i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

Truth Unveiled / 149school, where she worked from both plaster casts and live models. During the1930s, when Neel invented the portrait nude, the tradition of the unidealizedrendering of the female nude was continued at the Art Students League,where John Sloan taught. The New York–based urban realists Isabel Bishop,Raphael Soyer, and Reginald Marsh all painted “Art Students League” nudesmarked by academic competence; of the three only Marsh courted the lewdnessof modern romance book covers—the others were pointedly detached.Perhaps because Neel never held a long-term teaching position, she wasable to crack the Art Students League’s academic mold. In 1930, after Carloshad departed for Havana with Isabetta, Neel returned home, and for severalmonths in the summer before her psychic collapse, painted in the studioshared by her school friends Ethel Ashton and Rhoda Medary. As they paintedtogether, they also served as each others’ models. Whereas Ashton and Medaryproduced nudes in the Ashcan School style, much like those Carlos had madeof Alice in Cuba, Neel represented instead the experience of modeling, theembarrassed confrontation of two differently positioned individuals, subjectand model. She returned thereby to that individual personality which is evacuatedfrom the nude model in the academic setting. Sitting for her portrait,Rhoda was able to affect a feigned nonchalance, but Ethel, a painfully shywoman, evidently could not help but let her discomfort show.In Ethel Ashton (1930, ƒg. 140), Neel abolishes the distance required forobjectivity and brings the ƒgure forward into the viewer’s space, where she isliterally too close for comfort. At that close range, we are forced to look inEthel’s eyes, there to ƒnd the vulnerability we feel when required to removeour clothes and present our bodies, on one pretext or another, for ofƒcial inspection.With eye contact comes recognition, and with recognition, the constrictiveconvention of the nude collapses with the same gravitational force asthe folds of Ashton’s „esh. The genre of the nude has undergone a seismicshift, for the subject is no longer the artist’s fantasy, erotic or otherwise, aboutthe model, nor an objective anatomical rendering, but the ways in which themodel’s relationship to her body conditions her interpersonal relationships.The arrowhead shape of Ashton’s face, thrust down into her chest like a turtle’sinto its shell, is doubled in her pendulous breasts. The body is now part of aperson’s permanent psychological baggage.One wonders whether Eakins’s iconoclastic approach to the nude was aprecedent here. While at the PSDW, Neel surely heard the popular lore of hisdismissal from the PAFA in 1886 for removing the loincloth from a male modelin a coed life drawing class. Eakins’s frank nudes, such as Study of a SeatedNude Woman Wearing a Mask (1896), may have been on view at the PhiladelphiaMuseum when Neel returned home in 1930. By “removing the mask,” soto speak, Neel transformed Eakins’s ƒgure study into a psychological portrait.