people . . . [T]heywere still as politically powerless as almost all the members of their class . . . [Theyounger novelists of the post-1930 generation, on the other hand,] were dealingwith textile or waterfront strikes or the struggles of the tenant farmers. It seems to methat no great new writers have as yet emerged . . . Yet there is promise everywhere.”Malcolm Cowley, “Postscript,” in After the Genteel Tradition (Carbondale and Edwardsville:Southern Illinois University Press, 1936, 1964), 178–79.42. Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-StalinistLeft from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill and London: University of NorthCarolina Press, 1987).43. “Books: Wineskin into Giant” (review of Putnam’s translation of Don Quixote),Time, October 3, 1949, 76–77; “Milestones,” Time, January 30, 1950. In France inthe 1920s, Putnam published translations of Rabelais, Pirandello, and Cocteau.Later, in 1947, he would write his own account of the Lost Generation, Paris WasOur Mistress: Memoirs of a Lost and Found Generation. Neel’s anecdotal history, asquoted in Hills, gets the dates of the last decade of his life wrong.44. Samuel Putnam, “Marxism and Surrealism,” Art Front 3/4 (March 1937), 11–12.45. “Max White,” in W. J. Burke and Will K. Howe, eds., American Authors and Books(New York: Crown Publishers, 1972), 451.46. Neel made two subsequent portraits of White, one in 1939, the other in 1961,where he sheds his proletarian guise.47. Joseph Mitchell, Joe Gould’s Secret (New York: Viking, 1965), 1–12 passim.48. For a description of the ƒrst-person narrative project see “Text From Federal Writers’Project,” in Harlem: Photographs by Aaron Siskind, 1932–1940, Ann Banks, ed.(Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art, 1990), 5–6.49. The project’s ambitious scope, far beyond that of the Writers’ Project, so intriguedMitchell that he felt it was his duty to assure that the Oral History was preserved andpublished. What followed was a cat and mouse game that ended after Gould’s dementeddeath in Pilgrim State Hospital on Long Island in 1957. Seven years later,Mitchell confessed that he had examined what little was extant and found there

Notes / 187only one repeated entry, the story of the death of Gould’s father, a prominent Bostonphysician. “The Oral History of Our Time” was nothing more than the wordsGould used to describe his project, a charade formulated to sustain an identity.50. Neel claims that Gould in fact requested to pose nude.51. In 1962, for instance, Hubert Crehan was obliged to remove it from the exhibitionhe had organized at Reed College. It was ƒrst published in the underground magazineMother in 1965. Linda Nochlin published a small black and white photographof the painting in her “seminal” essay “Eroticism and Female Imagery inNineteenth-Century Art,” in Woman as a Sex Object (ARTnews, 1972), 15, whereNochlin predicted that “The growing power of woman in the politics of both sexand art is bound to revolutionize the realm of erotic representation.” In 1973, JohnPerreault included it, along with Neel’s nude portrait of him, in an exhibit at theSchool of Visual Arts gallery at N.Y.U. However, in 1975, Gould was removed fromthe “Three Centuries of the American Nude” exhibition at New York’s CulturalCenter, and in the same year, at Neel’s exhibition at the Georgia Museum of Art,he appeared in the catalogue but not in the „esh.52. Sigmund Freud, “The Medusa’s Head,” quoted in Laura Mulvey, Visual andOther Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana Unversity Press, 1989), 6.53. Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 9.54. Neel’s portrait gallery is notable for its absence of women, and despite the presenceof writers of the stature of Kay Boyle and Meridel LeSueur in the community. However,Malcolm Cowley’s After the Genteel Tradition from 1936 did not discuss a singlewoman writer, nor, a half a century later, did Alan M. Wald’s New York Intellectuals(1987). The sole woman entrant was not part of Greenwich Village bohemia,but a WPA bureaucrat who is subjected to a vicious caricature lacking the subtletyof the Gould parody. Neel’s portrait of Audrey McMahon (1940) reduces the attractive,hard-working regional director of the WPA/FAP in New York City to a toothlesshag, with eye bags drooping to meet three stunted ƒngers on a rigid yardstick ofan arm. In 1938, when McMahon had written that “it is no longer essential . . . thatwe produce antiquated allegorical subjects . . . that we go in heavily for sweetnessand light,” she could have had no idea how literally one of the artists under her supervisionwould take that statement. Quoted in Lucy R. Lippard, “Empathy and Indignation,”Women Artists of the New Deal Era (Washington, D.C.: National Museumof Women in the Arts, 1988), 16. As Neel’s “boss” on the WPA, McMahonwas forced on more than one occasion to lower Neel’s wages as the result of cutbacksin the program. In his essay, “The Easel Division of the WPA Federal ArtProject,” in F. V. O’Connor, ed., The New Deal Art Projects: An Anthology of Memoirs(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1972), 119, Joseph Solmanwrites that, as head of the grievance committee of the Artists Union, he had to interveneto prevent Neel from being transferred to the teaching division.55. Neel did not use the device again until the late 1960s, in her portrait of the theatricalproducer Joseph Papp.56. In the preface to his 1956 book of collected poems, which includes an extended polemicagainst McCarthyism and censorship in the media, Fearing acknowledged

188 / Noteshis debt to Marxism. In a statement again applicable to Neel’s portrait gallery, hesaid he was writing “about the people and events of this time and this place, throughimaginary characters and transposed circumstances, all of it coming in the end toan expression of the changing relationships between people in varied crises ...”Kenneth Fearing, “Preface,” New and Selected Poems (Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress, 1956), xxiii.57. This is not the Daily Worker headline for that date, but the paper had been ƒlledwith discussions of strikes during the previous months.58. Hills, Alice Neel, 64–65.59. Bruce Nelson, “Introduction,” Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremenand Unionism in the 1930s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 1, 5.60. Ibid., see ch. 3, “Red Unionism: The Communist Party and the Marine WorkersIndustrial Union.” Founded in 1930, the Marine Workers Industrial Union contributedgreatly to the era of insurgency between 1933 and 1935. The MWIU triedunsuccessfully to end the ethnic particularlism of the docks, which was maintainedby the International Longshoreman Union’s head, Joseph P. Ryan. As part of its callfor the end of racial and ethnic particularism, the MWIU fought actively for therights of black workers.61. Ibid., 89–90.62. Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, The American Communist Party (New York: Praeger,1957), 458.63. Herman Bahr’s Expressionism, the earliest text on expressionism, had been translatedinto English in 1920; in 1934, the American critic Sheldon Cheney publishedExpressionism in Art.64. Charmion von Wiegand, “Expressionism and Social Change,” Art Front 2/10(November 1936), 12.65. J. K., (Jacob Kainen), “Exhibitions and Reviews,” Art Front 2/11 (December 1936),16.66. Jacob Kainen, “Our Expressionists,” Art Front 3/1 (February 1937), 15.67. For a more sophisticated discussion of this subject, see Ernst Bloch, “Discussing Expressionism”(1938), in Aesthetics and Politics: The Key Texts of the Clasic DebateWithin German Marxism, ed. Fredric Jameson (London: Verso, 1977; 1980), 22.68. Von Wiegand’s essay is cited in Virginia Hagelstein Marquart, “Art on the PoliticalFront...” Art Journal 52/1 (spring 1993), 80.69. For a thorough history of The Ten, which includes a brief discussion of The NewYork Group, see Isabelle Dervaux, Avant-Garde in New York, 1935–1939: The Ten,Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1992.70. Neel was included in von Wiegand’s article on the expressionist movement, but notin Kainen’s. However, Kainen obviously recognized Neel’s importance by includingher in the group.71. Dervaux, The Ten, 12.72. “The New York Group,” ACA gallery exhibition brochure, May 23–June 4, 1938.Special Collections, Museum of Modern Art library, New York.73. I have not traced the two other paintings, “La Bailarina,” and “Golden Boy,” whichI assume are portraits.

Notes / 18974. J.L., “New Exhibitions of the Week: First Showing by a New & Democratic Artists’Group,” ARTnews 36/36 (June 4, 1938), 13.75. “New Exhibitions of the Week: Three Dramatic Shows Establish the Greatness ofKathe Kollwitz,” ARTnews 36/33 (May 14, 1938), 13.76. Hills, Alice Neel, 77.77. Kenneth Fearing’s proletarian introduction added expressionist tone but no content:“They are as savage, as primitive, as man is in today’s civilization; as civilized,as sensitive, as the individual is against the contemporary background of sheerchaos.” “The New York Group,” ACA gallery exhibition brochure, February 5–18,1939.78. Jacob Kainen, “Social Painting and the Modern Tradition,” unpublished typescriptpresented at ACA gallery, New York, February 10, 1939; quoted in Harry Rand,“Notes and Conversations: Jacob Kainen,” Arts 53/4 (December 1978), 139.79. Ibid., 140.80. Avis Berman, “Images from a Life,” in Jacob Kainen (Washington, D.C.: NationalMuseum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1993), 21.81. It may have appeared that Neel would fare better apart from the New York Group,for she was given her ƒrst one-person show at the Contemporary Arts gallery on57th Street in May 1938, at the same time her work was included in the ƒrst NewYork Group exhibit. Neel was also included in at least four group exhibitions at ContemporaryArts, Inc., between 1938 and 1941, such as “Twenty Artists Look NorthFrom Radio City” (May-June, 1938) and “The Painters Paint Each Other” (June1939); “Miscellaneous Papers,” AAA reel NAAA3/173–217. Founded in 1931 byEmily Francis, the gallery was devoted to “the introduction in New York and thesponsoring of mature American artists”; it also fostered sales for the “sponsoredgroup” through its afƒliation, the “Collectors of American Art.” After 1941, Neel isno longer listed as one of the “sponsored artists.” Despite the fact that Joseph Solman,Mark Rothko, and John Kane had their ƒrst shows there, the gallery’s “sponsored”roster did not include any of the prestigious names carried by the ACA: PhilipEvergood, Joe Jones, William Gropper, who were identifed with Social Realism.Contemporary Arts, Inc., papers, Archives of American Art, D226, frames 600ff.82. Telephone interview with Joseph Solman, October 5, 1993.Chapter 5. The Cold War Battles (pp. 67–89)1. Quoted in Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, The American Communist Party: A CriticalHistory (New York: Praeger, 1957), 245.2. Norman Barr, “Statement of Purpose: United American Artists,” Charles Kellerpapers, AAA 7/739.3. “From Rockwell Kent, President of the United American Artists,” The New YorkArtist 1/3–4 (May-June 1940), 10.4. Elizabeth McCausland, “Two Gallery Exhibits of United American Arists,” TheNew York Artist 1/3–4 (May-June 1940), 6. “Its aesthetic values are compelling becauseits roots are deep in social integration.”

