i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository
Share Embed Flag
Download ePaper

i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

bir.brandeis.edu
from bir.brandeis.edu More from this publisher
13.07.2015 Views

El Barrio / 95did she abandon “primitivism” by the early 1940s, Neel had no interest in thecycles of black history, religion, and mythology found in those artists’ works.She was not creating a separate cultural history, but a multicultural one. As awhite woman with a nonwhite daughter and son, she would have understoodfrom ƒrsthand experience the spurious and oppressive uses to which the conceptof “race” had been put.Although Neel’s Spanish Harlem series was precipitated by her long-standingpolitical commitments, Spanish Harlem was not a site of intense Partyactivism. Indeed, Spanish Harlem’s diversity makes generalizations about itspolitical base difƒcult. According to New Left historian Gerald Meyer, “ElBarrio grew within Jewish East Harlem, a great center of Socialist Party politics,”12 and as a result its newer residents also became radicalized. From 1934to 1950 the district was represented in the U.S. Congress by the Italian Americanmember of the American Labor Party Vito Marcantonio, who served as avoice for Puerto Rican interests. In 1948, the CP candidate, Henry Wallace,carried the district, and in 1950 the American Labor Party candidate for Senate,W. E. B. DuBois (shortly to join the Communist Party), received approximately45 percent of the vote in El Barrio. 13 The problem with drawing conclusionsfrom this summary is that it assumes that the Hispanic immigrantswere as politically active as their Jewish predecessors had been, when in factless than 50 percent of the population voted in the 1960 elections. 14Mitigating the radical political legacy of Jewish East Harlem was the natureof poverty within the Puerto Rican community. According to sociologist OscarLewis’s study of an extended Puerto Rican family, La Vida (1965), the slow assimilationof Puerto Rican immigrants meant that many retained their conservativeviews and customs. Moreover, the culture of poverty itself moved withthem from the island to the mainland, preventing the growth of active politicalorganizations. Lewis characterized the culture of poverty by the lack of participationof the poor in the larger institutions of society, and on the local level bya minimum of organization beyond the level of the nuclear or extended family.15 “The culture of poverty is both an adaptation and a reaction of the poor totheir marginal position in a class-stratiƒed, highly individuated, capitalist society.”16 The very distinction Lewis makes between the (temporary) condition ofpoverty and the (stagnant) culture of poverty is based on the existence of localpower bases, which were found throughout Black Harlem, but which SpanishHarlem lacked. As the social worker Patricia Cayo Sexton noted, the residentsof Spanish Harlem appeared to have merely traded the green poverty of PuertoRico for the grey poverty of New York. 17Neel’s apprenticeship for her Spanish Harlem portraits was served from1935 to 1939, in the extensive series of paintings, watercolors, pastel, and pencildrawings she made of José Santiago, a musician (guitarist), whom Neel met

96 / Neel’s Social Realist Artwhen he was playing at a nightclub, La Casita, in the Village, and who wouldbecome an English teacher in Mexico later in life. The portraits, whether Joséis sleeping, reading, or playing the guitar, are almost all bust-length, and are, ifanything, even more impenetrable than her subsequent Spanish Harlemwork. Even when she paints him as a menacing demon against a ƒery ground(ƒg. 74), José’s handsome, square-jawed features are impassive. In her extendedportraits, such as those of her daughter-in-law Nancy, she establishes a „exible,changing dynamic between herself and the sitter, choosing to emphasize oneaspect or another of their personality type as she sees it changing over time.With José, however, there are few cues to personality, no expression on theface, and no motion in the body. There are occasional clues to his nationalistpolitics: in one watercolor (1936, ƒg. 75) his sheet music is titled “Puerto RicoLibre!” so that one can assume he supported Congressman Marcantonio’s bill,submitted that year, calling for “genuine independence [for Puerto Rico andfor the declaration of] responsibility of the United States for the disastrous stateof the economy of Puerto Rico...” 18Yet whatever his politics, José is in and of another world; his features andguitar signify “Latinness” but little more. He remains remote and foreign;whether awake or asleep, his eyes are always downcast, and he is absorbed inhis own thoughts, dreams, or music. Together in bed, their two bodies formone contour on two different planes (Alice and José, c. 1938, ƒg. 76), which,despite their compositional union, is without physical contact or intimacy. Expressingdifference through the oppositions of light/dark, awake/asleep, fullface/proƒle, Neel avoids the cliché of exoticism while acknowledging that hisperson is ultimately unfathomable.José’s one identifying attribute, his guitar, remains an abstract sign, a broadgeneralization for Latin music (José and Guitar, 1935, ƒg. 77). Neel’s interestin Latin music was fostered while she was living in Havana, and her interpretationparallels instead that of the Puerto Rican writer Jesus Colón, whose collectionof Daily Worker columns, A Puerto Rican in New York, was publishedin 1961. Writing in the tradition of Gold and Bonosky, Colón’s essays are verbalportraits of his neigbors. One of these, “José,” is about a self-taught guitaristwho wrote songs based on music he heard as a child in Puerto Rico, and whoalso mastered Cuban, Argentinian, and Mexican music. José plays for familyand friends at home, leading Colon to wonder “how many Josés are lost in thebasements and top „oors of New York City, with nobody telling them theyhave talent...” 19 Neel’s painting is a monument to this as yet unheralded tradition,a signiƒcant “proletarian” art that remained an important part of herlife in Spanish Harlem. Like his literary counterpart, José sits in a culturallimbo.After Richard was born, Neel found herself abandoned once again, as José

