i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

88 / Neel’s Social Realist ArtIn the 1980s, with Neel’s reputation established, she was included in importantexhibitions of 1930s art. 90 As the ƒrst evidence of a thaw in the ColdWar appeared in the early 1960s, the United States and Soviet Union began topermit cultural exchange as an ostensibly neutral ground on which the opposingsystems could meet. As Khrushchev permitted greater latitude for the visualarts in Russia, even permitting some abstract art to be shown, if notpraised, the Iron Curtain was raised to permit American artists with the propercredentials to exhibit there as well. Neel no doubt considered participation insuch exchanges as important as any of her “New Left” activities, and her correspondencewith Mike Gold and Phillip Bonosky attests to her ongoing inquiriesabout the possibilities of exhibiting in Russia. Her ƒrst opportunity camein 1960, with the U.S.-U.S.S.R. Gift Exhibition, initiated by Rockwell Kentfor the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship. 91 This earliest ofthe “revivals” of social realist art was unquestionably one of its most comprehensive.During the late 1950s, Bonosky helped Neel keep the faith with positive reportsof life behind the Iron Curtain. 92 His letter from August 1960 assuredNeel that he would work on a solo exhibition at the Moscow Artists Union butcould not do so until after the “joint exhibition of American realism,” theFriendship exhibition. Twenty years later, in July 1981, an exhibition of eightyƒvepaintings by Alice Neel opened at the exhibition hall of the Union ofArtists of the U.S.S.R. on Gorky Street. Bonosky played an important role in itsorganization, but Neel herself paid for the price of shipping and for her family’stravel costs. Bonosky authored the catalog essay, which predictably toutedher communist credentials. The text then departs from “Old Left” rhetoric tobrie„y summarize the arguments of American scholars on the in„uence ofCold War politics on the critical reception of abstract expressionism:[A]rt had been taken over rather aggressively by abstract and other non-ƒgurativeforms. And to the degree that their emergence in time coincided with the politicsof McCarthyism in the 1950s they were also politically sanctioned . . . Only the leftlistened to her. As for the attitude of the bourgeoisie which now makes such a fussabout her name, well, at that time Alice Neel had simply ceased to exist . . . [InAmerica] the ofƒcial press . . . has distorted the meaning of the creative work . . .[H]er participation in the struggle for peace is not simply rage at a “stormy life.” 93Bonosky was right about the distortion of the meaning of Neel’s work in theAmerican critical press, but he failed to acknowledge Neel’s complicity in it.In Russia she geared her press statements to the Soviet audience, praising a systemwhere “the government owes you everything.” 94 When Neel arrived inMoscow, the ediƒce of the communist state was crumbling, taking with it theofƒcial art of socialist realism. Yet, publicly at least, the Party line was rigidly