190 / Notes5. Robert Shaffer, “Women and the Communist Party,” Socialist Review 45 (May-June 1979), 95.6. Increasingly embattled after 1940, it lost its union accreditation in 1942, emergingas the Artists League of America. Although the ALA continued to hold annual exhibitionsuntil 1948, its membership gradually declined as its cause retreated everfurther from view, until in a letter of August 23, 1948, to Daniel Koerner, RockwellKent suggested, “Let’s liquidate our assets in booze.” Daniel Koerner papersAAA1337/880. For information on United American Artists and the Artists Leagueof America see Lynd Ward papers, AAA4466/108–354; Charles Keller papersAAA7/591–740; Daniel Koerner papers, AAAN70–40/499–567; AAA1337/551–1028. For an excellent history of the trade union movement in American art seeGerald M. Monroe, “Artists as Militant Trade Union Workers During the GreatDepression,” Archives of American Art Journal 14/1 (spring 1974), 7–10.7. Letter of September 1943 from Joseph Solman to Jacob Kainen, Jacob Kainen papers,AAA565, 0170–0193.8. Anon., “The Passing Shows,” Art News 42/3 (March 15–31, 1944), 20.9. “Well, the mystery w/ WPA is cleared up. all the oils stored in King St. & adjacentwarehouses showed up in a second hand bric a brac shop down on Canal St . . . Ihurried down, recovered four really good ones of mine as well as several for [Mervyn]Jules, Louis Nisonoff & Alice Neel . . . Most of the stuff still lies in back of hisjunk shop on the „oor without beneƒt of stretchers—just one huge cofƒn.” Lettersof February 26, 1939, September 1943, and January 1944 from Joseph Solman toJacob Kainen, Jacob Kainen papers, AAA565, 0170–0193.10. Kenneth Fearing, The Big Clock (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1946), 153–56 passim.11. Ibid., 47–50.12. Ibid.13. Philip Evergood, “Sure, I’m a Social Painter,” Magazine of Art 36 (October 1943),257.14. Anon., “The Passing Shows.” Unfortunately, this review cannot be attributed to theyoung Hilton Kramer, but it anticipates by thirty years the main points of his scathingreview of her Whitney Museum exhibition in 1974.15. According to Irving Howe, “In its origins the line that America was approachingfascism re„ected the need of Russia to revile its main enemy in the cold war. Asapplied by the party this line was supposed to bind the ranks during a time of troubles.”Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, The American Communist Party (New York:Praeger, 1957), 457.16. Gropper, for instance, was called before the McCarthy Committee on May 6,1953, where the stoolpigeon Harvey Matusow testiƒed that Gropper was a communist.Later that year, the Cranbrook Academy canceled their scheduled Gropper exhibition.The artist’s response to this censorship by a respected arts institution was aseries of prints titled after Goya’s Capriccios. Like Neel’s The Stoolpigeon, The Informers(1953–1956) from this series visualizes the perversion of the truth in termsof exaggerated caricature. Louis Lozowick no doubt summarized their collectiveopinion when he wrote that “informers are the most despised of all groups in currentsociety.” Norma Shiela Steinberg, “William Gropper: Art and Censorship

Notes / 191from the 1930s through the Cold War Era,” Ph.D. dissertation, Boston University,1994, 151.17. Telephone conversation with Nancy Stewart, Information Resources Division, FBI,May 24, 1995.18. Ibid., 87.19. Donald Drew Egbert, Socialism and American Art (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1967), 126.20. V. J. Jerome, Culture in a Changing World: A Marxist Approach, (New York: NewCentury Publishers, 1947), 46.21. Ibid., 90–91.22. She told Pat Hills the following story: “After V. J. Jerome came out of the LewisburgFederal Penitentiary I went to his home. He told the story of how he went intoLewisburg, and they gave him the mattress of Remington who was murdered byother prisoners because he was a Communist. They said to him: ‘Here, take thisbloody mattress . . . and mind your P’s and Q’s.’” Patricia Hills, Alice Neel (NewYork: Harry N. Abrams, 1983), 87.23. Irving Howe, the editor of Dissent, called it “unin„uential,” and Paul Buhle describedit as “hard to read and hardly worth the effort.” (Paul Buhle, Marxism in the UnitedStates: Remapping the History of the American Left (London: Verso, 1987), 198.24. “The Editors” (Samuel Sillen), “Preface for Today,” Masses & Mainstream 1/1(March 1948), 3–4.25. In the May 1949 issue, for instance, the well-known Soviet author Alesander A. Fadeyevcalled for a literature whose narratives charted an inevitable progress towardthe socialist state: “What is socialist realism? Socialist realism is the ability to presentlife in its development . . . The characters in these books and plays . . . in theireveryday, ordinary and yes creative activity . . . do not drift, they anticipate the morrowand bring it nearer.” Alexander A. Fadeyev. “Our Road to Realism,” Masses &Mainstream 2/5 (May 1949), 56.26. Charles Humboldt, “Communists in Novels: II,” Masses & Mainstream 2/7 (July1949), 64.27. The Marxist group was put off as well by his hypocrisy: the dogmatist collectedmodern art.28. Interview with Annette Rubinstein, September 17, 1993.29. Annette Rubinstein, “The Cultural World of the Communist Party: An HistoricalOverview,” in Michael E. Brown, et al., eds., New Studies in the Politics and Cultureof U.S. Communism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993), 157, 159.30. Alice Neel, “Editors,” Masses & Mainstream 8/7 (July 1955), 62–63.31. For example, in his “Open Letter to Soviet Painters,” in the April 1956 issue ofMasses & Mainstream, David Alfaro Siqueiros stated bluntly what Neel had phrasedobliquely. Speaking as a member of the Communist Party since 1923, Siqueiros arguedthat “Realism . . . cannot be a ƒxed formula, an immutable law . . . Realismcan only be a means to ever progressing creativity.” Having lost sight of that essentialprinciple, Soviet art perpetuated “representational styles already passé, for examplethe styles employed in American advertising at the beginning of the century.”David Alfaro Siqueiros, “Open Letter to Soviet Painters,” Masses & Main-

192 / Notesstream 9/3 (April 1956), 3. J. P. Marquand has also noted the similarities betweenSoviet socialist realism and American capitalist realism in Advertising the AmericanDream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–40 (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1985).32. Bonosky interview.33. Neel painted a portrait of Bonosky at that time.34. The ƒrst published illustration was for “A Walk to the Moon,” in the April 10, 1949,issue of the Daily Worker. The ƒrst Masses & Mainstream illustration was for “TheWishing Well” (May 1949), the second for “I Live on the Bowery,” (January 1951).Her one political illustration, Relief Check, was published in Masses & Mainstreamin April 1950.35. The story became a chapter of Jews Without Money (New York: New Century Publishers,1980).36. The Twelve included Eugene Dennis, Councilman Benjamin J. Davis, and GusHall. A second trial in 1951 that indicted and convicted twenty-one others, sentV. J. Jerome to prison. Egbert, Socialism, 126.37. Charles Humboldt, “Books in Review: Trial by Stoolpigeon” (review of GeorgeMarion, “The Communist Trial: An American Crossroads.) Masses & Mainstream2/12 (December 1949), 66–67.38. Joseph North, “The Trial of the Twelve: Justice, Inc.,” Masses & Mainstream 2/4(April 1949), 10–11.39. The Editors, “Ella Reeve Bloor, 1892–1951,” Masses & Mainstream 4/9 (September1951), 3.40. Shaffer, “Women and the Communist Party,” 92.41. Paul Buhle, Marxism in the United States, 99.42. Interestingly, Frida Kahlo made a similar comment in one of her last paintings,Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick (1954), painted shortly before Kahlo’s lastpublic appearance in a communist demonstration in Mexico City on July 2, 1954,which protested the ouster of Guzman. Beyond their shared commitment to communism,both artists retained a contempt for the Big Brother policies of the UnitedStates. Neel’s painting is reproduced in Rob A. Okun, ed., The Rosenbergs: CollectedVisions of Artists and Writers (New York: Universe Books, 1988), pl. 20.43. Gerald Horne, “Civil Rights Congress,” in Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and DanGeorgakas, The Encyclopedia of the American Left (New York and London: Garland,1990), 134.44. Idem.45. Addressed to the General Assembly of the United Nations under the Convention ofthe Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide adopted by the GeneralAssembly of the United Nations of December 11, 1946, the introduction to the 200-page document argued: “Seldom has mass murder on the score of ‘race’ been sosanctiƒed by law . . .” The Civil Rights Congress, “We Charge Genocide!” Masses& Mainstream 4/5 (May 1951), 22–23.46. Igor Golomstock has identiƒed four categories of Socialist Realist portraiture: theleader as Fuhrer, the leader as inspirer, the leader as wise teacher, and the leader as

Notes / 193a man (who loves children). Igor Golomstock, Totalitarian Art (New York: Harper-Collins, 1990), 230–31.47. Tony Safford, “Interview with Sam Brody,” Jump Cut 14 (1977), 28.48. These ƒlms were restored in 1982 and are in the ƒlm library of the Museum ofModern Art in New York. Information on the League is compiled in the Tom Brandonƒles.49. Safford, “Interview with Sam Brody,” 29.50. Ibid., 30. In the same issue of Jump Cut, Leo Seltzer described Brody as “somewhatof a writer and a talker and a screamer. Those who did most of the ƒlming, editingand screening were Del Duca, Balog and I.” Ibid., 31.51. Ibid., 29.52. “Horizon Films Presents ‘Of These Our People,’” „ier in the archives of the NationalCenter for Jewish Film, Brandeis University. With thanks to the Center’s director,Sharon Rivo, for providing me with this material.53. Ibid., 58.54. His description of the patrician Edmund Wilson ascending the “proletarian ‘bandwagon’ with the arrogance of a myopic, high-bosomed Beacon Hill matron enteringa common street-car” is unforgettable. For his part, Wilson was quite measuredin his assessment of Gold.55. Buhle, et al., Encyclopedia of the American Left, 414.56. Mike Gold, “Foreword” to catalog of Alice Neel exhibition, New Playwright’s Theatre,1951, in scrapbook 1, Neel Arts, New York City.57. It is hardly coincidental that the vicissitudes of their careers are parallel. In the1950s and 1960s, neither artist enjoyed favorable critical reception, but by the1970s and 1980s, neo-Marxist and/or feminist critics had begun the process of reevaluationand reassessment. In 1961, in an important early history of Americanproletarian literature, Writers on the Left, Daniel Aaron concluded that communistwriters such as Gold produced little more than “journalistic ephemera.” DanielAaron, Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (New York,Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961), 393. Thirty years later, in Left Letters: The CultureWars of Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman, James Bloom found that the densityand complexity of Gold’s prose demonstrated a “subtle sophisticated cultural politics[that] belies the surviving image of him as a primitive sentimentalist, merely aCommunist Party mouthpiece.” James D. Bloom, Left Letters: The Culture Wars ofMike Gold and Joseph Freeman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 21,23. A contemporary of Bloom, Morris Dickstein, in his 1990 essay “The Tenementand the World: Visions of Immigrant Life,” also countered the received opinionthat Gold was a bad stylist: “I came to realize that his abrupt, impacted sentencesand paragraphs were long-limbed lines of prose-poetry . . . Gold was the missinglink between the plebian Whitman, whom he idolized, and the youthful AllenGinsberg, who must have read him as a Young Communist in the 1930s or early’40s.” In William Boelhower, ed., The Future of American Modernism: Ethnic WritingBetween the Wars (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1990), 68–69.58. Frederick Ted Castle, “Interview with Alice Neel,” Artforum (October 1983); re-

