i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

118 / The New York Art NetworkNeel was not alone in addressing the subject. Elaine de Kooning’s paintingThe Silent Ones (c. 1960), for instance, which was included in the “RecentPainting USA: The Figure” exhibit, depicts an interracial gay couple and obscurestheir faces to point to society’s refusal to acknowledge their bond. LarryRivers’s paintings provide another, more important example. When Neelpainted her portrait of O’Hara, it is doubtful she could have known, much lessimitated, the celebratory homoeroticism of Rivers’s stunning, oversized, standingportrait of O’Hara, arms pressed provocatively behind his head and dressedonly in combat boots (O’Hara, c. 1954, ƒg. 109). Neel’s painting provides nodirect cues to O’Hara’s sexual orientation. Nonetheless in their work bothartists addressed the issue of homosexuality as it relates to the artworld, if fromquite different points of view. Like Neel, Rivers conceived of his art as a formof history stripped of hypocrisy and true to the facts. 14Neel’s portraits of the gay subculture began when she was living in GreenwichVillage. Her ƒrst “gay” portrait, a quadruple image of the critic ChristopherLazare (1932, ƒg. 110) evidences strong visual parallels with Demuth’slast, and for the ƒrst time explicitly homosexual, illustration for Robert Mc-Almon’s Distinguished Air (1930, ƒg. 111). Neel may well have seen the watercolorat Demuth’s exhibition at the Anderson Galleries in 1931. Lazare’s fulllengthƒgure looks like Demuth’s top-hatted fop, turned to face us. Even theimaginative device of having a penis “explode” from Lazare’s head in the proƒleportrait might have been inspired by the phallic projection of Brancusi’s“Princess X” from the fop’s hat.The ƒrst of her “intellectual homosexuals,” Neel’s Lazare, is based on acommonly held social stereotype from the 1920s, whose characteristics rangefrom pose and dress, on the one hand, to the evidence of a sadomasochisticlife-style behind the elegant exterior, on the other. As Jonathan Weinbergpoints out in his study of homosexuality in the early American avant-garde,Speaking for Vice, such overt posturing, as exempliƒed by the prevalence ofdrag balls, was tolerated for the very reason that it conƒrmed stereotypes and“kept difference in its place.” 15By the 1950s, when the gay artist had been forced into the closet, Neel portraitsof gay men were no longer so clearly typecast. Abandoning stereotype forsuggestion, Neel paints homosexuality as one attribute among others, signalednot by physical type but by varying demeanors. As a heterosexual woman, sheemphasized the psychological con„icts and social ostracism these men endured.In the quiet angst of Paul Kuyer (1959, ƒg. 112), the question of sexualorientation cannot be avoided and yet cannot be conƒrmed. At the time theeditor of The Leader, a civil service magazine, Kuyer would later become thedirector of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. According to Ann SutherlandHarris, Kuyer, one of ten children in a poor family, told Neel that he had con-