i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

152 / The Extended FamilyIn a double nude portrait from the same year, Nadya and Nona (ƒg. 144),Neel attacks the nineteenth-century theme of lesbian lovers, used both to doublethe amount of female „esh per painting and as a sort of proof of women’snatural perversity. She may have been responding to the nudes of the Frenchémigré Jules Pascin, whose portraits of prostitutes were shown in New York inthe late 1920s and early 1930s. According to Raphael Soyer, it was Pascin “whocreated a cult among the younger artists for painting and drawing the femaleƒgure nude and semi-clothed.” 12 Pascin’s women, however, are clearly prostitutes,and their individuated bodies speak less to personality than to the type ofthe decadent woman, morally misshapen. 13The sexual tension in Nadya and Nona is of a different nature. The nakedwomen’s nocturnal moonbath is a private ritual that de„ects the potentiallyjudgmental gaze. 14 Although their dirty feet and Nadya’s drugged expressionconvey “decadence,” the ƒxed beam of light from Nona’s blue eye returns theviewer’s stare and unplugs fantasy. We cannot feel certain, as we can withPascin, that we are witnessing a lesbian encounter. Neel has reinterpreted thetheme of transgressive erotic activity by asserting their right to privacy.In the same years, Neel turned to the subject of male sexuality in a series ofnude drawings of Kenneth Doolittle that are the companions to her Nadyapaintings. Despite the fact that he had provided her ticket to the New York intelligentsia,Neel never included Doolittle in her proletarian portrait gallery.His place is not as an intellectual but as a lover. In her two full-length nudedrawings of Doolittle, one reclining, one standing, she transforms the lean,sinewy body type found in Eakins’s boxers. In a brilliant, sacrilegious spoof ofevery Sleeping Venus in art history, Neel depicts the sleeping Kenneth Doolittle(1932, ƒg. 145) splendidly spread-eagled in unconscious abandon, hishands folded prayerfully in dream-worship of the God of sex. Even thoughNadya Nude assumes a similar pose, her body lacks the angular tension ofDoolittle’s bony frame, which appears to be gathering energy from the coiledsprings beneath him as he sleeps. 15 When the male rather than the female isexposed and unconscious, the power relations within the artist-model paradigmbecome explicit. Based loosely on Michelangelo’s Dying Slave, whoseplaster cast Neel had copied in drawing class, Kenneth Doolitte removes fourcenturies of ƒg leaves. The male nude is exposed as no longer heroic, but asmuch the victim of his “unconscious drives” as is Nadya.In another drawing from 1932–1933 (Kenneth Doolittle, ƒg. 146), Doolittle’swiry body collapses under the in„uence of drug withdrawal. As in EgonSchiele’s drawings, the lack of musculature equates to lack of control, but neitherinsanity nor sexual obsession is the subject here. An early representationof drug addiction, this decadence has consequences more dire than that of