194 / Notesprinted in Alice Neel: Paintings Since 1970 (Philadelphia: The Pennsylvania Academyof the Fine Arts, 1985), n.p.59. In Samuel Sillen, ed., The Mike Gold Reader (New York: International Publishers,1954), 28.60. Art Shields, “Pittsburgh: Peace on Trail,” Masses & Mainstream 4/4 (April 1951),18, 21.61. In 1959, when the McKie Memorial Library was opened in Dearborn, Neel sent theportrait to the dedication ceremonies. Correspondence with Lou Leny, Secretary,McKie Memorial Library, Dearborn, Michigan, April 3, 1959; undated letter from1960; Neel correspondence, Neel Arts, New York City. A document of the historyof the U.S. labor movement, McKie’s portrait should ideally be placed with his papers.62. Neel did ask Annette Rubinstein to sit for her, but the writer did not have the time.63. Not until 1974, when they were mainstream issues, did the CPUSA create theWomen for Racial and Economic Equality to address equality of opportunity andpay for women. See Rosalyn Baxandall, “The Question Seldom Asked: Women andthe CPUSA,” in Brown, et al., New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism,158.64. Margrit Reiner, “The Fictional American Woman: A Look at Some Recent Novels,”Masses & Mainstream 5/6 (June 1952), 10.65. Alice Childress, “Florence,” Masses & Mainstream 3/10 (October 1950), 34–47.66. Childress was to enjoy increasing recognition: she was given the Obie Award forTrouble in Mind in 1956 and voted into the Black Filmmaker’s Hall of Fame in1977. In the preface to the second edition of Of Woman Born, Adrienne Rich citesthe literary achievements of women of color, praising “Florence” for its depiction ofa mother who is “ƒercely determined to support her daughter’s aspirations in a worldwhich wants her daughter to be nothing but a domestic worker.” Adrienne Rich,“Ten Years Later: A New Introduction,” Of Woman Born (New York: W. W. Norton,1986), xxv.67. In the April 1955 Masses & Mainstream, Charles White’s autobiographical “Path ofa Negro Artist” voiced the author’s frustration when in high school in Chicago heasked about Frederick Douglass, or mentioned the painters Bannister and Tanner:“My teachers answered smugly and often angrily. The histories from which wewere taught, they would say, were written by competent people, and whatever theydid not mention was simply not important enough to mention.” Charles White,“The Path of a Negro Artist,” Masses & Mainstream 8/4 (April 1955), 36.68. Letter of Oct. 31, 1958, from Mike Gold to Alice Neel, Neel correspondence, NeelArts, New York City.69. The four untitled drawings were published in the June 1958 issue.70. The editors remained the old guard: Charles Humboldt, Aptheker, Bonosky, Gellert,Lawson. There were more women on the list—Barbara Giles, Meridel LeSueur, Annette T. Rubinstein, and Shirley Graham—but who precisely the “snootyoung intellectuals” were is impossible to say.71. Both share a disdain for American materialism that marks Gold’s “120 Million”(1929) as the predecessor of Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1955–1956). Both pummel theears with a rhythmic barrage of short, declarative phrases and rhetorical questions

Notes / 195designed to jolt the reader out of complacency. Gold: “They told me to love mycountry, America. / But where is America? . . . America, I cannot worship yourMoney god / This monster whose heart is a Ford Car / Whose brain is a cheap HollywoodMovie / Whose cities are mad mechanical nightmares.” Mike Gold, “120Million,” in 120 Million (New York: International Publishers, 1929), 191. Ginsberg:“Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is runningmoney! Moloch whose ƒngers are ten armies!” Allen Ginsberg, “Howl,” in CollectedPoems, 1947–1980 (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 131.72. For a comparison of Gold and Ginsberg see Dickstein, “The Tenement and theWorld,” 71–72.73. Hills, Alice Neel, 118–19.74. Michael Gold, “The Happy Corpse,” in “Spring in the Bronx,” Masses & Mainstream5/7 (July 1952), 17.75. From the eulogy by Hank Starr, Daily World, June 21, 1974.76. He was also a member of the American Society for the Study of the German DemocraticRepublic, which once owned the portrait. Newsletter for the American Societyfor the Study of the German Democratic Republic 1/1 (October 1979). Neelarchives, Neel Arts, New York City.77. Anthony Tommasini, “A Critic’s Creed: Plug Yourself and Your Fellow Americans,”New York Times, August 21, 1994.78. Lawrence Alloway, “The Renewal of Realist Criticism,” Art in America 68/7(September 1981), 110.79. May Stevens, “The Non-Portrait Work of Alice Neel,” Women’s Studies, an InterdisciplinaryJournal (London, 1978), 64.80. Moses would die the year after the portrait was completed, but Raphael would outliveNeel by three years.81. Barbaralee Diamonsteen, Inside New York’s Artworld (New York: Rizzoli, 1979),374.82. Milton Brown, “Interview with Raphael Soyer,” 38.83. Unlike Neel, he avoided the male nude, which he confessed embarrassed him. Diamonsteen,Inside, 379.84. Brown, “Interview,” 65.85. Letter from Gus Hall to Neel, February 5, 1982. Neel correspondence, Neel Arts,New York City.86. Michael Riley, “Proƒle: Last of the Red-Hot Believers,” Time, September 9, 1991.87. Benny Andrews and Rudolf Baranik, eds., “Foreword,” The Attica Book (New York:The Black Emergency Cultural Coalition and Artists and Writers Protest Againstthe War in Vietnam, 1972).88. Stevens, “The Non-Portrait Work of Alice Neel.”89. Interviews with Rudolph Baranik and May Stevens, New York City, March 5, 1991and October 12, 1993. The artists do not claim credit for their support of Neel, butthe credit is unquestionably due.90. Appropriately enough, Neel’s art appeared ƒrst in an anthology of literature: JerreMangione, The Federal Writers Project, 1935–1943, The Dream and the Deal(Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1972), which was illustrated with her portraits

196 / Notesof Sam Putnam, Joe Gould, and Kenneth Fearing, and which Neel herself reviewedfor the Daily World. Alice Neel, “WPA Writers Project Seen as Success, DespiteRightists,” Daily World, November 11, 1972. She was included in importantexhibitions such as the extensive “New York City WPA Art” at the Parsons Schoolof Design in 1977, Patricia Hills’s “Social Concern and Urban Realism” in 1983,and “Women Artists of the New Deal” at the National Musem of Women in theArts in 1988. She was also included in exhibitions of the politics of the 1930s to the1950s: Irving Howe’s “Images of Labor” (1981); Philip S. Foner and ReinhardSchultz’s “The Other America: Art and the Labour Movement in the UnitedStates” (1985, Germany); and Rob A. Okun’s “Unknown Secrets: Art and the RosenbergEra” (1988). The Foner-Schultz exhibit included Nazis Murder Jews, UneedaBiscuit Strike, and Pat Whalen.91. Typescript (undated) by Anton Refregier of Foreword to catalog of “AmericanArtists Gift Exhibition.” ACA gallery papers, Archives of American Art, D304, 1093.Among the artists in the exhibition were Anton Refregier, Philip Evergood, FredEllis, William Gropper, Frank Kleinholz, Joseph Hirsch, Alex Dobkin, Sarai Sherman,Abram Tromka, Antoney Toney, Mervyn Jules, Charles Keller, RockwellKent, Raphael Soyer, Abraham Harriton, Moses Soyer, Philip Reisman, MorrisKriensky, Gerrit Hondius, Gladys Rockmore Davis, Nicoli Cikovsky, Neel, HarryGottlieb, David Burliuk, and Paul Sample. Neel’s statement for the brochure emphasizedher Spanish Harlem work: “I live . . . in a neighborhood where there aremany Puerto Ricans and I have painted many pictures of them. I have painted theold and the young, the young writers and poets, and the working people” (3).92. From the Moscow Writer’s Union in 1959 he wrote: “You asked me to tell you thereal truth about the U.S.S.R.—as far as I am concerned, I am quite at home here.”Neel correspondence, Neel Arts, New York City.93. For example, Eva Cockcroft, 1974; David and Cecile Schapiro, 1977; Serge Guilbaut,1980; the authors are not speciƒcally cited, however. [Philip Bonosky, Introduction],“Alice Neel,” exhibition catalog, Soviet Artists Union, July 9–31, 1981;trans. Thompson Bradley (Russian to English), typescript, Neel Arts, New York City.94. In her interview with Susan Ortega, Neel echoed Bonosky: “The Soviet Unionwants peace and friendship and Brezhnev has offered any number of times to talk tothis country . . . This country is now warlike and a threat to the world. Reagan saidthe government doesn’t owe anybody anything. In the Soviet Union you get freemedical care—everything is free. There the government owes you everything.” SusanOrtega, “Art for Detente,” [1981], Daily World. Neel scrapbook 4, Neel Arts,New York City.95. An editorial, “United, Multinational,” published in Pravda on May 19, anticipatedthe tedious speechmaking that would take place six weeks later at the Seventh RepublicWriters Congress at the Writers Union, which coincidentally opened onJune 30, one week before Neel’s exhibit opened at the Artists Union. As articulatedby Georgiy Mokeyevich Markov, ƒrst secretary of the USSR Writers Union: “Thesphere of artistic creativity is an arena of keenest ideological struggle . . . True patriotsof their socialist homeland, our literary and artistic ƒgures . . . are heralds ofpeace and progess and ƒghters against all forms of reaction and fascism. Socialist re-

Notes / 197alist art, permeated by humanism and historical optimism, counters the bourgeoiswest’s ‘mass culture,’ which tramples human dignity and sows disbelief in man’sstrength and future.” Translated in Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FIBIS),“Pravda Editorial on the Role of Artistic Criticism,” Daily Report: Soviet Union,June 9, 1981.96. One short review appeared in the art journal Iskusstvo, (Art) as part of an overview ofall the summer 1981 offerings. It summarized her subject matter and praised herrealist style. “In Moscow,” the reviewer concluded, “she and friends met true appreciatorsof realist art” (no. 9, 1981, p. 76). I thank Pam Kachurin for locating thisreview, which I had overlooked, and for providing the translation. Although the reactionof the art critics was minimal, Neel was interviewed on television, and so,ironically, her persona instead of her work reached a wide audience. Nancy Neel,who along with her husband and children accompanied Neel to the U.S.S.R., reportsthat the crowds at the exhibit were consistently large, and that a TV interviewhad a wide audience as well. There were no reviews in Dekorativenoe iskusstvo orKhudozhnik Itvo. Pravda [July 10, 1981?] provided a brief notice.97. Margarita Tupitsyn, “U-Turn of the U-topian,” in David Ross, et al., Between Springand Summer: Soviet Conceptual Art in the Era of Late Communism (Cambridge,Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1990), 36.98. Lucy Lippard, “Introduction: Art and Ideology,” New Museum of ContemporaryArt, quoted in Hilton Kramer, “Turning Back the Clock,” in The Revenge of thePhilistine: Art and Culture, 1972–84 (New York: The Free Press, 1985), 386.Chapter 6. El Barrio (pp. 90–108)1. Louisa Randall Church, “Parents—The Architects of Peace,” American Home (November1946), quoted in Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound (New York: BasicBooks, 1988), 135.2. Ibid., 208.3. Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (Baltimore:Penguin Books, 1962), 10, 12.4. Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man (1952) (New York: Vintage International, 1990),3, 14.5. See Joseph P. Fitzpatrick, Puerto Rican Americans: The Meaning of Migration tothe Mainland (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1971), and Dan Wakeƒeld,Island in the City: The World of Spanish Harlem (Boston: Houghton Mif„in, 1959).6. “Not accepted as white, reluctant to be classed as Negroes, they were clinging to everythingthat gave them identity as Puerto Ricans . . . The colored Puerto Rican isidentiƒed primarily as Puerto Rican, not as a Negro.” Fitzpatrick, Puerto RicanAmericans, 108–109.7. Guillen provided the following example: “Much of what we know about a greatNegro woman [‘La Bayamesa’] who was in charge of well-functioning ƒeld hospitalsduring our War of Independence, we owe to a Yankee journalist.” NicholasGuillen, “Havana to New York,” Masses & Mainstream 2/6 (June 1949), 61–62.

