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A Gallery of Players / 123Neel’s courage in painting a portrait of the man whose postmodernism hadexposed the rapidly eroding base of realist-expressionist art was impressive. IfNeel assumed that her portraits could strip her sitters of their shells to revealtheir inner self, Warhol, felling the traditions of modernist portraiture and artphotography in a single blow, insisted, “If you want to know about AndyWarhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and ƒlms and me, and there Iam. There’s nothing behind it.” 38 Yet Warhol’s own deadpan visage has beenread with some justiƒcation as a strategy for protecting the self in an age ofmass communication, and Neel elected to depict Andy in that light. Neel wasas yet unwilling to admit that the postcapitalist era required some visual acknowledgmentif art was to remain a form of history, and so she had little sympathyfor his art. To her, Warhol was “the greatest advertiser living, not a greatportrait painter.” 39 I would argue that by publicly courting wealthy patrons,Warhol called attention to the fact that the artist was as constricted under latecapitalism as under communism. 40 Warhol did not sell out, any more thanNeel did, even though both enjoyed the notoriety and ƒnancial rewards thatdeƒned artistic success during the boom years.Neel’s friendship with Warhol also provided her with the opportunity torecord the surfacing of the gay underground at a key point of origin, Warhol’sentourage. If the picture of Neel attending evenings at the Club in the late1950s in order to establish a line to the expanding artworld network is reasonableenough, it is surprising that in her seventies she was able to befriendWarhol and the members of his Factory. Yet, in her lectures she stated thatwhen she ƒrst met Warhol in 1963, he wanted to put her in one of his moviesand requested that she paint his portrait. 41 Perhaps her Mae West-like persona,her “ƒrst strike wit” and “ability to turn sexuality into a weapon against the acceptednorm,” would have had great appeal to the gay subculture. 42 Althoughshe never participated in a Warhol ƒlm, she and Warhol did appear in thesame issue of the underground publication Mother (no. 6, 1965), where theƒrst public exposure of Joe Gould was followed by stills from Warhol’s “TenMost Beautiful Women.” In April 1979, Neel’s photograph, her 1929 poem“Oh the men, the men . . .” and her 1929 nude double portrait Bronx Bacchuswere considered sufƒciently outré to be published in Night 2 along with photographsof Mary McFadden and Ultra Violet dancing at Studio 54. Finally,her last dialogue on art, with Henry Geldzahler, was published in Warhol’s Interviewin January 1985.And so the Factory came to Neel. The ƒrst was Gerard Malanga (ƒg. 117),who posed in 1969, shortly after his seven-year collaboration with Warholended. As Ellen Johnson has noted, Malanga’s pose is as open as Warhol’s isclosed, 43 and he averts his glance to permit the viewer to survey his body. Histousled hair and sensual, parted lips evidence a modern homoerotic ideal