i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

A Gallery of Players / 117on Neel’s 1966 Graham gallery exhibit that was destined to become the mostquoted of her reviews. Entitled “Collector of Souls,” 12 Gruen’s narrative ofNeel’s life from her childhood “in a very puritanical town in Pennsylvania” toher current “underground reputation among whole streams of artists and intellectuals,”provided the outline for the majority of the reviews that would follow,and the sobriquet “Collector of Souls” adhered for the remainder of hercareer.Gruen and his wife, the painter Jane Wilson, were prominent hosts to theNew York artworld throughout the 1950s, and their parties helped forge alliancesand create a sense of group cohesion vital to the strength of the network.Appropriately, then, Neel presents Gruen as the center of a sophisticatedfamily. John and Jane’s casual elegance is as planned and as calculated as thelook on Jane’s face, which both welcomes and sizes up the viewer. So imposingare the adults that the wai„ike ƒgure of their daughter Julia seems suspendedin midair like an afterthought. The couple’s true family, one mightsurmise, was the artworld, and their conspicuous, “dancing” patent leathershoes attest to its glamor, as well as underscoring the increasing connection betweenart and fashion.At the time of the portrait, Gruen had just completed his personal reminiscenceof the ƒfties artworld, The Party’s Over Now (1970). This autobiographyconsists of a series of portraits of the New York artists he befriended at thattime: among them, Virgil Thomson and Frank O’Hara were also painted byNeel. The verbal and visual descriptions of artworld luminaries show strongparallels: Gruen’s description of Thomson’s anti-Semitism could have comeout of one of Neel’s lectures: “In his cups Virgil would expound on the ‘JewishMaƒa,’ and how it was keeping him from being one of the most performedcomposers of the day...” 13 Both Gruen and Neel were willing to speak in publicthe common language of circulating gossip that „ows beneath the system,refusing to dismiss an underground communication pipeline that so decisivelycolors subsequent historical interpretation.Another contribution of Gruen’s book was a frank discussion of the homosexualitythat was an accepted part of the art scene in the 1950s. Its publicationin 1970 established both O’Hara’s poetry and Rivers’s painting as importantprecedents for the emergence of an openly gay art in Warhol’s work of the1960s. Gruen’s book, which links O’Hara to Rivers, in turn provides anotherposition from which to view Neel’s earlier links to O’Hara, Rivers, and the“beat” culture of the 1950s. Neel’s insistence on including in her portraitgallery gay men, a group as invisible as blacks and as despised as communists,was part of her mission to write the truth of society as she saw it. She no doubtwas drawn to the gay subculture because of its unacknowledged role in NewYork’s cultural life.