i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

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