i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

94 / Neel’s Social Realist ArtSuch distictions in art have been a large element in the propaganda for war and fascismand in the pretense of peoples that they are eternally different from and superiorto others and are, therefore, justiƒed in oppressing them . . . The idea of a purerace is a myth scorned by honest anthropologists. 8Both Schapiro’s essay and Neel’s project anticipate the most controversialdisquisition on race at the time, “The Races of Man,” written by two ColumbiaUniversity anthropologists, Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltƒsh. Presagingpostwar centrist discourse, it argued that “The Bible story of Adam and Eve . . .told centuries ago the same truth that science has shown today: that all thepeoples of the earth are a single family and have a common origin.” 9 AlthoughNeel never articulated her opinion about current anthropological theories ofrace, she would have sympathized with the authors’ argument that racism hadan economic base. “In any country every legal decision that upholds equal citizenshiprights without regard to race or color, every labor decision that lessensthe terror of being ‘laid-off ’ . . . can free people from fear. They need not lookfor scapegoats.” 10 However, Neel’s Save Willie McGee suggests that she wouldhave found naive at best the anthropologists’ efforts to conƒned the politicalproblems of race relations solely to the arena of poverty.Moreover, in rejecting the idea of ƒxed racial characteristics, Neel distancedherself from the “African” premises on which much of the art of the HarlemRenaissance had been based. A decade before Schapiro’s essay was published,Alain Locke, in his 1925 introductory essay to the anthology The New Negro,had urged the artists of the Harlem Renaissance to deƒne Negro culture interms of difference from the dominant white culture, and to look to African artas the basis for their own cultural expression. But the institution of slavery hadall but eliminated those traditions. As Michael Leja observed with reference toprimitivism in American art of the 1940s, “Laying such claim to African visualtraditions would have required wresting these forms away from the dominantculture . . . What made such a move impossible, however, was the fact thatAfrican arts were only available to the Harlem artist through modernism . . .and its misreadings.” 11 Whatever the weaknesses of its premises, Locke’s callhad led to an unprecedented „owering of literature, art, theater, and musicthat remains the outstanding achievement of American art between the wars.Although a comparable development in music and literature would slowlytake root in Spanish Harlem, there was no counterpart in the visual arts to aPalmer Hayden, a William H. Johnson, or a Jacob Lawrence. Nor did documentaryphotographers of the Photo League, who were also creating importantstudies of Harlem life, include Spanish Harlem. The role of making a creativedocument fell to Neel, who had adopted Hispanic culture. Neel’s artonly rarely intersects with the artists of the Harlem Renaissance, for not only