i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

98 / Neel’s Social Realist Artcal of the now mature mother. In this painting, the matriarchal family, whilevulnerable, is presented as an alternative ideal to the dominant model.Yet, how fragile and unstable this family appears in constrast to the patriarchalfamily of the 1950s. Even though in the middle-class family the breadwinner/fatherwas absent for the better part of each day, he was always frontand center when the time came for a commissioned family portrait. The idealof the American postwar nuclear family is pictured, and punctured, in DanWeiner’s hilarious Morris Levinson, The President of Rival Dog Food and HisFamily Outside Their Home in Scarsdale (1955, ƒg. 80), where the husbandand wife are buttressed by their possessions, a son and a daughter at the frontand the façade of a palatial home to their rear. This is the façade, indeed, of theAmerican Dream as it was then conƒgured, one that required this adaptiveJewish family to masquerade in a Protestant colonial costume in selecting theirdomicile. The very stiffness of their poses betrays their game, but few viewers atthe time would have noticed that the façade depicted by Weiner was a false one.Black Spanish-American Family (1950, ƒg. 81), a woman and her daughters,dressed in proper middle-class attire, attempts the same masquerade with lesssuccess. The contrast of dark-skinned mother and light-skinned children demonstratesthe complex racial mixture that constitutes Hispanic culture. Thismixture appears odd initially, at least when the facial features are comparedwith the handsome regularity of the mother’s and children’s features in TheSpanish Family. In 1929, Neel had written a short story, “The Dark Picture ofthe Kallikaks,” that parodied current eugenic theories by casting the decadent“Nona” in the same role as Zola’s Nana—the corrupter of upper-class bloodlines.When Neel began her Spanish Harlem series, the theories of biologistCyril Burt enjoyed wide support. In The Backward Child (1937), Burt’s “scientiƒc”studies of the inherited intellectual inferiority of slum children ledhim so far as to connect IQ with physiognomy; the faces of slum children, hewrote, “are marked by developmental defects—by the round receding forehead,the protruding muzzle, the short and upturned nose, the thickened lips,which combine to give to the slum child’s proƒle a negroid or almost simianoutline . . . ‘Apes that are hardly anthropoid’ was the comment of one headmaster...”22Nazism had caused a precipitous decline in the prestige of the theories ofSir Cyril and an acceptance of the liberal humanist anthropology of Benedict.Yet, the belief in the inherited nature of intelligence and thus the intrinsic inferiorityof certain races continued to provide the “scientiƒc” rationale for segregationand denial of equal rights throughout the 1950s, just as such widespreadassumptions of inferiority colored the representations of “races” in massculture. Neel presents the viewer with Burt’s “simian” types in Black SpanishFamily, yet their composure and deportment forestall any racist conclusions