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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-