i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

The Women’s Wing / 141There exist but a few hints in Neel’s art of an interest in exploring the relationbetween the culture’s lesbian stereotype and the complicated issue of lesbianidentity that she had consistently addressed in her portraits of gay men.Certainly there are no paintings from the 1970s that celebrate lesbian activismin the way that John Perreault does gay liberation. Nor did Neel provide anyverbal commentary on the increasingly visible efforts of lesbian women artistsover the course of the decade. This absence may in part be explained by thefact that what one might term a lesbian sensibility in contemporary art did notemerge until the very end of Neel’s life. The symbiotic relationship describedby D’Emilio between gay liberation and women’s liberation was, ironicallyenough, not immediately extended to gay women. 57 It was not until 1980 thata “movement,” in the sense of a signiƒcant number of artists addressing thetopic, can be said to have been established. 58 The portrait of Garrard is an indicatorof the tentative emergence of that sensibility.Neel offers two alternatives to her artworld androgynes, both young and old:the fecund ƒgure of Faith Ringgold (1978, ƒg. 136) and the „amboyant one ofHungarian-born multimedia artist Sari Dienes (1898–1992) (1976, ƒg. 137).In a portrait as coloristically magniƒcent as Neel’s portrait of Nochlin, Ringgoldis the embodiment of the 1960s phrase “Black Is Beautiful.” Neel emphasizesthe splendor of Ringgold’s ethnic dress by tipping the familiar tub chairforward to suggest the round ceremonial stools used by leaders of Africantribes. Splendidly arrayed in her red costume, Ringgold represents the changein the formulation of racial identity in the 1970s from black (skin color) toAfrican American (ethnicity). In contrast to Neel’s contemporary portrait ofthe African businessman Kanuthia (1973, ƒg. 138), whose neckless head appearsglued onto his tan, western-style, business suit, Ringgold takes pride inadopting African fabric art as a sign of her cultural heritage. Kanuthia, rigid inhis corporate attire, becomes a “suit,” the representative of Western colonialismin Africa. Ringgold is an African American, Kanuthia an AmericanizedAfrican. Each uses dress rather than skin color to establish identity.Like Neel, Sari Dienes was a role model for feminist artists, and becausea number of them, including Martha Edelheit, had painted portraits of her,Dienes’s dealer at the Buchfer/Harpsichord gallery planned to include a selectionin her 1976 exhibit there. Neel agreed to contribute a portrait as well, anddepicted the seventy-eight-year-old artist, two years Neel’s senior, garbed in amulticolored muumuu, in full bloom. Smiling as if in delight at her clownishappearance, she is the bawdy comedienne, whose self-presentation need nolonger contain any element of irony or anger, for she is past the age where criticalopinion or neglect can harm her. An artworld Persephone, she has been reborninto a vital, springlike old age; the red, purple, and green polka dots onher caftan have the bold simplicity of Matisse’s late cutouts. Neither a Great