i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

128 / The New York Art Networkthey were creating, and although Neel had ambivalent feelings about some ofthe rhetoric of 1970s feminism, she gratefully accepted the support and recognitionof younger feminist artists and art historians. As her artistic stature grew,so did the size of her canvases. Critical acceptance was re„ected visually in increasingartistic conƒdence, which compensated for her declining health andpermitted her to enjoy a particularly fertile late period. As the critic ThomasHess noted, now that “the spur of neglect and misunderstanding isn’t so sharp. . . [t]he light in her pictures has turned milder, almost rosy.” 1 Her belatedartistic success did not blunt her critical edge, however, and her portraits of themembers of the women’s art network look dispassionately at the professionalwoman of the 1970s, as she assumed new roles and new identities.For their part, the emerging generation of feminists drew from Neel an empiricalexample of their arguments and a living inspiration. The rewriting ofart history to include women required role models, and Neel personiƒed thecharacteristics those models demanded. Lawrence Alloway noted in 1974 that“Neel has a special status among women artists: she is a symbol of persistentwork and insufƒcient recognition.” 2 In 1981, the president of the Women’sCaucus for Art and dean of the Wayne State University Art School, Lee AnnMiller, described Neel as the “symbol of women’s struggles.” 3 To female arthistorians who had gone through years of classroom training without everstudying a woman artist’s work, the discovery of art of outstanding quality bywomen was part of their consciousness raising, providing an initial impetus forthe rewriting of art history. As Linda Nochlin argued in an in„uential early essay(1971), 4 if there were no great women artists, it was because women hadhad no access to the system, not because genius was exclusively male.Like Neel’s own con„icted status as rebel and celebrity, however, the feministeffort to rewrite art history was not without its own contradictions. Althoughbreaking down the barriers to entry into the system required the dismantling ofconcepts such as artistic “genius,” which had been couched in biased and outdatedterms, feminists nonetheless would ƒnd themselves reverting to the verycategories they had declared outmoded when describing an older artist’s accomplishments.For instance, one of Neel’s earliest and strongest supporters,Ann Sutherland Harris, confessed in her catalog essay for the retrospective sheorganized at Loyola Marymount University in 1979, “I am not easily impressednor inclined to hero-heroine worship but Alice seemed to me then and[seems] still a real genius.” 5 Neel understood the artworld too well not to noticethe contradictions within feminist criticism: its claims of sisterhood, onthe one hand, and its competitiveness on the other. 6 Neel’s own attitude towardthe movement was equally contradictory: both celebratory and critical,she alternately claimed herself as a foremother and distanced herself from therhetoric of women’s liberation.