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The Women’s Wing / 137historical context. On an immediate level, it is a portrait of the new workingwoman balancing career and motherhood, intelligently addressing the viewerwhile calmly keeping an active, curious daughter in tow. No doubt Neel rememberedher own frustrated efforts to walk that tightrope, which she hadrecorded in The Intellectual (ƒg. 20). If the languid Fanya Foss had been thecounterfeit item, we have here the real McCoy: the faceted oval of Nochlin’shead, pressing against the top of the picture plane, is a powerful metaphor for atowering, crystalline intelligence, providing clear evidence that this is an intellectualworker. The riveting intensity of Nochlin’s gaze is matched by the fullsaturation of the primary and secondary colors linking mother and child. Inthis portrait, Nochlin is accorded the masklike imperturbability and intensecoloration of van Gogh’s portrait of Mme. Roulin. 44 Perhaps the painting’sstyle is a deliberate reference on Neel’s part to the scholar’s work.Nochlin’s articulate defense of the realist tradition in twentieth-century artprovided yet another validation, apart from femininism, of the principles onwhich Neel had based her art. The year Neel painted her portrait, Nochlinpublished an article assaulting the prevailing critical methodology, the formalistcriticism of Clement Greenberg, which insisted that abstraction was theinherent goal of modernism. Titled “The Realist Criminal and the AbstractLaw,” the essay questioned formalism’s key premises by asking “Why are thedemands of the medium more pressing than the demands of visual accuracy?”Why is purity better than impurity?” Tracing an idealist, Platonic bias in arthistorical writing from the Renaissance to the present, Nochlin deƒned visualrealism in the same way it had been deƒned recently in literature, as: “the creativeacknowledgement of the data of social life at a recognizable moment inhistory.” 45 Having chosen a phrase that could well serve to summarize Neel’sart, Nochlin concluded; “To condemn contemporary realism as resurgent academicismor trivial deviation from the mainstream—Modernism—is to falsifythe evidence...” 46In an article from the following year, 1974, Nochlin joined the feminist debateover the question of a “female sensibility.” In “Some Women Realists,”Nochlin wrote, “I was concerned to discredit essentialist notions about the existenceof an ahistorical, eternal “feminine” style, characterized by centralizedimagery or delicate color, at the same time that I wished to demonstrate thatthe lived experience of women artists in a gendered society at a certain momentin history might lead in certain speciƒc directions.” 47 In section 4, “Painters ofthe Figure,” which included Neel, she argued that the decline of the Westernportrait tradition was due not merely to the invention of photography but to a“male” fear of content:Fear of content . . . which has marked the most extreme phases of the modernmovement in recent years, is at least in part responsible for the demise of the por-