i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

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