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The Cold War Battles / 89maintained. 95 With the Zhdanovist façade still ƒrmly intact but increasinglyunder stress from the guerilla attacks of the artistic underground, it is hard togauge who the audience for her work might have been and what interpretationsit may have elicited. 96In spite of the interest in the exhibit on the part of the general public, onecan speculate that in Moscow in the period of late communism, American socialrealism appeared to be the naive, well-meaning sibling of its cynical, ofƒcial“negative twin,” socialist realism. Even though Brezhnev was still inpower, and Gorbachev’s glasnost would not be instituted until 1986, nonetheless,unofƒcial art, even art overtly critical of the government, was widely toleratedand respected, whereas exhibits of socialist realism were ignored. Amongthe more prominent artists of the 1970s and early 1980s were the Sots artists,among them Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid. According to the art historianMargarita Tupitsyn, the Sots artists “proposed to view socialist realismand propaganda imagery not as mere kitsch or simply a vehicle for bureaucraticmanipulation, but as a rich ƒeld of stereotypes and myths which theycould transform into a new language, one able to deconstruct ofƒcial myths ontheir own terms.” 97 To Russian artists familiar with the profound cynicism ofpaintings such as Komar & Melamid’s portrait of Stalin as a narcissist prayingto his own image (Stalin in Front of a Mirror, 1982–1983, ƒg. 71), viewingNeel’s portrait of Mike Gold (Mike Gold, In Memoriam, 1967), an altarpieceexpressive of genuine faith in the ideals of communism, must have created astrong conceptual dissonance. Whereas Neel memorialized the passing of anera with continuing respect for its intellectual elite, Komar & Melamid forcethe viewer to look at a shoeless tyrant in the process of creating a false publicface for ubiquitous distribution.With the end of the Cold War, the half-century artistic communication gapbetween East and West was bridged with remarkable symmetry, affording Komar& Melamid comfortable artistic passage to the United States. However,this postmodern, postcommunist art also marked the beginning of an era towhich Alice Neel’s humanistically based social realism no longer belonged. In1984, the year of Neel’s death, Lucy Lippard articulated the premises of a newart of social concern: “It is understood by now that all art is ideological and allart is used politically by the right or the left, with the conscious and unconsciousassent of the artist. There is no neutral zone.” 98 However obvious such astatement would have seemed to Neel, the means for critiquing the system hadprofoundly changed. With the disintegration of the totalitarian Russian statethat was communist in name only, a new, postcommunist social realism, lessself-righteous, less convinced of the existence of unassailable truth, began toemerge, and with it the outlines of a transnational oppositional art that beganto rewrite yet again the agendas of both social and socialist realism.