198 / Notes8. Meyer Schapiro, “Race, Nationality and Art,” Art Front 2/4 (March 1936), 10–11.9. Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltƒsh, “The Races of Mankind” (1943), reprinted inRuth Benedict, Race, Science and Politics (New York: Viking Press, 1947), 171.10. Ibid., 188. Because it praised the Russian nation for outlawing prejudice by “welcomingdifferences while refusing to treat them as inferiorities,” the House MilitaryAffairs subcommittee charged in early 1944 that the text was ƒlled with “all thetechniques . . . of Communistic propaganda” (167).11. Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism (New Haven: Yale University Press,1993), 99.12. Gerald Meyer, “Puerto Ricans,” in Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas,Encyclopedia of the American Left (New York: Garland, 1990), 614.13. Ibid.14. Patricia Cayo Sexton, Spanish Harlem: An Anatomy of Poverty (New York: Harper& Row, 1965), 106.15. Oscar Lewis, La Vida (New York: Random House, 1965), xliv.16. Ibid., xlvi.17. Sexton, Spanish Harlem, 176.18. Meyer, “Puerto Ricans,” 614.19. Jesus Colón, “José,” in A Puerto Rican in New York (New York: Mainstream Publishers,1961), 89.20. Lewis, La Vida, xlvi, lii.21. Langston Hughes’s play The Mulatto (1935) is a prominent example.22. Cyril Burt, The Backward Child (1937), quoted in Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasureof Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 281.23. Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 54.24. After 1974, when Arce was in jail for the murder of his business partner, he maintaineda regular correspondence with Neel, calling her his second mother and regularlysending Hallmark cards for birthdays, Christmas, and Mother’s Day. Neelkept all of his letters on her mantel. The sentimental tone of his notes—“My loveand regards to the whole family and as always may God keep you in his care andBless you with Happiness always!”—is in jarring opposition to the action that led tohis incarceration. Arce taught himself law, in order to try to assist in his own defense,but he was still imprisoned at the time of Neel’s death. Neel’s comments onone of his notes requesting that she send him law books indicates that she felt“reasonable doubt” about his guilt: “when he realized that American Airlines paid$20,000 to a lawyer to defend an overweight stewardess case, Georgie’s appeal lawyerappeared even more inadequate when one realized it was a jail sentence of fromthirty years to life, Bellvue and Islip.” Letter from Georgie Arce to Alice Neel, Dec.30, 1974, Neel correspondence, Neel Arts, New York City.25. Piri Thomas, Down These Mean Streets (New York: Signet Books, 1967), 145.26. Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression (Urbana: Universityof Illinois Press, 1983), 303.27. Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: Morrow, 1961), 221.28. Ibid., 213.

Notes / 19929. Morris Dickstein, Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties (New York: PenguinBooks, 1977, 1989), 156.30. Idem.31. Patricia Hills, Alice Neel (New York: Abrams, 1983, 1995), 116.32. Andrew Hemingway, “The Critical Mythology of Edward Hopper,” Prospects 17(1992), 384–85.33. Guy Pène du Bois, Edward Hopper (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art,American Artists Series, 1931), 12.34. Hemingway, “The Critical Mythology,” 396.35. Ibid., 399.36. Schapiro, “Race, Nationality and Art,” 10, 12.37. Michael Gold (Irwin Granich), “Towards Proletarian Art,” Liberator 4 (February1921), 20–21.38. Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1985), 238.39. Raymond Ledrut, “Speech and the Silence of the City,” in The City and the Sign:An Introduction to Urban Semiotics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986),133.40. Quoted in Bloom, Left Letters, 79.41. Jane Jacobs, Death and Life of the Great American Cities (New York: RandomHouse, 1961), 37.42. “The New York I Love: Seventeen New Yorkers Tell Us What Makes Them MostLove This Big, Bad, Beautiful Town,” New York Magazine, October 20, 1980.43. Raymond Williams, “Metropolitan Perspectives and the Emergence of Modernism,”The Politics of Modernism (London: Verso, 1989), 35.Chapter 7. A Gallery of Players (pp. 111–26)1. For a discussion of the Club, see Irving Sandler, The New York School: Painters andSculptors of the Fifties (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 31–32.2. Alice Neel, “A Statement,” in Alfred Leslie and Robert Frank, eds., “The HastyPapers: A One-Shot Review” (New York: 1960), quoted in Patricia Hills, Alice Neel(New York: Abrams, 1983, 1995), 1053. Diana Crane, The Transformation of the Avant-Garde: The New York Art World,1940–1985 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 2–3.4. Lawrence Alloway, “Women’s Art in the Seventies,” in Network: Art and the ComplexPresent (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984), 273, 285.5. Alloway, “Network: The Artworld Described as a System,” in ibid., 3–4.6. Emily Genauer, “Art & the Artist,” New York Post, March 2, 1994.7. David Lehman, “A Poet in the Heart of Noise” (review of Brad Gooch, City Poet:The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara), New York Times, June 20, 1993.8. Valerie Peterson, “U.S. Figure Painting: Continuity and Cliché,” ARTnews 6/4(summer 1962), 51. Certainly it made as much sense to group together Larry Rivers,Philip Pearlstein, Fairƒeld Porter, Robert Beauchamp, and Neel as it did to groupJackson Pollock with Mark Rothko.

200 / Notes9. Hubert Crehan, “Introducing the Portraits of Alice Neel,” ARTnews 61/6 (October1962), 45.10. K.L. “Alice Neel at the Graham Gallery (October 1–26),” ARTnews 62/6 (October1963), 11.11. He stated bluntly that “this series fails to give any idea of the importance of theagony of Sacco and Vanzetti.” Walter Gutman, “The Passion of Sacco-Vanzetti,”The Nation, April 29, 1932, quoted in David Shapiro, Social Realism: Art As aWeapon (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1973), 289.12. John Gruen, “Art: ‘Collector of Souls,’” Herald Tribune, January 9, 1966; Jack Kroll’s“A Curator of Souls” was published several weeks later in the January 31 issue ofNewsweek.13. John Gruen, The Party’s Over Now (New York: Viking Press, 1972), 62.14. In discussing his well-known parody of Emmanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossingthe Delaware, Rivers claimed to have painted it as a deliberately provocative gesture:“I did it the year Joe McCarthy was at his height. I even have some letterssomewhere saying that Joe McCarthy would take me as a patriot. I mean, the absurdityof history is that I might be seen as a kind of loyal, patriotic person although Itook drugs and engaged in homosexual activities. In other words, what I was sayingis that America as you know it wasn’t true.” Sam Hunter, Larry Rivers (New York:Rizzoli, 1989), 18.15. Jonathan Weinberg, Speaking for Vice: Homosexuality in the Art of Charles Demuth,Marsden Hartley and the First American Avant-Garde (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1993), 205–206. See also my Ph.D. dissertation, “The WatercolorIllustrations of Charles Demuth,” Johns Hopkins University, 1970.16. Ann Sutherland Harris, Alice Neel Paintings, 1933–1982 (Los Angeles: LoyolaMarymount University, 1983), 14.17. Nancy Neel has recounted that, when Kuyer died in 1981, the family decided notto keep the portrait.18. John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a HomosexualMinority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1983), 41, 42.19. Ibid., 59. This is true as well of revisionist histories, which continue their inexplicablesilence. See for instance, Michael E. Brown, et al., eds., New Studies in the Politicsand Culture of American Communism, (New York: Monthly Review Press,1993).20. Such attitudes were slow to change. In 1964, shortly after the election of LyndonJohnson, Walter Jenkins, the president’s chief of staff, was arrested for making “indecentgestures” with another man in the men’s room of a YMCA two blocks fromthe White House. Jenkins was dismissed from his government post, but an extensiveFBI investigation nonetheless ensued in order to assure that his actions had inno way compromised the security of the United States. For a brilliant account ofthe scandal, see Lee Edelman, “Tearooms and Sympathy: The Epistemology of theWater Closet,” in Henry Abelove, Midnele Aina Barale, David M. Halperin, eds.,The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 1993),553–75. With the spirit of McCarthyism still at large in the U.S. government, Neel’s

Notes / 201portrait of the boyish William Walton, a former advisor to President Kennedy whooften escorted Jackie to ofƒcial events in the mid-1960s, is likely to have been paintedas a political comment. To Neel, Walton’s rolled up sleeves and large watchbandwere coded signals.21. Judy Grahn, Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds (Boston: BeaconPress, 1990), 14.22. Emile De Antonio and Mitch Tuchman, Painters Painting: A Candid History of theModern Art Scene, 1940–75 (New York: Abbeville, 1984), 21.23. Quoted in Thomas Hoving, Making the Mummies Dance (New York: Simon andSchuster, 1993), 207.24. David C. Berliner, “Women Artists Today: How Are They Doing Vis-à-Vis TheMen?” Cosmopolitan (October 1973), 219.25. Geldzahler was curator at the Dia Center for the Arts gallery in Bridgehampton,L.I., when he conducted the last interview with Neel. In 1991, several years beforehis own death, he curated an exhibition of Neel’s Spanish Harlem work at Bridgehampton.“Alice Neel,” Dia Center for the Arts, Bridgehampton, New York, June29–July 28, 1991. The text contains Geldzahler’s 1984 interview. A more comprehensiveexhibit was held at the Robert Miller gallery in 1994. “Alice Neel: TheYears in Spanish Harlem, 1938–1961,” February 14–March 19, 1994.26. Gail Gelburd, Introduction to “Androgyny in Art” (Hempstead, N.Y.: Emily LoweGallery, Hofstra University, 1982), n.p.27. Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar,Straus, Giroux, 1966), 279.28. Ibid., 289.29. Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers (New York: Grove Press, 1943, 1963), 295–96.30. Two important essays on Warhol’s construction of a gay identity are Kenneth E. Silver,“Modes of Disclosure: The Construction of Gay Identity and the Rise of PopArt,” in Russell Ferguson, ed., Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition 1955–62 (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1992), 179–204; and Trevor Fairbrother,“Tomorrow’s Man,” in Success Is a Job in New York: The Early Art andBusiness of Andy Warhol (New York: The Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, NewYork University, 1989), 56–76.31. Deborah Kass, whose use of the silkscreen technique is directly indebted to Warhol,told Holland Cotter in 1994 that “I ƒnd Andy so fascinating because he was the ƒrstqueer artist—I mean queer in the political sense we mean queer. While some of hishomosexual contemporaries were into coding and veiling and obscuring, Andy reallymade pictures about what it was like being a queer guy in the ’50s.” HollandCotter, “Art After Stonewall: 12 Artists Interviewed,” Art in America 82/6 (June1994), 57.32. Fairbrother, “Tomorrow’s Man,” in Success, 56. I am grateful to Trevor Fairbrotherfor reading and offering suggestions on this chapter.33. Ibid., 72.34. Calvin Tomkins, “Raggedy Andy,” in John Coplans, et al., Andy Warhol (Greenwich,Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1970), 14.35. Robert Rosenblum states that Warhol “was a daily visitor to the church of St. Vin-

