i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository
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i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

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Shifting Constellations / 163which both the nucleus and the circulating orbits are dismantled and reconƒgured,forming shifting constellations which are unfamiliar. In this, Neeladopted the attitude of the bohemian Villagers, whose “experimental” attitudestoward the family were charted by Caroline Ware. In 1935, 86 percentbelieved women should have independent interests, 76 percent believed thatit was not wrong for unmarried couples to live together, 70 percent believedthat husbands should share in household tasks, and 65 percent believed thatmarried women should be self-supporting. 3These attitudes were hardly re„ected in popular culture. From the turn ofthe century, when the Kodak camera was invented, photographs of familymembers gathered for ritual occasions, such as religious holidays or weddings,provided assurance that the family was a cohesive unit. Similarly, in Americanillustration, works such as Norman Rockwell’s bountiful Thanksgiving table inFreedom from Want (1943) became as emblematic of patriotism as the „ag. 4Neel’s family album contains no family ritual and little evidence of who is relatedto whom. Her relations are not necessarily next of kin, but nephews, stepsons,or people whom she includes by “elective afƒnity.” Her portrait gallerythus blurs the distinction between relationships and blood relatives.Neel’s critique of the construct of the American family reads from the pointof view of a woman who dared to „out its norms and who suffered the consequences.Like Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot before her, she examines thewoman’s realm, but unlike her nineteenth-century upper-class predecessors,she will ƒnd in that shared space of interpersonal relationships discord and isolationas well as intimacy and privacy.In the private wing of the portrait gallery, the family is portrayed as a sitepermeated by social and political pressures. The meaning of each portrait residesin its juxtaposition with associated portraits: one must be interpreted as it“relates” to another. In 1965, for instance, Neel painted three works that referredmetaphorically to the Vietnam War. The most monumental of the threedepicts her son Hartley at the end of an emotionally stressful ƒrst semester atTufts Medical School (Hartley, 1965, ƒg. 158). Posed with his hands on top ofhis head like a captured prisoner of war, his elbows forming visual road signspointing in opposite directions, Hartley registers his dilemma over what coursehis life should take. Representing the moral quandary of so many Americanmen of his generation, Hartley was “in a trap,” as Neel put it. Drafted Negro(ƒg. 159), in turn, shows a dejected young man whose number has come up;he is of the wrong race and class to be eligible for deferment from service inVietnam. Finally, when placed with the two portraits, the Soutine-like Thanksgiving(1965, ƒg. 160) can be interpreted as Neel’s comment on the escalatingslaughter of the war and the wrenching internal con„ict into which it thrustour citizenry: the capon is a „ayed corpse and the contiguous dishrag its dis-

164 / The Extended Familycarded „esh. Stuffed into the shallow grave of the sink, the fowl embodies a violentdeath suffered with no higher purpose beyond the commercial productsthat loom above it. The photojournalistic images of massacre, self-immolation,and mutilation that formed the daily diet of Americans at that time had comehome to roost. Norman Rockwell’s Freedom from Want has been reinterpretedin terms of the black humor of the 1960s, so to speak. The three together pointto the folly of conceiving of private life as a refuge from the war in SoutheastAsia.Neel’s family saga encompasses three generations—her parents, her own,and her adult children’s—but it is only in the last that the nuclear family is representedin recognizable form. Her parents and siblings are represented interms of death or loss, perhaps metaphorically referring not only to her rejectionof the conventional family life, but also to the process of growth and maturationthat leads inevitably to the splitting of the family unit. As head of herown household, Neel represented the family in terms of her experience of parenting,and to do so, she turned to the conventions of surrealism. AlthoughNeel’s portraits of her parents are contemporary with her portraits of her matriarchalfamily, I will structure the discussion along the model of a family treeand place them ƒrst.Neel’s immediate family consisted of her father, George Washington Neel,her mother, Alice Concross Neel, and four children: Albert, Lily, Alice, andGeorge (called Peter). If one tries to ƒnd a picture of that family in Neel’s portraits,one ƒnds that the elemental structure, the parental nucleus with fourorbiting offspring, has been altered. There are no signiƒcant portraits of hersiblings, and after 1927, the progenitors, the parents, exist not as a formativepresence but only as loss. The theme of loss as the deƒning characteristic offamily life originates, as we have seen, with Requiem (1928).In Neel’s ƒrst and only picture of her family unit, the Family (1927), Neel’sfather is the personiƒcation of drudgery, his days on earth marked by dullingroutine. In his only signiƒcant subsequent portrait, he has died. Dead Father(1946, ƒg. 161) is an image as brutally frank as its title. Reminiscent of thedeathbed photographs that were a staple of family albums before the twentiethcentury „ed in fear from the face of death, Dead Father is a memorial withouta eulogy. The corpse in the cofƒn, presented from the point of view of amourner, depicts death as a fact of life without larger meaning. Only the featherlikelilies and the two pink roses suggest the gentleness that inhabited thebody in life.Initially too numbing to open out to metaphor, nonetheless Dead Fathermay well be linked to its historical moment. Because Neel connected signiƒcantevents in her personal life with important events in American history,she was able to use the former as a metaphor for the latter. Just as Childbirth

164 / The Extended Familycarded „esh. Stuffed into the shallow grave of the sink, the fowl embodies a violentdeath suffered with no higher purpose beyond the commercial productsthat loom above it. The photojournalistic images of massacre, self-immolation,and mutilation that formed the daily diet of Americans at that time had comehome to roost. Norman Rockwell’s Freedom from Want has been reinterpretedin terms of the black humor of the 1960s, so to speak. The three together pointto the folly of conceiving of private life as a refuge from the war in SoutheastAsia.Neel’s family saga encompasses three generations—her parents, her own,and her adult children’s—but it is only in the last that the nuclear family is representedin recognizable form. Her parents and siblings are represented interms of death or loss, perhaps metaphorically referring not only to her rejectionof the conventional family life, but also to the process of growth and maturationthat leads inevitably to the splitting of the family unit. As head of herown household, Neel represented the family in terms of her experience of parenting,and to do so, she turned to the conventions of surrealism. AlthoughNeel’s portraits of her parents are contemporary with her portraits of her matriarchalfamily, I will structure the discussion along the model of a family treeand place them ƒrst.Neel’s immediate family consisted of her father, George Washington Neel,her mother, Alice Concross Neel, and four children: Albert, Lily, Alice, andGeorge (called Peter). If one tries to ƒnd a picture of that family in Neel’s portraits,one ƒnds that the elemental structure, the parental nucleus with fourorbiting offspring, has been altered. There are no signiƒcant portraits of hersiblings, and after 1927, the progenitors, the parents, exist not as a formativepresence but only as loss. The theme of loss as the deƒning characteristic offamily life originates, as we have seen, with Requiem (1928).In Neel’s ƒrst and only picture of her family unit, the Family (1927), Neel’sfather is the personiƒcation of drudgery, his days on earth marked by dullingroutine. In his only signiƒcant subsequent portrait, he has died. Dead Father(1946, ƒg. 161) is an image as brutally frank as its title. Reminiscent of thedeathbed photographs that were a staple of family albums before the twentiethcentury „ed in fear from the face of death, Dead Father is a memorial withouta eulogy. The corpse in the cofƒn, presented from the point of view of amourner, depicts death as a fact of life without larger meaning. Only the featherlikelilies and the two pink roses suggest the gentleness that inhabited thebody in life.Initially too numbing to open out to metaphor, nonetheless Dead Fathermay well be linked to its historical moment. Because Neel connected signiƒcantevents in her personal life with important events in American history,she was able to use the former as a metaphor for the latter. Just as Childbirth

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