i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

102 / Neel’s Social Realist Artartists to that change. Whereas Neel’s Spanish Harlem series serves to makevisible a marginalized group of predominantly Hispanic women and children,her portraits of black activists assert a confrontational presence. These are thenew revolutionaries, whose identity is no longer in question.Home-Based: Spanish Harlem as DomicileSocial realist tableaux, no matter how wrenching the subject, can suffer fromformulaic renderings of the downtrodden that elicit indifference rather thansympathy. One way out of this impasse was to empty the stage of its stock charactersand to use the city’s buildings as a metaphor for the life lived withinthem. To do this Neel appropriated the motif of the tenement, which predominatedin Depression-era art, and transformed it from a stage to a metaphor forcity life.Throughout modern art, the city has served as a metaphor for alienation,and Neel’s task was to ƒnd the means to restate that theme in terms of the experienceof tenement life in Spanish Harlem. When she began her career, thetheme of urban alienation in American art was “owned” by Edward Hopper,who forged a major career with his ƒnely tuned evocations of urban isolation,metamorphosing the period’s economic depression into a psychological state.Gaining from his study with Robert Henri an admiration for Manet and Degas,Hopper translated the French aristocratic, detached observation of urbanlife into the loneliness of the small-town boy in the big city.Neel especially admired Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning (1930, ƒg. 93),which was exhibited both in the Whitney Museum’s Annual and at Hopper’sone-person exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1933. As in many ofhis cityscapes, Hopper chose a long, horizontal canvas for this painting andstretched the architectural façades across its full breadth. The impenetrablewall with its repeated rectangular windows effectively squeezes out human access,for which the barber’s pole and ƒre hydrant substitute. Hopper’s use ofabstract architectural elements to convey the absence of human contact in thecity constitutes one of the more signiƒcant formal inventions in North Americanart between the wars, one that Neel adopted and reformulated.In 1933, the year Hopper’s work reached prominence, Neel was acceptedto the Public Works of Art Program and went to the Whitney Museum to register.When she returned to her apartment in Greenwich village, she paintedSnow on Cornelia Street (ƒg. 35), the ƒrst of her views from her apartment window.Initially, it looks like a pastiche of Hopper’s painting: here, too, the city isvacant and mute, its human voice sti„ed under blankets of snow, as well as bythe geometry of the blank windows with half-drawn shades. Yet, Neel has com-