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The Women’s Wing / 129Neel’s ƒrst portrait of a modern feminist was a commissioned piece, a portraitof Kate Millet for the cover of Time magazine’s “Politics of Sex” issue, August31, 1970 (ƒg. 123). Millet’s Sexual Politics, released that July, had donefor feminist intellectual history what Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique(1963) had done for social history: it had challenged the very assumptions onwhich the category of woman rested. The sculptor/author thus served as ameans for Time, which used its portrait covers to exemplify historical events, topersonify women’s liberation. Ignoring the recent history of feminist writing,Time claimed, “Until this year, the movement had no coherent theory to buttressits intuitive passions, no ideologue to provide chapter and verse for its assaulton patriarchy.” 7 Millet had no interest in serving as an ideologue, and ina precursor to Neel’s interchange with Gus Hall in 1980, Millet told the artistthat she would not pose because she felt the movement should not have a singlespokesperson.” 8 Neel rarely worked well from photographs, and the visualresult is a fairly lifeless, cardboard ƒgure, an inadvertent demonstration of thevalidity of Millet’s argument. Time, which still devoted one of its issues annuallyto “The Man of the Year,” required an establishment image of leadershipthat neither the sitter nor the artist was prepared to fulƒll. Despite its deƒcienciesas a work of art, the stilted portrait has the virtue of exposing the contradictionof picturing a feminist leader in patriarchal terms.The following year, on June 1, 1971, Neel’s alma mater, the Moore Collegeof Art, which had held a major exhibit of her work in January, awarded her itsƒrst honorary doctorate. Neel had recently garnered several prestigious awards,but this recognition must have been a particular source of pride. 9 Her doctoraladdress to an emerging generation of artists provided Neel with the opportunityto re„ect on her views of women’s liberation. “The women’s lib movementhas given the women the right to openly practice what I had to do in anunderground way. I have always believed that women should resent and refuseto accept all the gratuitous insults that men impose upon them.” However, shedenied the implication that men, as part of the patriarchy, were the “enemy.”“Injustice has no sex and one of the primary motives of my work was to revealthe inequalities and pressures as shown in the psychology of the people Ipainted.” For Neel women’s liberation was important as part of the fundamentalchanges occurring throughout the culture: “Everything is being questioned,all relationships, education, western man, and the very ethos of the west . . . Itis a great time to be starting as an artist; who knows where these new investigationswill lead?” Neel’s talk offered no prescriptions or simple answers, no solutionsto what she considered the aesthetic confusion of the day, and no utopianformulations of the future. Instead it envisioned an unprecedented opportunityfor women to “ƒnd out what they want.” 10For Neel, as for older feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir, the means of