i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

Truth Unveiled / 153Nadya’s addiction to sex. In retrospect, her Picassoesque drawing of Doolittlein long underwear (Kenneth Doolittle, 1931, ƒg. 147) becomes a red „ag warningof the destruction he would cause to both himself and to her.Neel found refuge from that decadence in her relationship with John Rothschild,which began in 1932 when they met at the Washington Square Parkannual outdoor exhibition. A loyal friend until his death in 1975, Rothschildhad a keen appreciation of her art; in addition, he assisted her ƒnanciallythroughout her years of obscurity. A Harvard-educated businessman, John washer bourgeois lover, and Neel, the communist sympathizer, was unapologeticabout her own enjoyment of the middle-class comforts he offered as an escapefrom the stresses ƒrst of Doolittle and then of life in Spanish Harlem. The cosmopolitanlifestyle they enjoyed together is absent from the portraits, however.In the ƒve portrait busts Neel painted between 1933 and 1958, John is depictedas emotionally withdrawn. In the three 1935 watercolors to be discussedhere, Joie de Vivre, untitled (Bathroom Scene), and Alienation, Neel depictstheir sexual relationship, and male and female desire in general, as a danceending in disappointment.Like Kenneth Doolittle asleep, Joie de Vivre (ƒg. 148) is a parody, in this instanceof modernism’s investment in sexuality as the originating or motivatingsource of human behavior. Neel’s cartoon version of Matisse’s modernist monumentmetamorphoses the circle of female dancers into pigs. In the center,Rothschild-Bacchus, penis „apping, kicks his red pointed boot between thepig-Alice’s legs. In 1980, Neel bragged with considerable justiƒcation to reporterJerry Tallmer, “If the world hadn’t discouraged me, I would have donesome magniƒcent pornography.” 16 Yet, although the piggies are raunchy, theyare also far too lighthearted in their turning minuet for their barnyard personaeto become degrading. And although the pigs also reference the legendof Circe, which fathered some of the most bestial of all of the representationsof female sexuality in turn-of-the-century art, Neel reverses the story: it is theman’s lust that turns her into a pig. Nor does Neel condemn John as the paintingsof Circe condemned her; she seems to enjoy her temporary metamorphosis,which draws together in one image the playfulness of Disney’s animatedcartoon The Three Little Pigs (1933), the aplomb of Astaire and Rogers in TopHat (1935), and the sly naughtiness of Aubrey Beardsley’s “decadent” turn-ofthe-centuryillustrations.As in her painting of the lecherous Joe Gould two years earlier, Neel’s genitalsare represented in triplicate. The multiplication in this instance has the effectof increasing rather than decreasing sexual potency, an insatiable lust thatRothschild tries to quell with a well-aimed boot. What Matisse omits from hiscanonical representation of the dance, the female genitals, Neel aggressively