i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

142 / The New York Art NetworkGoddess or a Wonderwoman, Dienes is an older artist who exudes creative energy.In this sitter, Neel found a kindred spirit.Dienes wrote that “Bones, lint, Styrofoam, banana skins, the squishes andsquashes found on the street: nothing is so humble that it cannot be made intoart.” 59 Although not widely known to the general public, Dienes, who hadstudied with Fernand Léger, André Lhote, and Henry Moore in Paris andLondon, was a ƒxture on the New York art scene. The artistic pluralism andthe political climate of the 1970s brought into the mainstream four new artistictypologies: the gay male androgyne, the African American, the militantfeminist, and the „amboyant elderly female, represented by Perreault, Ringgold,Garrard, and Dienes respectively.The last of her elderly artworld matriarchs was Neel herself, presentedin her natural element: as a painter. (Self-Portrait, 1980, ƒg. 139). The selfportraitis a standard modernist subject, but a portrait of a painter who is anaked, eighty-year-old woman is not, and so the effect is initially comic: everthe bawdy woman, her antic makes us laugh at this breach of conventionalbarriers. Yet unlike the one obvious precedent, the octogenarian Picasso, wizenedbut still horny in his 347 suite from 1968, Neel presents a noneroticizedbody shocking only because what is supposed to be a source of disgust andshame is merely old. Because Neel’s aged body is so schematically rendered,its grotesque or pathetic implications are minimized, and its current conditiongranted limited relevance to the task at hand.With this summary work, Neel quite deliberately places herself in art historythrough citation. The pose is based on Rembrandt’s well-known etching,Woman Seated On a Mound (1631), and the lava-like cone of her „esh out ofwhich her head spews with such force recalls Rodin’s Balzac (1897). Yet whileBalzac’s towering form is absorbed in contemplation, Neel, like Eakins beforeher, presents herself as a worker, holding her brush with the authority Eakinsaccorded Dr. Gross’s scalpel. Passing across her heart, it is a lifeline, pointingboth to her lineage (realism) and to her legacy (feminist art). She had spent alifetime creating her own comédie humaine, which she presents as a product ofhuman effort, created in the shadow of past art history. Although her „esh issagging, her brush creates a boundary between her head and her body, demarcatingthe triumph of mind over matter. Although elderly, she is still a productivelaborer. In The Coming of Age, her pessimistic account of the inevitablemiseries of old age, Simone de Beauvoir reserved special praise for the old personwhose world remains “inhabited by projects: then, busy and useful, he escapesboth from boredom and from decay.” 60 Neel personiƒes proliƒc old age,and she might have added that, for a woman released from caretaking responsibilities,from the body’s reproductive demands, and from any accusations ofantisocial behavior, the last stage of life represents the ƒnal liberation.