i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

100 / Neel’s Social Realist Arttense and guarded, while in others he appears playful and relaxed. In a paintingdone at the same time, Arce smiles, but all playfulness is gone (ƒg. 87). Setagainst a pink ground, Arce’s skin takes on a sickly yellow pallor, and his knittedbrow and sad eyes reduce the smile to the ingratiating gesture of someonetrying to please. In a second painting from 1955 (ƒg. 88), the penknife withwhich he had cut a piece of wood or fruit in the early drawing has grown into acarving knife, and although it is only rubber, he is no longer playing but adoptingthe model of the gang member. However one may interpret his expressionsthroughout this series, in the context of Neel’s portraits of children, Arce literallystands apart, for he is always alone. His consistent isolation deƒnes himjust as the other children’s friendships deƒne them: he is antisocial. Arce’s threatmay be no more than a charade, but the white viewer is likely to read it as real.As Ruth Frankenberg has noted, this perceived threat inverts the institutionalizedrelations of racism, wherein minorites “actually have more to fear fromwhite people than vice versa.” 23 Neel’s painting makes us aware that this fear issocially constructed, as are the studied postures of aggressive self-conƒdenceArce adopts as a pitiful defense against institutionalized white power. 24Even if we do not know Georgie’s life story, we can with some conƒdencelocate its literary counterpart in Piri Thomas’s autobiography of growing up inSpanish Harlem, Down These Mean Streets (1967), which he wrote with theencouragement of the documentary ƒlmmaker Richard Leacock and thepainter Elaine de Kooning. Thomas’s vivid portrayal of a horriƒc childhood ofgang ƒghts, drugs, and thievery, leading inexorably to jail, is only hinted at inNeel’s portraits of Arce by the inclusion of the knives, but both boys are characterizedby anger and pain, disguised by bravado, which is their reponse to theirslum environment. Thomas’s use of vernacular speech captures in its rhythmand intonation the struggles with identity faced by the black Puerto Ricanwhose mother is white and whose siblings are light-skinned. At his brotherJosé’s insistence that “We’re Puerto Ricans, an’ we’re white,” Piri replies: “Say,José, didn’t you know the Negro made the scene in Puerto Rico way back? Andwhen the Spanish spics ran outta Indian coolies, they brought them big blacksfrom you know where. Poppa’s got moyeto blood . . . It’s a played-out lie aboutme—us—being white.” 25The Spanish Harlem portraits provide a picture of a vulnerable minoritypopulace of women and children. However, during the late 1950s, when Neelwas painting the decline of the Party through its aging leaders, she also paralleledher Spanish Harlem series with the emerging new radicals, the leaders ofblack culture. Whereas her earlier portrait of Alice Childress had exempliƒedthe alliance between communism and Negro civil rights, these later portraitsincluded authors who had defected from communism in order to assert an independentblack voice. The historian Mark Naison has argued that during and