i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

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-