202 / Notescent Ferrer at Sixty-sixth Street and Lexington Avenue”; in Kynaston McShine, ed.,Andy Warhol: A Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989), 36.36. Diana Loercher, “Alice Neel,” The Christian Science Monitor, March 4, 1978.37. For his part, Andy was sufƒciently ecumenical to permit Neel to interpret him as amodernist martyr, offering his standard empty cliché in perfunctory praise of Neel’sportrait: “I thought it was wonderful.” Interview with Andy Warhol, 6 November1978,” in Patrick S. Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films (Ann Arbor: UMI ResearchPress, 1986), 513. The art historian Ellen Johnson, a contemporary ofNeel’s, shared her modernist point of view: “I always felt . . . that beneath all the glitterand ironic sophistication was a fundamentally innocent person . . . Alice Neelcaptured that paradoxical truth . . . in her portrait of him: he exposes his woundedbody, but keeps his eyes closed. His life is public, but he remains hidden.” AthenaTacha, ed., Fragments Recalled at Eighty: The Art Memoirs of Ellen H. Johnson(North Vancouver, B.C.: Gallerie, 1993), 75.38. Quoted everywhere, e.g. McShine, ed., Andy Warhol, 13.39. Hills, Alice Neel, 138.40. Peter Schjeldahl has argued the case differently: “Whatever attitude one takes towardthe commodity-based logic of current capitalism, it ought to be possible toview such an extreme and subtle extension of it as Warhol’s in a positive light, as artthat says something about a culture and an era . . . Art with conscious, fully integratedsocial content is arguably a category transcending political lines . . . And bysuch a standard Warhol must be judged to rank as high as the best Socialist Realism,for instance.” Peter Schjeldahl, “Warhol and Class Content,” Art in America68/5 (May 1980), 118.41. Audiotape of lecture by Alice Neel, “Learning from Performers” series, The CarpenterCenter, Harvard University, March 21, 1979. Neel ƒles, Archives of AmericanArt, Washington, D.C.42. Michael Bronski, Culture Clash: The Making of a Gay Sensibility (Boston: SouthEnd Press, 1984), 99.43. Ellen H. Johnson, “Alice Neel’s Fifty Years of Portrait Painting,” Studio International193 (March 1977), 175.44. According to Judy Grahn, this typiƒes cross-dressing. “[O]ur point was not to bemen; our point was to be butch and to get away with it. We always kept somethingback: a high-pitched voice, a slant of the head, or a limpness of hand gestures,something that was clearly labeled female. I believe our statement was ‘Here is anotherway of being a woman,’ not ‘here is a woman trying to be taken for a man.’The fairies also held something back that prevented them from passing over intothe female gender . . .” Judy Grahn, Another Mother Tongue, 31.45. Both men enjoyed prominence in the artworld at the time, Bourdon for his writingson Calder and Christo (and, in 1987, on Warhol), and Battcock for his importantcritical anthologies.46. Battcock was stabbed to death by thugs. Neel saved the newspaper accounts of theChristmas eve murder in Puerto Rico. Neel correspondence, Neel Arts, New YorkCity.47. After Battcock’s death, Bourdon dismissed the painting as little more than “art

Notes / 203world gossip.” David Bourdon, “Women Paint Portraits on Canvas and Off,” VillageVoice, February 20, 1976.48. Taped interview with Karl Fortess, Boston University, 1980. Archives of AmericanArt, Washington, D.C.49. John Perreault, “I’m Asking—Does It Exist? What Is It? Whom Is It For?” Artforum19/3 (November 1980), 74–75.50. John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, 237.Chapter 8. The Women’s Wing (pp. 127–43)1. Thomas Hess, “Art: Sitting Prettier,” New York, February 23, 1976, 62.2. Lawrence Alloway, “Art,” The Nation, March 9, 1974, 318.3. Marsha Miro, “A Lifetime of Raw, Biting Art,” Detroit Free Press March 12, 1981.4. Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” ARTnews (January1971), 22–39, 69–71; reprinted in Women, Art and Power and Other Essays(New York: Icon Editions, 1988), 145–77.5. Ann Sutherland Harris, “Alice Neel: 1930–1980,” Alice Neel Paintings, 1933–1982(Los Angeles: Loyola Marymount University, 1983), 54.6. Within feminist art history, a dispute developed between historians who applied traditionalart historical models to the study of women and those who developed newmethodologies based on poststructuralist criticism.7. Transcript of editorial description of Time cover, August 31, 1970, Neel ƒles, Registrar’sofƒce, National Portrait Gallery.8. As Neel told Nemser, “When I met her at the Art Students League I said to her,‘Why didn’t you pose for me? After all you believe in Women’s Liberation. I’m awoman.’ She said, ‘Because the Daughters of Bilitis of which I am a member do notbelieve in having a leader.’” Cindy Nemser, Art Talk: Conversations with TwelveWomen Artists (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975), 134.9. Neel received a second honorary doctorate from the Kansas City Art Institute onMay 9, 1981.10. The text of the doctoral address was ƒrst reproduced in the Feminist Art Journal(April 1972), 12–13. It is also included in the Georgia Museum of Art catalog (1975)and excerpted in Patricia Hills, Alice Neel (New York: Abrams, 1983, 1995), 131–36.11. Quoted in Sandra Dijkstra, “Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan: The Politicsof Omission,” Feminist Studies 6 (summer 1980), 299–301.12. Barbaralee Diamonsteen, Inside New York’s Artworld (New York: Rizzoli, 1979),258.13. Alice Neel, statement, Daily World, April 17, 1971. At the time of the United NationsWorld Conference of Women in 1975, the parochialism of feminists’ positionsbecame obvious. According to Lawrence Alloway, the disparity between thelives of Third World women and those of the middle-class–based women’s “libbers”was absolute. “Those women for whom homemaking was no longer a fulltimeoccupation . . . and who thus have time to produce art, appeared suddenly, ina jolting perspective, as the concubines of imperialism.” Alloway, “Women’s Art in

204 / Notesthe Seventies,” Network Art and the Complex Present (Ann Arbor: UMI ResearchPress, 1984), 278.14. Peslikis would leave the editorial board by the end of 1972.15. Cindy Nemser, “The Whitney Petition,” Feminist Art Journal, 1/1 (April 1972), 13.16. For a full account of the activities of feminist arts organizations in the 1970s, seeMary D. Garrard, “Feminist Politics: Networks and Organizations,” in NormaBroude and Mary D. Garrard, The Power of Feminist Art (New York: Abrams, 1994),88–101. Redstocking Artists and the Ad Hoc committees are discussed on pp. 90–91.17. The museum’s selection was The Family, one of the few paintings not to be reproducedin the catalog for the exhibition.18. “Open Hearing at the Brooklyn Museum,” Feminist Art Journal 1/1 (April 1972), 6.Neel’s remarks have not been recorded.19. Alloway, “Art,” 318. The New Republic critic Kenneth Everett was effusive, callingNeel “one of the few original and signiƒcant painters of the past 30 years.” “KennethEverett on Art,” New Republic, May 4, 1974, 27–28.20. Hilton Kramer, “Art: Alice Neel Retrospective,” New York Times, February 9, 1974.21. Hilton Kramer, “Art View: Why Figurative Art Confounds Our Museums,” NewYork Times, January 2, 1977.22. Kramer continued his diatribes in his review of the ARTnews 75th anniversary issue:“My favorite entry in the foolish sweepstakes is that given by Ann SutherlandHarris, who solemnly pronounces Alice Neel, who is said to be underrated, as the‘ƒnest portraitist that America has produced since 1900.’ More party chatter ofcourse . . .” Hilton Kramer, “Art View: Reporting the Fashions—and the Ideas—for75 Years,” New York Times, December 4, 1977. In his catalog statement for her1951 exhibition at the ACA gallery, “Paintings by Alice Neel” (December 16,1950–January 31, 1951), Joseph Solman had praised her “great intensity.” On Neel’scopy he added the sentence, “I can say, that without any doubt, Alice Neel is thebest portrait painter in America today,” thus presaging Harris’s opinion by a quarterof a century.23. Robert Hughes, “Art: Myths of Sensibility,” Time, March 20, 1972, 77.24. Ibid., 72.25. Garrard, “Feminist Politics,” 92.26. David C. Berliner, “Women Artists Today: How Are They Doing vis-à-vis theMen?” Cosmopolitan 175/4 (October 1973), 216.27. Neel’s two sons and daughter-in-law Ginny were also very supportive of Neel’s career.28. Interview with May Stevens, New York City, March 1991.29. Patricia Hills, “Remarks” at Alice Neel Memorial Service, February 7, 1985, 1–2.Typescript in Neel ƒles, Whitney Museum of American Art.30. Cindy Nemser, “The Women’s Conference at the Corcoran,” Art in America 61/2(Jan.-Feb., 1973), 90.31. Unavoidable disagreements did undermine the movement’s unity over the courseof the decade. For example, in 1980, Neel participated in a second conference inWashington, D.C., the Women’s Caucus for Art and the Coalition of Women’sArts Organizations. The event was organized by a splinter group of the WCA,

Notes / 205which had refused to participate in the annual College Art Association in New Orleans,La., a state that had not ratiƒed the ERA. The majority of WCA memberschose to attend the CAA, where they held a major protest march. Garrard, “FeministPolitics,” 99.32. Cindy Nemser, “Alice Neel—Teller of Truth,” in Alice Neel: The Woman and HerWork (Athens, Ga.: The Georgia Museum of Art, 1975), n.p.33. Quoted in Garrard, “Feminist Politics,” 93.34. Nemser, Art Talk, 121.35. Douglas Davis, “Women, Women, Women,” Newsweek, January 29, 1973, 77.36. Among Blum’s exhibitions are: “Unmanly Art,” in the fall of 1972, and “ThreeRealist Painters (Neel, Flack and Blum),” in Valencia in February 1978.37. The three artists had been included in Cindy Nemser’s exhibition “In Her OwnImage” at the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial in Philadelphia that spring.38. Judith Vivell, “Talking About Pictures,” Feminist Art Journal 3/2 (summer 1974), 14.39. Published in Heresies in 1978; reprinted in Arlene Raven, Cassandra C. Langer,and Joanna Frueh, eds., Feminist Art Criticism (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press,1988), 71–86.40. In his essay on the women’s art network, Lawrence Alloway provided an apt analogybetween the great goddess trend and the 1940s mythmakers: “The mythologies ofGottlieb and Mark Rothko were a patchwork of ideas from Frazer, Freud, Jung, andNietzsche. Portentousness lurked behind the poetic symbols of these artists becausetheir access to myth rested on the idea of the artist as seer, gifted beyond other people.What has feminism to gain from the revival of these affected attitudes? . . . Tocompare the improvised myths of the seventies with the male equivalents of the fortiesshows that the mother-goddess is as intellectually disreputable as the heroking.”Alloway, “Women’s Art in the Seventies,” 283.41. “Newsmakers,” Newsweek, February 12, 1979.42. Her concern was justiƒed, for Abzug, who had been elected to Congress in 1970,would become a victim of the backlash of the 1980s. When she ƒrst got to Washington,Abzug requested a seat on the House Armed Services Committee, offering asher rationale: “Do you realize there are 42,000 women in the military? do you realizethat about half the civilian employees of the Defense Department are women,290,000 of them at last count? And, as if that isn’t enough, there are one and a halfmillion wives of military personnel.” June Sochen, Herstory: A Woman’s View ofAmerican History, vol. 2 (New York: Alfred Publishing Co., 1974), 404.43. Laurie Johnson, “The ‘Sister Chapel’: A Feminist View of Creation,” New YorkTimes, January 30, 1978. The exhibition was held from Jan. 15 to Feb. 19, 1978, atP.S. 1, Long Island City.44. In 1968, on the occasion of their wedding, Nochlin and her husband, the late architecturalhistorian Richard Pommer, commissioned Philip Pearlstein to paint theirportrait. The constrast between Pearlstein’s image and Neel’s provides a sort of proofof one postulate of Nochlin’s writings: that realism in art is never simple verism.Neel’s Linda Nochlin and Daisy and Pearlstein’s Portrait of Linda Nochlin andRichard Pommer occupy opposite ends of the spectrum of realist portraiture in this

