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A Gallery of Players / 113be lost as the expanding artworld became an increasingly commercial enterpriseduring the 1960s. As sociologist Diana Crane has documented, “thenumber of galleries handling twentieth-century American art was more thanthree times as great in 1977 as in 1949. 3 After a hiatus of nearly a decade fromher ACA gallery exhibition in 1954, Neel was signed on by the Graham galleryin 1963, shortly after the ƒrst important article on Neel appeared in ARTnews.She exhibited there regularly until 1980, and the consistent exposure resultedin ongoing reviews in major publications and increasing critical recognition.In 1982, shortly before her death, she left Graham for the Robert Miller gallery,where her fellow modernist foremothers Joan Mitchell and Louise Bourgeoisalso exhibited.During these years, as her reputation grew, Neel also beneƒted from showingin cooperative women’s galleries and from articles published by feministcritics, a factor crucial to the careers of many female artists. For as LawrenceAlloway noted in his essay “Women’s Art in the Seventies”:Women’s art in the 1970s emerged in a form unlike that taken by earlier art movements. . . Group shows and co-operative galleries have established the ƒrst publicphase of women’s art . . . It is a measure of the radical social base of women’s artthat it should require changes in the distribution system. 4Apart from the sheer growth charted by Crane, the very structure of the artscene underwent reorganization. Again Alloway provided an analysis of thisshift in Network: Art in the Complex Present:art is now part of a communications network of great efƒciency. As its capacity hasincreased a progressive role-blurring has taken place . . . Critics serve as guest curatorsand curators write art criticism . . . All of us are looped together in a new andunsettling connectivity. 5Neel’s “one plus one” method would seem to be inadequate to depict this “newand unsettling connectivity,” and she did express regret to Henry Geldzahlerthat she had not produced group portraits. Yet, as with the proletarian portraitgallery, the sum of the individual portraits constitutes a representative portraitof the network, the changes in dress and pose indicating the transition fromthe 1960s to the 1970s, from bohemian to business or celebrity artist. In eachcase she documents the psychological costs of an artistic career in New York’sincreasingly competitive artworld with a clarity that cuts through the romantichaze that still surrounded the modern artist.Neel’s artworld portraits, so lacking in the idealized image of the artist familiarfrom art photographs, appeared to some critics to be little more thansour grapes. Neel’s New York Art Network received its ƒrst critical assessment