i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

114 / The New York Art Networkat the time of her Whitney Museum mini-retrospective in 1974. The exhibitincluded her portraits of Red Grooms and Mimi Gross, Peter Homitzky, AndyWarhol, David Bourdon and Gregory Battcock, The Family (John Gruen, JaneWilson and Julia), Duane Hanson, and John Perreault. Reviewing it for theNew York Post, Emily Genauer ƒrst attributed Neel’s “venomous, sadistic laterpictures” to her personal bitterness: “I know the art world, and many of thosesitters, for all their hostilities ƒred by tough struggles, for all their arrogance,they’re not like this ...,” but in the end Genauer conceded that perhaps thecollective picture had validity, permitting her to see for the ƒrst time “the poisonthat lies just under the surface of creative life in New York...” 6The series begins in 1960 with two paintings depicting prominent membersof the New York School, the painters Milton Resnick and Pat Pasloff (ƒg.102), and the poet, critic, and Museum of Modern Art curator Frank O’Hara(Frank O’Hara, No. 2, ƒg. 103). Together the portraits illustrate “art in thecomplex present”: the artist-critic-dealer system. Although respected abstractpainters, Resnick and Pasloff are reduced to participants in a required publicritual, the gallery opening. No longer simply creators, they are ofƒcial greeters,looking like a Rabbi and his wife at a bar mitzvah. Nothing could better serveas a counterweight to the mythologizing of Namuth’s photographs of Pollockpainting than the all-over „ickering pattern of artworld ƒgures, including JoanMitchell, with which Neel surrounds the couple. The occasion is the openingat the Pace gallery of the abstract expressionist work of Pollock’s widow, LeeKrasner. But now, the kinetic energy of the abstract expressionist stroke hasbeen transformed into the crackling interchanges on the art network, and theartist from a producer to an automaton whose recognition rests on being seen,in the scene.Frank O’Hara, No.2 is the more ambitious work of the two in every sense ofthe word. Neel speciƒcally asked him to sit for her, no doubt hoping to interesthim in her work. Frank O’Hara was associated with the Club, and althoughthe exhibitions he organized at the Museum of Modern Art in the early 1960shelped to canonize the ƒrst generation of Abstract Expressionists—Motherwell,Kline, David Smith—O’Hara also wrote sympathetically about the newƒgurative artists, in particular Alex Katz and Larry Rivers. With the criticaldominance of abstract expressionism yielding to a more heterogeneous situation,both in the return of the ƒgure and with the neo-dadaism of Johns andRauschenberg, Neel may have sensed the importance of asking O’Hara topose. Although she was interested in his hawklike face, her request was also anacknowledgment of the practical exigency of cultivating friends in high placesif the importance of her work was to be recognized. Of course, what was a dramaticdeparture for Neel is now considered merely professional routine.O’Hara did not himself elect to write about or exhibit her work, but Lawrence