i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

148 / The Extended Familythe nude is maintained under strict supervision. There, the naked model is nota person but a mold from which is extracted a restricted range of meanings.The model’s very anonymity is thus a form of dress, draping her in an academicpseudonym, “Study.” The shock and embarrassment beginning art studentsoften experience when ƒrst confronted with a naked stranger is routinelydismissed by their professors. By making that initial confrontation the subjectof her portraits, Neel removed the nude from the ideological realm of the academicclassroom and returned the body to its central position in the formationof identity.Neel’s portrait nudes are a signiƒcant contribution to the modernist demystiƒcationof the body. Like her contemporaries, Neel’s concept of the relationshipbetween identity, the body, and sexuality was in„uenced by theFreudian theories prevalent in the Village in the 1930s. Neel was fully as capableof violating taboos and of celebrating the release of the repressed sex driveas her literary contemporaries, James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, whom sheƒrst read in art school. Of the two writers, her work most closely parallels thatof Joyce, who, unlike Lawrence, did not make a religion of the sexually liberatedbody. Rather, Joyce considered the body “matter-of-fact . . . a tragically rebelliousservant, and . . . also comic.” 4 The private body is both uncivilizedand unprotected; lacking the veneer of propriety, aware only of its own needs,it is scandalous when in public, often humiliating in private.From such an emperor’s-new-clothes approach to the tradition of the idealnude in art came Neel’s invention of the portrait nude. The word “invention”may seem too strong a claim; after all, the full-length male and female nudesof both Eakins and Henri at the turn of the century gave equal attention to theface and body, and so could be considered portrait nudes. Moreover, the Austrianexpressionists Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele had developed the portraitnude by 1910 as a means of depicting the “sex drive,” although in the1930s Neel was not familiar with their radical work. Other precedents includePaula Modersohn-Becker’s ƒgure drawings made in Paris in 1906, and SuzanneValadon’s nudes from the early 1920s, which also have the speciƒcity of portraits,even though they are not named.Although Neel’s portrait nudes are a logical and not unexpected developmentwithin modernist art and literature, she remains the only American artistof her generation to strip from the naked subject all reference to the model.Between 1930 and 1980 she observed the changing deƒnitions of sexuality andgender identity as they were inscribed on the bodies of her sitters. Neither simplyobjective recordings of the individual body nor expressionist exposures ofsexual obsessions, her naked men, women, and children present identity aspart and parcel of embodied experience.Like all professional artists, Neel had learned to paint the nude in art