206 / Notesperiod, a spectrum that ranged from formalism to expressionism. See Linda Nochlin,“Portrait of Linda Nochlin and Richard Pommer,” Artforum 32/1 (September1993), 142, 204.45. Linda Nochlin, “The Realist Criminal and the Abstract Law, Part II,” Art in America61/6 (November-December 1973), 98. The quote is from J. P. Stern, “Re„ectionson Realism,” Journal of European Studies 7 (March 1971).46. Nochlin, “The Realist Criminal and the Abstract Law, Part II,” 102–103.47. Nochlin, “Introduction,” Women, Art and Power, xiv.48. Linda Nochlin, “Some Women Realists,” Arts (April-May 1974), reprinted inWomen, Art and Power, 98–99.49. It was precisely this historical perspective that Nemser’s writings on Neel, by concentratingon her biography and her sitters’ biographies, had ignored. The potentialof biography for commercial exploitation by the artworld celebrity system was soonrecognized by other feminist art historians. Carol Duncan’s review of Nemser’s ArtTalk, which she titled, borrowing a phrase from Neel, “When Success Is a Box ofWheaties,” pointed out that Nemser’s interviews framed the work of women artistsaccording to traditional male criteria of greatness—originality, for instance—ratherthan taking into account the artists’ own, quite different criteria as developed intheir work. The result, in her opinion, was not criticism but publicity. “Artists asprofessionals must compete, but they must not appear to compete. They need publicity,but must seek it in a form that is not publicity . . . Publicity alone—or, as inArt Talk—barely disguised publicity—distorts their seriousness and renders themexploited objects.” Carol Duncan, “When Success Is a Box of Wheaties,” Artforum(October 1975), reprinted in Carol Duncan, The Aesthetics of Power (New York:Cambridge University Press, 1993), 121ff.50. The ceremony, accompanied by a small exhibit of her work, was held on May 19.51. Joanna Frueh, “The Body Through Women’s Eyes,” in Broude and Garrard, ThePower of Feminist Art, 207.52. June Singer, Androgyny: Toward a New Theory of Sexuality (Garden City, N.Y.:Doubleday, 1977), 278.53. An incisive summary of this debate is provided in Kari Weil, Androgyny and the Denialof Difference (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1992),ch. 6: “Androgyny, Feminism, and the Critical Difference.”54. Ibid., 152. As the concept of androgyny began to be detached by feminist writersfrom its origins in the Platonic ideal of unity, it continued nevertheless to representa way beyond binary male-female oppositions. Summarizing Toril Moi, Kari Weilhas argued that in Woolf’s Orlando (1928), the story of a man who, over the courseof three centuries of life, becomes a woman: “sexual identity loses its claim as agiven, appearing, rather, as an effect of the cultural codes of desire and of changingrelations to ‘others’ . . .” Ibid., 157.55. Johnson, in her autobiography, Fragments Recalled At Eighty: The Art Memoirs ofEllen H. Johnson (North Vancouver, B.C.: Gallerie, 1993), 145–50, wrote a wittyaccount of sitting for Neel.56. Fat became a feminist issue in the 1980s. see Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls:The History of Anorexia Nervosa (1988); Kim Chernin, The Hungry Self: Women,

Notes / 207Eating and Identity (1985); Susie Orbach, Hunger Strike: The Anorectic’s Struggleas a Metaphor for Our Age (1986); Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and HolyFast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (1986).57. At a panel sponsored by the New Museum of Contemporary Art in 1982, “ExtendedSensibilities: The Impact of Homosexual Sensibilities on ContemporaryCulture,” Kate Millet suggested rephrasing the question to ask, “‘What is the impactof lesbian sensibility on Contemporary Culture?’ I would respond right offhand without even shifting gears, that it’s zilch.” Harmony Hammond, “A Space ofInƒnite and Pleasurable Possiblities: Lesbian Self-Representation in Visual Art,” inJoanna Frueh, Cassandra L. Langer and Arlene Raven, eds., New Feminist Criticism(New York: Icon Editions, Harper/Collins, 1994), 99.58. See Hammond, ibid., for a thorough discussion and chronology of the lesbian artmovement, 1970–1990.59. Roberta Smith, “Sari Dienes, 93, Artist Devoted to the Power of the Found Object,”obituary, New York Times, May 28, 1992. Hirshhorn Museum and SculptureGarden Archives, Smithsonian Institution.60. Simone de Beauvoir, The Coming of Age (New York: Warner Paperback Library,1973), 733.61. Hills, Alice Neel, 184.62. Neel used this phrase to describe her portrait of Walter Gutman in her interviewwith Judith Vivell in Feminist Art Journal in 1974.Chapter 9. Truth Unveiled (pp. 147–61)1. Marcia Pointon observes that “The nude is everywhere, yet has no place; it is‘difƒcult to handle,’ yet wholly familiar; it is the least known and the most familiarof art forms. Above all it is understood to be Art.” Marcia Pointon, Naked Authority:The Body in Western Painting, 1830–1908 (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1990), 12.2. Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London: Routledge,1992), 6.3. Idem.4. Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1993), 261.5. In her study of the social signiƒcance of fashion, Dress Codes, Ruth P. Rubinsteinnotes that the new ideal also suited the demands of photographic reproduction.“The boyish look was considered beautiful, for it accommodated the demands ofthe camera for long legs and a hipless body . . . Fashion photographers such asBaron Adolph de Meyer, Cecil Beaton, and Edward Steichen helped to style thisnew ideal of feminine fashion in accordance with the tastes and values of Vogue editors.”Ruth P. Rubinstein, Dress Codes: Meanings and Messages in American Culture(Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), 105.6. Ibid., 182.7. Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1981), 24.

208 / Notes8. Nadya became a very prominent graphologist. Her book The Psychology of Handwriting:Secrets of Handwriting Analysis (North Hollywood: Wilshire Book Company,1960) included a glowing introduction by Harmon S. Ephron, M.D., whopraised her “profound sense of devotion to graphology as a clinical tool” that has“stimulated psychiatrists and psychologists to study and use graphology as an importantclinical indicator of trends in their patient’s progress” (8). The book containedher analysis of the handwriting of Albert Einstein, Mary Baker Eddy, Ted Williams,Fyodor Dostoevsky, and others.9. Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969; 1990), 179.10. Ibid., 188.11. Ibid., 189.12. Raphael Soyer, Self-Revealment: A Memoir (New York: Random House, n.d.), 103.Pascin’s work was shown at the Daniel, Weyhe, and Downtown galleries.13. The art historian Emmanuel Cooper has argued that the motif of lesbian prostitutecouples in modernist art has been a means of relieving homoerotic impulses bytransferring them onto women: “The scenes these artists painted are titillatory andalso serve a function in relieving the tensions of repressed sexuality within the maleviewer. By transferring the homosexual content onto members of the opposite sex,it makes the subject safe and non-threatening.” Emmanuel Cooper, Homosexualityand Art in the Last 100 Years in the West (London and New York: Routledge, 1986;1994), xx.14. According to the Neel family, Nadya always insisted that she and Nona were notlesbian lovers.15. The parallels between Eakins’s and Neel’s male nudes warrants further discussion.16. Jerry Tallmer, “On the Town,” New York Post, November 15, 1980.17. Quoted in Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory and Psychoanalysis(New York: Routledge, 1991), 66.18. Idem. Neel’s portrait of Annie Sprinkle can be seen as a modern Baubo.19. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover; À Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Cambridge,Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 221.20. Idem.21. Lawrence, “À Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” 310–11.22. Quoted in James T. Patterson, America in the Twentieth Century (San Diego: Harcourt,Brace, Jovanovich, 1989), 150.23. In Sexual Politics (1969) Millet summarizes the book as follows: “Lady Chatterley’sLover is a quasi-religious tract recounting the salvation of one modern woman . . .through the ofƒces of the author’s personal cult, ‘the mystery of the phallus’” (238).24. For a summary of the feminist debate over this text and pornographic images ingeneral, see Susan Gubar, “Representing Pornography: Feminism, Criticism, andDepictions of Female Violation,” in Susan Gubar and Joan Hoff, eds., For AdultUsers Only: The Dilemma of Violent Pornography (Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress, 1989), 47–67. Susan Suleiman supplies a strong counterargument in“Transgression and the Avant-Garde,” Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics and theAvant-Garde (Harvard University Press, 1987).

Notes / 20925. Georges Bataille, The Story of the Eye (1928) (San Francisco: City Lights Books,1987).26. Quoted in Gubar and Hoff, For Adult Users Only, 57.27. Quoted in Susan Stanford Friedman, “Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor,” inFeminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism (New Brunswick: RutgersUniversity Press, 1991), 386.28. For a fuller discussion of the pregnant nudes, see my “Mater of Fact: Alice Neel’sPregnant Nudes,” American Art (spring 1994), 7–31.29. Quoted in Carolyn Keith, “Alice Neel: Portraits of Souls,” “Cityside” MilwaukeeJournal, October 23, 1978. Clipping in Neel ƒles (unmicroƒlmed), Archives ofAmerican Art, Washington, D.C. Neel was in Milwaukee to address the annualconference of Wisconsin Women in the Arts.30. G. D. Searle marketed Enovid in 1960. By 1963, the birth control pill was availableat clinics in all states except Massachusetts and Connecticut. In 1965, the year afterPregnant Maria was painted, the Supreme Court overturned the 1873 ComstockLaw, which prohibited interstate transportation of contraceptives. Patricia Gossel,“A Hard Pill to Swallow: American Response to Oral Contraceptives,” paper presentedat the National Museum of American History, October 19, 1993. Gosselnotes that this legislative activity took place “independently of the women’s movement”(14).31. Mary Jane Sherfey, The Nature and Evolution of Female Sexuality (New York: Vintage,1976), quoted in Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experienceand Institution (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976; 1986), 183.32. “Rape Has Many Forms,” (review of Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will: Men,Women and Rape), in The Spokeswoman 6/15 (November 15, 1975), quoted inRich, Of Women Born, 14.33. Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” in The Female Body in Western Culture, ed. SusanSuleiman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 99.34. Dr. Stuart Asch, quoted in Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her OwnGood: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women (Garden City: Anchor/Doubleday,1978), 278.35. In January 1973, Neel submitted the painting to the “Women Choose Women” exhibitionat the New York Cultural Center. Douglas Davis published a deprecatoryreview of this unwieldy gathering of 109 artists in Newsweek magazine: “The dramaunfolding is a historical drama,” he wrote, “a drama of women trying to integratetheir nature as women into their art, which is no simple matter.” Douglas Davis,“Women, Women, Women,” Newsweek, January 29, 1973, 77.36. Quoted in Geoffrey G. Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction inArt and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 11. Nancy was sufferingfrom toxemia at this point in her pregnancy, and this condition provides theliteral (as opposed to the metaphorical) explanation of the painting’s coloration.37. Rich, Of Woman Born, 13.38. Michel Auder’s video-portrait of the artist, “Alice Neel, 1976–1983,” records thepermutations of this “sitting.” Neel ƒrst seated Evans on the couch, then on the tub

