i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

IntroductionThe Portrait GalleryAlice Neel made her ƒrst mature paintings in 1927 and continued paintinguntil her death in 1984. A realist whose primary genre was portraiture, she consideredherself fortunate to have been active from the early to the late twentiethcentury and to have recorded the changes and continuities within thatspan of time as they were registered in the faces and bodies of her sitters. In1960, she described herself as a collector of souls, a phrase ground into a clichéby critics in the 1970s. But because her work did not begin to sell until she waspast seventy, she was most certainly a collector of her own work; her sittersmaintained their presence in her apartment long after their physical departure.Her home was thus a portrait gallery of vivid likenesses stacked togetherlike geological strata marking the various “epochs” of the century. I have chosenthe portrait gallery as the dominant metaphor for this thematic discussionof Neel’s work because it suggests the collective, historical nature of her art.However, this public monument is the product of an idiosyncratic, individualvision.Cumulatively, Neel’s paintings of people provide an artist’s interpretation ofsigniƒcant social, political, and intellectual trends in twentieth-century Americanculture, as exempliƒed by three overlapping populations in New York City:the left-wing artists and political activists in Greenwich Village during the Dexvii