i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

El Barrio / 105both the building’s base (feet) and its cornice (head). The view through thewindow restricts the vista to the trunk of the building opposite, its torso. Again,the restriction that this motionless, delimited section suggests is at variancewith the work of other urban scene artists. For instance, most precisionist paintingand photography has the same bird’s-eye, free-ranging, panoramic viewpointfound in the commercial advertising of the day (ƒg. 95). In Advertisingand the American Dream, Roland Marchand singles out the view from theofƒce window as a central fantasy of capitalist realism:No advertising tableaux of the 1920s assumed so stereotyped a pattern as those ofthe typical man—Mr. Consumer—at work . . . As the “master of all he surveys,”that epitome of the American Man, the business executive, commanded an unobstructedview . . . in the advertising tableau, women never gained the opportunity tolook down with that magisterial sense of domain, control, and prospects for the futurethat the “typical” man obtained from his ofƒce window. 38The sociologist Raymond Ledrut, in his essay “Speech and the Silence of theCity” has argued that this “magisterial sense of domain” is the ideal point ofview of capitalism itself:The great capital or the State reveal themselves in glass and steel, verticality andright angles adapted to the spirit of the ofƒce, the world of business or administration,which asserts itself thus as a power transcending the life of the citizens. Historicalaction eludes cities and their inhabitants. It is concentrated in high places, in asphere of social space supreme and detached from local life. 39If the phallic skyscraper is the domain of the powerful male (either artist or executive),the tenement, as represented by Neel, is the realm of the powerless.Neel’s torso/façades, although “female” in their constriction, are not obvioussexual symbols; nonetheless, the metaphor of the house as a female body has awider currency than simple Freudian symbolism. Neel defantasizes the femalebody/house by making it erect. In her masterpiece, Rag in Window (1959, ƒg.96), the skin of the building is stained and spotted, its surface, like Carlos’s brokenbody, a visual record of the indignities it has suffered. The gray, torn, windblownrag, the tenement’s “hair,” was for Neel a metaphor for the twentiethcentury and speaks of suffering and vulnerability rather than eroticism. Notthe male child’s fantasies, but the process of aging in the female adult, and themarks left by the struggle to survive, are inscribed for public view.In its social commentary, Neel’s Rag in Window parallels the opening photographof Robert Frank’s The Americans (1959), the in„uential work of personaldocumentary that was published the year the two worked together on