i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

108 / Neel’s Social Realist ArtWhen Neel painted her view of Strauss Park she avoided slumming: the bumand his beer are not included. In Snow (1967, ƒg. 99), a large, unin„ected greyground conveys the dead light of midwinter, but the lea„ess branches of thetree outside Neel’s window seem to reach with all the kinetic energy of aKabuki dancer for the linear tracery of the park’s gingko trees. Even under theconstriction of the snow, the paint seems to rise through the vertically multiplyingelements like blood through capillaries. Life, in muted form, still persists,and in a less tenuous form than that symbolized by the tattered rag hangingfrom the window of the East Side tenement.The greater size and charm of the later cityscapes thus modulates their keyand, with it, their associations to class. Neel’s 107th and Broadway (1976, ƒg.100) is indebted to Hopper not simply in style but now in content as well. Theshadow of death passes across the façade, slowly obliterating the brightness ofa summer afternoon. However, the deliberate fusion of interior and exterior,self and nonself that Neel created in Fire Escape is split apart in the later work,where the building is given a uniƒed volume onto which the shadow is cast.“That was Death, of course, creeping over here,” Neel told Hills, and Neel’smortality may well have been uppermost in her mind, as she had recently hada pacemaker installed. As Hopper does in his work, Neel projects her personalanxieties onto the building in a direct analogy lacking the complex social commentaryof her earlier tenement façades, where interior and exterior are laminated,one to the other.As Raymond Williams has observed, the City of Strangers that became emblematicof modernism has now been absorbed into mass culture, and the“isolated, estranged images of alienation and loss . . . have become the easyiconography of the commercials.” 43 Neel’s cityscapes from 1930 to 1960 exemplifythose exceptional works within the modernist tradition that replacethe alienated “I” with the disenfranchised “we,” suggesting that the boundariesof identity can only be established when crossed. By using the tenementfaçade to join the social body with its social space, creating a meeting groundof exterior and interior, Neel reconƒgured the spaces of modernism into acommunal art.