96 / Neel’s Social Realist Artwhen he was playing at a nightclub, La Casita, in the Village, and who wouldbecome an English teacher in Mexico later in life. The portraits, whether Joséis sleeping, reading, or playing the guitar, are almost all bust-length, and are, ifanything, even more impenetrable than her subsequent Spanish Harlemwork. Even when she paints him as a menacing demon against a ƒery ground(ƒg. 74), José’s handsome, square-jawed features are impassive. In her extendedportraits, such as those of her daughter-in-law Nancy, she establishes a „exible,changing dynamic between herself and the sitter, choosing to emphasize oneaspect or another of their personality type as she sees it changing over time.With José, however, there are few cues to personality, no expression on theface, and no motion in the body. There are occasional clues to his nationalistpolitics: in one watercolor (1936, ƒg. 75) his sheet music is titled “Puerto RicoLibre!” so that one can assume he supported Congressman Marcantonio’s bill,submitted that year, calling for “genuine independence [for Puerto Rico andfor the declaration of] responsibility of the United States for the disastrous stateof the economy of Puerto Rico...” 18Yet whatever his politics, José is in and of another world; his features andguitar signify “Latinness” but little more. He remains remote and foreign;whether awake or asleep, his eyes are always downcast, and he is absorbed inhis own thoughts, dreams, or music. Together in bed, their two bodies formone contour on two different planes (Alice and José, c. 1938, ƒg. 76), which,despite their compositional union, is without physical contact or intimacy. Expressingdifference through the oppositions of light/dark, awake/asleep, fullface/proƒle, Neel avoids the cliché of exoticism while acknowledging that hisperson is ultimately unfathomable.José’s one identifying attribute, his guitar, remains an abstract sign, a broadgeneralization for Latin music (José and Guitar, 1935, ƒg. 77). Neel’s interestin Latin music was fostered while she was living in Havana, and her interpretationparallels instead that of the Puerto Rican writer Jesus Colón, whose collectionof Daily Worker columns, A Puerto Rican in New York, was publishedin 1961. Writing in the tradition of Gold and Bonosky, Colón’s essays are verbalportraits of his neigbors. One of these, “José,” is about a self-taught guitaristwho wrote songs based on music he heard as a child in Puerto Rico, and whoalso mastered Cuban, Argentinian, and Mexican music. José plays for familyand friends at home, leading Colon to wonder “how many Josés are lost in thebasements and top „oors of New York City, with nobody telling them theyhave talent...” 19 Neel’s painting is a monument to this as yet unheralded tradition,a signiƒcant “proletarian” art that remained an important part of herlife in Spanish Harlem. Like his literary counterpart, José sits in a culturallimbo.After Richard was born, Neel found herself abandoned once again, as José

logo

products

Resources

Company

Terms of service
Privacy policy
Cookie policy
Cookie settings
Imprint
Change language
Made with love in Switzerland
© 2024 Yumpu.com all rights reserved

Hooray! Your file is uploaded and ready to be published.

Saved successfully!

Ooh no, something went wrong!