i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

86 / Neel’s Social Realist ArtDressed in their drab business suits, they look more like shopkeepers thanartists, perhaps a reference to their academic roles as teachers. Raphael (on theleft) described himself simply as a “representational painter,” which, he commented,was synonymous with a “social painter,” because it expressed “thespirit of the time.” 81 In his 1981 interview with Milton Brown for the Archivesof American Art, he was at pains to emphasize that “I never painted a picture ofpeople in a factory. I never painted a picture of people beating up strikers.” 82Yet apart from the differences their in attitudes toward the relationship of artto politics, Neel and Raphael Soyer in particular could be said to share twin careers.Soyer painted primarily portraits of relatives, friends, and fellow artists,including Neel. Both painted the female nude, including the pregnant nude,frankly and with lack of idealization, although Soyer de-emphasized the body’seroticism by conƒning the nude to the studio. 83 The two contemporaries thusoccupied the same place on the spectrum of American postwar art, that of the“old-fashioned” realist who believed that the human ƒgure, well drawn, wasthe basis of art. To Soyer, Neel belonged to that tradition. “I know,” he said,“that I have great feelings for someone like Alice Neel. I think she’s a verystrong painter, a very strong representatonal painter.” 84 For her part, eventhough she never explicitly praised his work, Neel valued Soyer’s advice, as thephotograph of the two of them at her 1968 Graham gallery exhibit reveals (ƒg.69). Certainly Neel recognized the struggle involved in maintaining a placefor representational art in the postwar New York artworld. That place, anachronisticbut still viable, is the subject of the portrait.The last entry in the communist wing of the portrait gallery personiƒes theParty’s increasing ossiƒcation. In 1980, when Neel painted a portrait of theChairman of the Communist Party USA, Gus Hall (ƒg. 70), she hoped itwould be shown in her upcoming Moscow exhibition. Without doubt, Neelwished to create a socialist realist portrait along Soviet lines by picturing aruggedly handsome man of the people in a Russian fur hat. However, Hall refusedto let the portrait travel, much to Neel’s displeasure. When she asked foran explanation, he responded, “I am always uncomfortable about anythingthat tends to give the impression of immodesty, egocentrism, individualismand that any way feeds a tendence [sic] toward a cult of the personality.” 85No doubt he simply disliked looking hidebound, but his expression of dogmatismnonetheless epitomizes the rhetoric of the Party, which from the 1960son refused to respond to calls from within its ranks for reform. His tenacity issuggested by his bulldog-like face, suggestive of the apparatchik rather than avisionary. After the fall of the communist state, Hall was interviewed in theSeptember 1991 issue of Time magazine, where he was described in patronizingterms as the “80-year old party patriarch”—“the last of the Red-Hot believers—,”who refused to recognize that “the party is ƒnally over.” 86 Neel pre-