210 / Noteschair, then ƒnally on the armless side chair, which provided the least amount ofsupport and emphasized her instability.39. Douwe Tiemersma, Body Schema and Body Image: An Interdisciplinary and PhilosophicalStudy (Amsterdam: Swets and Zeitlinger, 1989), 67–68.40. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1978), 202.41. Anne Sexton, “The Double Image,” in Selected Poems (London: Oxford UnversityPress, 1964), 36–37.42. Luce Irigary, “Et l’une ne bouge pas sans l’autre” (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1974),14–15, quoted in Jane Gallop, The Daughter’s Seduction (Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress, 1982; 1989), 116–17.43. Margaret Miles, Carnal Knowing (New York: Vintage, 1991), 153.44. Linda M. Whiteford and Marilyn L. Poland, New Approaches to Human Reproduction:Social and Ethical Dimensions (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989), 4. See alsoSusan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).45. Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Artand Medicine (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1991), 212.Chapter 10. Shifting Constellations (pp. 162–76)1. Arlene S. Skolnick and Jerome H. Skolnick, Family in Transition: Rethinking Marriage,Sexuality, Child Rearing, and Family Organization, 2nd ed. (Boston: Little,Brown, 1977), 4.2. Ibid., 6.3. Caroline Farrar Ware, Greenwich Village, 1920–1930. A Comment on AmericanCivilization in the Post-War Era (Boston: Houghton Mif„in, 1935), 406.4. The U.S. government soon realized the political value of Rockwell’s Four Freedomsseries. Reproduced in poster form, they were used part of the U.S. Treasury’swar bond drive. After the war, the O.W.I. distributed them as Cold War propagandathroughout Europe and the Far East. See Norman Rockwell, Illustrator (New York:Watson-Guptill, n.d.). “The Four Freedoms” are illustrated on p. 5.5. James Patterson, America in the Twentieth Century (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace,Jovanovich, 1989), 307.6. Neel archives, scrapbook 1, and correspondence, Neel Arts, New York City.7. Letter to Alice Neel from Mrs. J. Chadwick Scott, May 14, 1957. Neel correspondence,Neel Arts, New York City.8. Patricia Hills, Alice Neel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1983, 1995), 14.9. Emma Goldman, “Marriage and Love,” in The Traffic in Women and Other Essayson Feminism (New York: Times Change Press, 1970), 43. Shortly before Goldman’sdeportation to her native Russia in 1919, Robert Henri painted her portrait.Alix Kates Shulman concludes her introduction to the reprint of Goldman’s textswith the following observation: “When she died in Canada in 1940, only a handfulof Americans recognized that she had been, in the words of journalist William MarionReedy, ‘about eight thousand years ahead of her age’” (15).

Notes / 21110. William S. Rubin, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage (New York: Museum ofModern Art, 1968), 159. The famous photograph of “Artists in Exile” (all male ofcourse) was taken at that time.11. Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the1940s (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 199.12. I refer the reader to chapter 7 of Susan Suleiman’s Subversive Intent, Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), for an analysis of a parallel revision of theSurrealist writer Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet (1976).13. Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism, 147.14. Jackson Pollock also had his ƒrst gallery exhibition in 1943.15. Ibid., 343–44.16. Marcia Epstein Allentuck, ed and introd., John Graham’s System and Dialectics ofArt (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), 101–102.17. C. G. Jung, “The Psychological Aspects of the Mother-Archetype,” in Violet Staubde Laszlo, ed., The Basic Writings of C. G. Jung (New York: The Modern Library,1938; 1959), 334.18. Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Year of the Experts’Advice to Women (Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1978), 221.19. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood As Experience and Institution (NewYork: W. W. Norton, 1976; 1986), 12.20. Ibid., 161.21. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1978), 61–62.22. Ibid., 86–87.23. A decade later, Jessica Benjamin would argue that “if the mother were really recognizedin our culture as an independent subject, with desires of her own, this recognitionwould revolutionize not only the psychoanalytic paradigms of ‘normal’ childdevelopment (which have always been based on the child’s need to be recognizedby the mother, not on the idea of mutual recognition,) but the actual lives of childrenin this culture as they develop into adults.” Jessica Benjamin, Bonds of Love:Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problems of Domination (New York: Pantheon,1988), quoted in Susan Suleiman, Subversive Intent, 180.24. Richard J. Gelles, “Violence in the American Family,” in J. P. Martin, ed., Violenceand the Family (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1978), 170.25. Ibid., 174.26. By the 1980s, artists began to include the subject of child abuse in their work. InJune 1981, an exhibit, “Weeping in the Playtime of Others,” at Gallery 345 in NewYork, curated by Karen de Gia, included Neel.27. The interview in the New York Times Magazine in 1945 is quoted in Leja, ReframingAbstract Expressionism, 55–56.28. Alice Neel, “Peggy,” October 17, 1979. Registrar’s records, Smith College Museumof Art, Northampton, Mass.29. Quoted in Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering, 79.30. May Stevens, “The Non-Portrait Work of Alice Neel,” Women’s Studies: An InterdisciplinaryJournal (London, 1978), 64.

212 / Notes31. Unpublished essay for ArtForum (April 1975). Neel Arts, New York City.32. Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967).33. E. Ann Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Cultureand Melodrama (New York: Routledge, 1992), 216.34. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1986), 37.

BIBLIOGRAPHYI. Archival Sources and InterviewsA. ArchivesArchives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.:ACA Gallery papers, (#D304 + N69–98)Herman Baron papers (#3769)Jacob Kainen papers (#565)Charles Keller papers (#7–8)Daniel Koerner papers (#N70–40 + 1337)Raphael Soyer papers (#867)Lynd Ward papers (#141 + 4466–4468)Miscellaneous catalogs (#NAAA3–173–216: “Contemporary Arts, Inc.” Papers)Oral history collection: Interviews with Alice Neel (Karl Fortess, Sept. 12, 1975; DetroitInstitute of Arts, March 1969; Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard,March 21, 1979); Isabel Bishop, 1987; Raphael Soyer, May–June, 1981Unmicroƒlmed: Alice Neel Papers, Rockwell Kent Papers, Anton Refregier PapersArchives of the National Center for Jewish Film, Brandeis University: Samuel BrodyƒleButler Library, Columbia University: Oral history collection. Richard Polsky, interviewswith Alice Neel, April 8, April 29, June 5, 1981213

214 / BibliographyMuseum of Modern Art, New York, N.Y., Film Study Center: “Workers Film andPhoto League, 1931–2”; Thomas Brandon ƒle (I-64)Neel archives, Neel Arts, W. 107th St., New York, N.Y.Neel correspondence, Neel Arts, New York, N.Y.Neel ƒles, Robert Miller Gallery, New York, N.Y.B. InterviewsRudolf Baranik, New York City, October 12, 1993Phillip Bonosky, New York City, November 7, 1992Daniel Brand, Concord, Mass., October 1990Peggy Brooks, New York City, February 1989Arthur Bullowa, New York City, March 5, 1991Marisa Diaz, Miami, April 1991 and January 1993Rosemary Frank, December 12, 1993 (telephone)Lottie Gordon, Reference Center for Marxist Studies, spring 1993Elizabeth Humesten (Mrs. Mike Gold), November 3, 1993 (telephone)Pablo Lancella, Miami, January 6, 1993George Neel, November 20, 1993 (telephone)Nancy Neel, New York City, ongoing interviews, 1989–1995; also Richard and HartleyNeelLinda Nochlin, March 29, 1994Harry Rand, National Museum of American Art, November 11, 1993Annette Rubinstein, September 17, 1993 (telephone)Joseph Solman, October 5, 1993 (telephone)David Soyer, New York City, October 13, 1993May Stevens, New York City, March 5, 1991; October 12, 1993Robert G. Stewart, National Portrait Gallery, September 6, 1993Farley and Virginia Wheelwright, Milton, Mass., February 2, 1993II. Sources Focused on Alice NeelA. BooksBelcher, Gerald, and Margaret Belcher. Collecting Souls, Gathering Dust: The Strugglesof Two American Artists: Alice Neel and Rhoda Medary. New York: ParagonHouse, 1991.Hills, Patricia. Alice Neel. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1983; 1995.B. Exhibition CatalogsACA Gallery. The New York Group. May 23–June 4, 1938. Statement by Jacob Kainen.———. The New York Group. February 5–18, 1939. Statement by Kenneth Fearing.Allara, Pamela E. “Object as Metaphor in Neel’s Non-Portrait Work.” Exterior/Interior:Alice Neel. Medford, Mass.: Tufts University Art Gallery, 1991.

Sources Focused on Alice Neel / 215American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Alice Neel: Memorial Exhibition.New York, 1985.Bell, James M. Alice Neel. Fort Wayne: Fort Wayne Museum of Art, 1979.Blum, June. Women’s Art: Miles Apart. Orlando: Valencia Community College, 1983.Bonosky, Phillip. “Introduction.” Alice Neel. Moscow Artists Union, U.S.S.R. 1981.Trans. Thompson Bradley.Cheim, John. Alice Neel: Paintings Since 1970. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academyof Fine Arts, 1985.———. Alice Neel: Drawings and Watercolors. New York: Robert Miller Gallery, 1986.Geldzahler, Henry. Alice Neel in Spanish Harlem. Bridgehampton, N.Y.: Dia Centerfor the Arts, 1991.Gold, Mike. “Alice Neel.” Foreword to exhibition catalog. New York: New Playwright’sTheater, 1951.Harris, Ann Sutherland. Alice Neel: A Retrospective of Watercolors and Drawings. NewYork: The Graham Gallery, 1978.———. Alice Neel Paintings 1933–1982. Los Angeles: Loyola Marymount University,1983.Hills, Patricia. Alice Neel: Paintings of Two Decades, Boston: Boston University ArtGallery. 1980.Hope, Henry R. Alice Neel. Fort Lauderdale: Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, 1978.Langenstein, Michael. Alice Neel: A Retrospective Exhibition. Hagerstown, Md.: WashingtonCounty Museum of Fine Arts, 1977.Nassau County Museum of Fine Arts. Alice Neel: Paintings and Drawings. Roslyn,N.Y., 1986.Paul, William D., Jr. Alice Neel: The Woman and Her Work. Athens, Ga.: Georgia Museumof Art, 1975. Includes essay by Cindy Nemser; statements by DorothyPearstein, Raphael Soyer, and John I. H. Baur; Moore College doctoral address.Scott, Martha B. Alice Neel: A Retrospective Showing. New Canaan, Conn.: The SilvermineGuild of Artists, with the University of Bridgeport, 1979.Solomon, Elke Morger. Alice Neel. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art,1974.C. Articles and ReviewsAllara, Pamela E. “Mater of Fact: Alice Neel’s Pregnant Nudes.” American Art 8/2(spring 1994), 6–31.———. “The City as Domicile: The Urban Art of Alice Neel.” Journal of Urban andCultural Studies 2/2 (winter 1992), 7–27.Alloway, Lawrence. “Art.” The Nation, March 9, 1974, 318.———. “Patricia Hills, Alice Neel” (review). Art Journal 44/2 (summer 1984), 191–92.Barrie, Leta. “Real People: Alice Neel at Linda Cathcart Gallery.” Artweek, January 23,1992, 1, 12–13.Bass, Ruth. “A Modern-Day Collector of Souls,” ARTnews 83/3 (March 1984), 36–37.Berkman, Florence. “Who Is the Real Alice Neel?” Hartford Times, September 26,1976, 38.

