i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

Shifting Constellations / 165was a metaphor for the acute anxiety of bringing a child into a world of povertyand war, so Neel’s portrait of her father’s corpse may have served as a memorialnot just for those who were killed in World War II but for the death of Rooseveltthe previous year and perhaps for the collapse of the U.S.A.-U.S.S.R.alliance as well. In February 1946, when Stalin declared capitalism and communismincompatible, the journalist Eric Sevareid commented that “theComintern, formalized or not, [was] back in effective operation.” 5 Coexistencewas impossible, as it meant appeasement. Neel’s father lies within thisstate of affairs.As she customarily did, Neel registered her personal feelings of loss in hernonƒgurative work. Both The Sea (ƒg. 162) and Cutglass Sea (ƒg. 163) werepainted after a walk to the ocean from her house at Spring Lake, New Jersey,the summer following his death. Although Neel had pasted into her scrapbooksthe announcement of her father’s retirement from the Ofƒce of SuperintendentCar Service of the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1931, and kept snapshotsof him as a young man, 6 she never painted a portrait of her father at theirsummer house, and so the seascapes mourn the loss of someone who, pictoriallyspeaking, was never there. Signiƒcantly, both are nocturnal landscapesprecipitated by her father’s “going into the night”; they are not portraits of herfather but of her own feelings. Although references to the seascapes of JohnMarin and Milton Avery can be found in The Sea and Cutglass Sea respectively,Neel weights the works with metaphorical meaning absent from thework of the two American modernists, whose reputations were then at theirheight. The expressionist turmoil in The Sea and the motionless Cutglass Seaproject the extremes of feeling—anger and depression—characteristic of thegrieving process. Neel returned to the landscape of mourning in 1957 in SunsetRiverside Drive (ƒg. 164). This warmly colored “tropical” sunset may havebeen a memorial to Carlos, as it was painted after learning, via a terse notefrom her estranged sister, that the artist had recently died. 7Her pictures of her mother from the early 1950s do not so much address thesorrowful aftermath of death as the suffering leading to it. In Last Sickness(1952, ch. 2, ƒg. 16), her mother’s chair resembles an old-fashioned wheelchair,her bathrobe a shroud or body bag. In recording this frail, elderly woman,helpless and afraid, Neel offers little sense of her once forceful, dominatingpersonality. During the last year of her life, Neel’s mother moved in with her.Neel thus assumed the position of caretaker/mother, and so the mother in turnis positioned as a dependent.Despite her terminal cancer thirty years later, Neel would deƒnitively rejecther mother’s fearful, helpless resignation, replacing fear with willfuldeƒance in her self-portrait at eighty. Her extraordinary discipline and will tocreate are exempliƒed by her last painting, the portrait of Dr. James Dineen