i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

106 / Neel’s Social Realist ArtPull My Daisy. As in Neel’s Fire Escape, the image and the title of Frank’s Parade,Hoboken, New Jersey (1955–1956, ƒg. 97) are contradictory. A parade is a“formal, public procession,” but the image shows two female torsos imprisonedwithin the windows in the apartment’s brick wall. In both artists’ works,the analogy between the cropped, featureless façade and the constricted, isolatedlives of its occupants provides a critique of our culture’s ideology of freedomand social mobility, asking: “freedom for whom?” Because in a capitalistsociety the space of the home is walled off from the workings of the economy,poverty and women frequently occupy the same location. Neel’s cityscapesimply what Frank’s make explicit by con„ating the boundaries of income line,gender, and social status into one line of vision. Given any one of these positions,this is what you see.Rather than providing a document of the changing face of New York Cityduring the twentieth century, Neel demonstrated that for speciƒc groups theliving conditions of the city remained unchanged: cramped, deteriorating quartersserving as shelter and little more. Neel’s railroad apartment in Harlem, aproduct of urban planning in the 1880s, may have given way to the urban renewalhigh rises, those Corbusian nightmares of the 1950s, and the boundariesof slum districts may have shifted, but from the point of view of povertythe perspective of New York was unvarying. Neel refused to acknowledge thespace of power, the space of precisionist and advertising art. Concentrating insteadon the social body symbolized by the tenement torso and immobilizedbeneath “the great capital,” she mapped the mental geography of tenement life.Neel’s strategy, then, was to take the tradition of American realist painting,and in particular contemporary American Scene painting, and to redeƒne it inMarxist terms. Despite the conscious effort of left-wing artists in the 1930s tofollow Moscow’s directives, Neel did not attempt to import a revolutionarystyle but to revolutionize the style of the status quo. This was the only reasonablecourse, as Charmion von Wiegand discovered when she was Moscow correspondentfor the New Masses. The Soviet authorities there criticized her cityscapesbecause they were unwilling to entertain the notion that socialist realismcould omit the human ƒgure. 40Fire Escape and Rag in Window were painted from apartments on East 107thand 108th Streets respectively in Spanish Harlem. The static spaces of culturalpoverty these paintings represent are not unrelieved by joy, however. The “humanwarmth” Neel admired there colors the façades in Sunset in SpanishHarlem (1958, ƒg. 98), in which the red and coral of the evening sky are siphonedoff to give a cosmetic lift to the greyed faces of the tenements. Shiftedto a diagonal rather than a frontal position, the building on the right providesan opening that leads the eye to the vista of the sky. In 1958, Neel’s own posi-