216 / BibliographyBerrigan, Ted. “Alice Neel’s Portraits of Joe Gould.” Mother: A Journal of New Literature6. Peter Schjeldahl and Lewis MacAdams, eds. New York: 1965.———. “The Portrait and Its Double,” ARTnews 64/9 (January 1966), 30–33, 63–64.Blair, William G. “Alice Neel Dead: Portrait Artist.” Obituary, New York Times, October14, 1984.Bonetti, David. “Nude Dissenting . . .,” Boston Phoenix, December 24, 1985.Bonosky, Phillip. “Social Comment of Alice Neel.” Daily World, October 30, 1970.———. “Alice Neel Exhibits Her Portraits of the Spirit.” Daily World, October 4, 1973.Brand, Jonathan. “Putting Down Pearlstein and Kramer.” Letter to the editor. NewYork Times, June 29, 1969.Burstein, Patricia. “Painter Alice Neel Strips Her Subjects to the Bone—and SomeThen Rage in Their Nakedness.” People, March 19, 1979, 63–64.Campbell, Lawrence. Review of group exhibition at ACA Gallery, N.Y. ARTnews 59/8(December 1960), 13.———. Review. ARTnews 69/7 (November 1970), 24.Castle, Frederick Ted. “Interview with Alice Neel.” Artforum (October 1983), 36–41.Cochrane, Diane. “Alice Neel: Collector of Souls.” American Artist 37/4, (September1973), 32–7; 62–4.Crehan, Hubert. “Introducing the Portraits of Alice Neel.” ARTnews 61/6 (October1962), 44–47, 68.———. “Portrait of a Liberated Portrait Painter.” Sunday Post Dispatch, August 1, 1971.D.B. Review of exhibition with Captain Hugh Mulzac at ACA Gallery. Arts Digest 28/20 (September 1954), 26.Donohoe, Victoria. “Neel’s Portrait Art Peers into the Souls of Subjects.” PhiladelphiaInquirer, May 26, 1984.———. “Homecoming ‘Collector of Souls’ Display Portraits at Moore.” PhiladelphiaInquirer, January 24, 1970.Everett, Kenneth. “Art.” New Republic, May 4, 1974, 27–28.Foss, Fanya. “Neel.” Koplin Gallery Newsletter, Los Angeles, 1985.Friedman, Jon R. “Alice Neel.” Arts 57/1 (September 1982), 23.Gallati, Barbara. “Alice Neel: Non-Figurative Works.” Arts 57/2 (October 1983), 23–24.———. “Alice Neel.” Arts 58/9 (May 1984), 54–55.Gardner, Isabella. “For Alice Neel: Your Fearful Symmetries.” In Women Painters andPoets. New York: New York University Visual Artists Coalition, 1977, 11.Gaugh, Harry. “Alice Neel.” Arts (May 1978), 9.Geldzahler, Henry. “Alice Neel.” Interview 15/1 (January 1985), 86–88.Genauer, Emily. “Art and the Artist.” New York Post, March 2, 1974.Goldstein, Patti. “Soul on Canvas.” New York, July 9–16, 1979, 76–80.Gordon, David. “Women Choose Women.” Daily World, February 14, 1973.———. “Alice Neel, Humanist Artist, for More Cultural Exchange.” Daily World, May31, 1973.Gruen, John. “Art: ‘Collector of Souls.’” New York Herald Tribune, January 9, 1966.———. “Interview with Alice Neel.” Close Up. New York, 1968.Halasz, Piri. “Alice Neel: ‘I have this obsession with Life.’” ARTnews 73/1 (January1974), 47–49.

Sources Focused on Alice Neel / 217Harris, Ann Sutherland. “The Human Creature.” Portfolio 1/5 (December/January1979–1980), 71–76.———. “A Note on Alice’s Greatness.” ARTnews 75/11 (November 1977), 113.Henry, Gerrit. “The Artist and the Face: A Modern American Sampling.” Art in America63/1 (January/February 1975), 34–35.———. “Elaine De Kooning and Alice Neel.” ARTnews 83/3 (March 1984), 54–55.———. “New York Letter.” Art International 14/10 (December 1970), 77.Hess, Thomas. “Art: Behind the Taboo Curtain.” New York, March 4, 1974, 68.———. “Art: Sitting Prettier.” New York, February 23, 1976, 62–63.Higgins, Judith. “Alice Neel and the Human Comedy.” ARTnews 83/8 (October 1984),70–79.Hoffman, Marla. “Two Women Paint.” Daily World, March 9, 1974.Hope, Henry R. “Neel, Portraits of an Era.” Art Journal 38 (summer 1979), 273–81.Johnson, Ellen H. “Alice Neel’s Fifty Years of Portrait Painting.” Studio International193 (March 1977), 174–79.Kimmelman, Michael. “Art in Review: Alice Neel.” New York Times, March 4, 1994.Keith, Carolyn. “Alice Neel: Portrait of Souls,” “Cityside.” Milwaukee Journal, October23, 1978.Kramer, Hilton. “Art: Alice Neel Retrospective.” New York Times, February 9, 1974.———. “Art.” New York Times, January 20, 1968.———. Review of the Graham Gallery exhibition. New York Times, October 24, 1970.Kroll, Jack. “Art: Curator of Souls.” Newsweek, January 31, 1966, 82.Levin, Kim. “Alice Neel at the Graham Gallery.” ARTnews 62/6, (October 1963), 10–11.———. “Art/Alice Neel.” Village Voice, May 18, 1982.Loercher, Diana. “Alice Neel.” Christian Science Monitor, March 4, 1978.———. “One-Man Shows Liven N.Y. Galleries.” Christian Science Monitor, October11, 1973.Lubell, Ellen. “Alice Neel, 1900–1984.” Village Voice, October 30, 1984, 107.McGuff, Jane. “Alice Neel: Her Portraits, Herself.” Glitch2 (Chelsea, Ala., 1978), 34–35, 43.Mainardi, Pat. “Alice Neel at the Whitney Museum.” Art in America 62/3, (May-June1974), 107.Mellow, James R. “When Does a Portrait Become a Memento Mori?” New York Times,February 24, 1974.Mercedes, Rita. “Alice Neel.” Connoisseur 29 (September 1981), 2–3.Mitchell, Anita Velez. “A Visit with Alice Neel.” Helcion Nine: Journal of Women’s Artsand Letters (1979), 15–19.Neel, Alice. “A Statement.” in Alfred Leslie and Robert Frank, eds., The Hasty Papers:A One-Shot Review (New York, 1960), 50.———. “Editors.” Daily World, February 2, 1971.———. “Editors.” Masses and Mainstream 8/7 (July 1955).———. Review of The Dream and the Deal by Jerre Mangione. Daily World, November11, 1972.———. “Peggy.” Archives. Smith College Museum of Art. Northampton, Mass. October17, 1979.

218 / Bibliography———. “WPA Writers Project Seen as Success, Despite Rightists.” Daily World, November11, 1972.———. “Doctoral Address.” Moore College of Art. May 1971. Reprinted in GeorgiaMuseum of Art catalog, 1975.———. Statement, Daily World, April 17, 1971.———. “The New York I Love: Seventeen New Yorkers Tell Us What Makes ThemMost Love This Big, Bad, Beautiful Town.” New York, October 20, 1980, 34–37.———. “Interview.” Night 2/3 (April 1979).———. “I Paint Tragedy and Joy.” New York Times, October 31, 1976.Nemser, Cindy. “Alice Neel: Portraits of Four Decades.” Ms. 2/48 (October 1973), 48–53.———. “In the Galleries . . . Alice Neel.” Arts 42/4 (February 1968), 60.Ortega, Susan. “Art for Detente.” Daily World, September 3, 1981.———. “Alice Neel: True Artist of the People.” Daily World, November 17, 1984.“The Passing Shows.” ARTnews 42/3 (March 15–31, 1944), 20.Phillips, Deborah C. “Alice Neel.” ARTnews 81/8 (October 1982), 153.Perreault, John. “Catching Souls and Quilting.” Village Voice, Febrary 21, 1974.———. Review of exhibition at Graham Gallery, New York. ARTnews 66/9 (January1968), 16.———. “Reading Between the Faces’ Lines.” Village Voice, September 27, 1973.Peterson, Valerie. “U.S. Figure Painting: Continuity or Cliché.” ARTnews 61/4, (summer1962), 36–38.Porter, E. F., Jr. “Blithe Spirit, Collector of Souls.” St. Louis Post Dispatch, December14, 1975.Price, Aimée Brown. “Artists Dialogue: A Conversation with Alice Neel.” ArchitecturalDigest (August 1982), 136, 140, 142.Princenthal, Nancy. “About Faces: Alice Neel’s Portraits.” Parkett 16 (1988), 6–17.Raynor, Vivien. “Alice Neel.” Arts 38/1 (1963), 58.Richard, Paul. “Alice Neel: Portraits and the Artist.” Washington Post, October 8, 1976.Rizzi, Marcia Salo. “The Human Comedy of Alice Neel.” Liberation 19/3 (May 1975),29–33.Russell, John. “Art.” New York Times, February 7, 1976.———. “Art: Offbeat Alice Neel: Not a Portrait Around.” New York Times, May 28,1982.Saltz, Jerry. “Notes on a Painting: Alice Neel, Painter Laureate.” Arts 66/3 (November1991), 25–26.Schulze, Franz, “Three Artists Defy Trend.” Chicago Sun Times, October 15, 1978.Schmitt, Marilyn. “Alice Neel.” Arts 52 (May 1978), 9.Smith, Roberta. “Art: Alice Neel Show.” New York Times, December 19, 1986.———. “Diane Arbus and Alice Neel, With Attention to the Child.” New York Times,May 19, 1989.Stevens, Elizabeth. “She’s Court Painter to the World of Art.” Baltimore Sun, February20, 1981.Stevens, May. “The Non-Portrait Work of Alice Neel.” Women’s Studies: An InterdisciplinaryJournal (London) (1978), 61–73.

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PHOTOGRAPHY CREDITSeeva-inkeri: ƒgures 2, 9, 98, 107Lauros-Giraudon/Art Resource: ƒgures 5, 172Scala/Art Resource: ƒgures 25, 157Zindman/Fremont: ƒgures 11, 49, 50, 70, 76, 81, 82, 86, 88, 126, 127, 131, 166Eric Pollitzer: ƒgures 12, 33, 38, 65, 68, 96, 99, 121, 130, 167Geoffrey Clements: ƒgures 34, 45, 93, 173Beth Phillips: ƒgures 36, 57, 90, 124D. James Dee: ƒgures 44, 52, 71, 84, 108Steven Sloman: ƒgures 61, 92, 174Geraldine T. Mancini: ƒgures 148, 171John Seyfried: ƒgure 132233