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150 / The Extended FamilyLike Eakins’s nudes, Ethel is a modernist revision of the allegorical ƒgureof the Truth Unveiled. With her female nudes from the 1930s, the Truth isthat in our culture the image of the woman’s body is so thoroughly manipulatedthat very few women ƒnd it to be a source of ego reinforcement. Instead,their bodies are evidence to them of their own inadequacies, their failure tomeasure up. By 1930, the ideal of the Modern Woman, as streamlined and activeas the products of modern industrial design, had replaced the passive,voluptuous Victorian ideal. 5 Popular images of the Modern Woman, whetherpersoniƒed by a Zelda Fitzgerald, Coco Chanel, or Marlene Dietrich, wereubiquitous. Moreover, the new ideal had garnered the power of medical authorityas early as 1908 when a Dr. Louis Dublin, having linked obesity to decreasedlongevity, developed the ƒrst height/weight charts, which have servedever since as the medical counterpart to high art’s ideal nude. 6 When Ethel’snaked body is measured against the Modern Woman’s, it simply does not ƒt.Because Ethel’s body fails to meet the requirements of the decade’s imageof the Modern Woman, she endures a tragic collapse of the ego. Moreover,with her hands and feet amputated, she is helpless to move from her position,but is forced to remain identiƒed with/as her torso. Her departure from thecultural norm reduces her to a grotesque, traditionally deƒned as a “monstrousquality, constituted by the fusion of different realms as well as by a deƒnite lackof proportion and organization.” 7 Ethel cannot contain herself, and so shelacks a culturally sanctioned feminine identity. By granting the “Academy”subjectivity, Neel created the antitype of the Modern Woman, thereby posingquestions that remained pertinent throughout the century.During 1932–1933, when she had moved to Greenwich Village, Neel continuedher dialogue with the tradition of the nude, speciƒcally with the turnof-the-centuryimage of woman’s bestial sensuality in visual art and its psychoanalyticcounterpart, Freudian theory. At this time, her model was her closefriend Nadya Olyanova, whom she had ƒrst met in New York in 1928. Nadya(a.k.a Edna Meisner from Brooklyn) was petite and dark, and apparently Neelaccepted the exotic, gypsy fortune-teller persona the woman had adopted forher career as a graphologist. Although quite perky in the photograph of the twoof them as “Modern Women” in Greenwich Village (n.d., ƒg. 141), Nadya isprematurely aged and hardened in Neel’s portrait from 1928 (Nadya Olyanova,ƒg. 142). Seated at a carved table, Nadya, cigarette in hand, appears to besizing up a customer. Hardly the Modern Woman with the streamlined bodyand glamorous career, Nadya is the marginalized woman whose business, whateverit may be, is more than slightly disreputable. 8Nadya Nude (1933, ƒg. 143), the most traditionally posed of her portraitnudes, seems to revert to the tradition of the physical and moral lassitude, “thedecadence,” of the ƒn-de-siècle female nude. Like Ethel’s body, the weight of