i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

9Truth Unveiled:The Portrait NudeIn the process of dismantling the artiƒcial barriers between public and privatein her portraits, Neel also reconƒgured the meanings of the body, and in particularthe unclothed body. Whereas when naked the human body is in itsleast public state, when depicted as a nude it is the most prevalent and publicof artistic genres, the genre that signiƒes art. 1 For Neel, whose portraits violatedecorum and insist on the validity of all observed experience, the depictednude was necessarily to appear to be naked. Her approach to nakedness, andthe sexual charge it carries in this culture, was matter-of-fact. Whether clothedor unclothed, the sexual component of the body is never absent in Neel’s portraits.A constant throughout her work, Neel’s most innovative portrait nudesoccur at either end of her career, during two decades of “sexual liberation,” the1930s and 1970s.In The Female Nude, Lynda Nead has argued that the classical nude ofWestern art history was deƒned in terms of containment, metaphorically andmetamorphically “a sheath, as regular and structured as the column of a temple.”2 This girding of the wayward form of the body is, Nead argues, a doublyregulatory act—regulartory “of the female body and of the potentially waywardviewer whose wandering eye is disciplined by the conventions and protocols ofart.” 3 The site of this discipline is the art academy, where the representation of147