i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

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.