i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

The Cold War Battles / 87sents a ƒgurehead, wooden but tenacious, who represents the state both of theParty and of socialist realist art.Neel’s proletarian portrait gallery spans the history of American communismfrom the 1930s to the 1980s, and insists that these leaders will not be writtenout of American history—or into it—simply as enemies or crackpots. Centralto Neel’s cultural, if not her political life, the CPUSA did provide her withher link to history, as well as the intellectual framework for her social realistwork, and an ongoing underground network of moral support. In return Neelcelebrated the idealism of individuals who, like herself, had maintained thecourage of their convictions. And if those convictions became increasinglynarrow-minded, as in the case of Gus Hall, she would record that part of historyas well. He was still a “hero” even if he was ƒghting a losing battle in creakingarmor.As the Old Left gave way to the New, Neel occasionally lent her name and/or art to the growing ƒeld of protest art. However, there are no counterparts toNazis Murder Jews to protest the war in Vietnam. Her “protest” came in theform of portraits of young men fated to ƒght in it. Only in her occasional illustrationsdid she continue to use art as a vehicle for overt political protest. In1971, the artists Rudolf Baranik and Benny Andrews compiled The AtticaBook. A joint effort of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition and Artists andWriters Protest Against the War in Vietnam, The Attica Book served as “a battlecry and lament—the Guernica of America’s dispossessed” 87 for the brutal suppressionof the riots at the upstate New York prison. That statement could havebeen written in the 1930s, and the artists who contributed to the book did includesome of the well-known Left artists of the previous generation: JacobLawrence, Romare Beardon, and Antonio Frasconi. But the generation ofartists reared in the 1930s and 1940s was also included: Nancy Spero, LeonGolub, Duane Hanson, and May Stevens. In this context, Neel’s untitled drawingof protesters with raised ƒsts looked as if it had wandered accidentally outof Masses & Mainstream, deƒnitely out of the mainstream in this context.Of greater historical interest than Neel’s speciƒc artistic contribution to TheAttica Book is the support that Neel began to receive at this time from theartists-activists of the New Left. Rudolf Baranik and his wife, May Stevens, whoƒrst met Neel through Phillip Bonosky in about 1954, were especially supportive.Both teachers as well as activists, Baranik and Stevens invited Neel to lectureto their classes at the Pratt Institute and Queens College. These served asimportant “trial runs” for her later lecture-performances. Active in the women’smovement after 1970, Stevens wrote an important article on Neel’s nonportraitwork for Women’s Studies in 1978. 88 Stevens’s link to the women’s movementwas crucial for Neel’s later career, despite the fact that she never fully acceptedthe idea of a collective art, whether communist or feminist. 89