i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

156 / The Extended Familythat function in counterpoint to the banal physicality of sexual activity. Unlikeher male contemporaries, sex for Neel is neither liberation nor transgressionbut one bodily act requiring speciƒc preparation, blunt, awkward, and yet fun.If the 1935 watercolors are placed in a narrative sequence, the reality principleis extended to the bedroom as well, where it suffers its tragic denouement.In Alienation (ƒg. 150), Neel is posed voluptuously on the bed, butJohn, still in his slippers, stands immobile before her, his legs crossed, his armsfolded, head bowed in shame. If the priapic male is a staple of modernist artand literature, impotence is a subject largely absent from the art of a Picasso,Bataille, Lawrence, or Joyce. (Dali is an exception.) The distance between thecultural myth of male sexual potency and the reality of its performance has ledto personal disappointment for both parties in Neel’s depiction, a commonenough real-life occurrence. Instead of the supposed transcendent experienceof sexuality, we must share the humiliation of the body’s malfunction, a malfunctionnot based on biological deƒcit but on con„icted emotions: “He hadjust left his wife and a couple of kids,” Neel commented, years later.The evidence of Neel’s portrait nudes from the early thirties suggests thatNeel did not subscribe to Freudian ideas of an essential womanhood, but,rather, interpreted the various effects of the period’s ideologies of sexuality, includingFreud’s, on her friends and lovers. Ethel’s and Nadya’s destinies hadbeen determined as much by the decade in which they came to maturity as bytheir biology. Similarly, with her pregnant nudes from the 1960s and 1970s,Neel examined procreation as experienced by her children’s generation, in adifferent era.Between 1964 and 1978, the active years of the women’s liberation movement,Neel painted a series of seven pregnant nudes, a subject virtually unprecedentedin art history. (The rare exceptions include Gustave Klimt’s Hopefrom 1903 and Picasso’s life-sized bronze Pregnant Woman from 1950.) In aperiod of “revolutionary changes” when “everything was questioned,” Neelquestioned what pregnancy might mean to the 1970s version of the liberatedwoman. For in choosing the subject of pregnancy, she chose the one subjectthat threatened to “prove” that anatomy was destiny, sending women back totheir suburban prisons. (Erica Jong would conclude a celebration of her ownsexual potency with a confession stated in precisely those terms: “I havedreaded pregnancy as a loss of control over my destiny. I had fantasies of the . . .death of my creativity during pregnancy, the alteration of my body into somethingmonstrous.” 27 ) Having faced her own con„icts over creativity vs. procreativity,Neel must have been interested in observing how the next generationwould resolve the issue. Neel’s pregnant nudes posed the question: How doesthe mater matter to individual women at this historical moment? 28Despite Neel’s 1978 claim that “I did begin to paint pregnant nudes before