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166 / The Extended Family(ƒg. 165), an unusually caring physician who treated her during the summerof 1984. Although she liked him personally, in his portrait he becomes “Dr.Death,” the image of the unspoken reality of the imminent death she was thenfacing. Like Picasso’s last self-portrait (1972), it speaks to the unwelcome momentof realization that the end of life has arrived. Despite severe incapacitation,which affected her draftsmanship, she continued to speak the truth.As with her parents, so with her sisters and brothers. From the visual evidence,one might conclude that Neel was an only child, for her siblings areerased from her gallery. Only her nephew, Peter’s son Georgie, is recorded instages from a troubled adolescence to marriage to a woman who could be hismother (Georgie Neel, 1947, ƒg. 166; Annemarie and Georgie, 1982, ƒg. 167).As the portraits of Georgie and the later portraits of Sam’s sons (Julian andDavid Brody) and José’s family attest, the boundaries of the family unit areopened up so that it is no longer coincident with its container, the home, andrelations are no longer based on biology. This “nomadic” family, cut off fromnational, racial, and social roots, deƒes a coherent deƒnition.The transition from one generation to the next was ƒrst pictured in The Family,when Neel was in the anomalous position of residing at her parents’ homewith a child of her own: a child with a child, a mother without a husband. InThe Family from 1928 (ƒg. 168), Neel depicts the reunited family unit—husband,wife, and infant daughter. In it, Neel assumes her mother’s crouchedposition from the previous year. Dressed like a native in her sarong and barebreasts, Neel-as-Cuban-peasant bears the burden of her husband and child.A„oat in the striped bloodstream of the daybed, the infant Santillana, in turn,forms a linchpin joining father and mother. The undulating sea that engulfedAlice and Carlos in grief in Requiem is now calm, but the burden of family stabilityis a weight borne by the woman. Forty years later, in her portrait of PregnantJulie and Algis (1967, ƒg. 169), Neel recreated the dominant-subordinate,male-to-female compositional structure of The Family. In Berkeley at a time oftremendous social change, the oppressive family structure reproduces itselfagain. It was this structure that she would examine in light of the second waveof femininism.Neel told Patricia Hills that she felt only disdain for women’s roles in conventionalmarriage: “I thought they were stupid because all they did was keepchildren and dogs in order . . . I thought the most they ever did was back someman they thought was important.” 8 This criticism of the patriarchal family wasvoiced for Neel’s generation by Emma Goldman’s “Marriage and Love”(1917): “The institution of marriage makes a parasite of woman, an absolutedependent. It incapacitates her for life’s struggle, annihilates her social consciousness,paralyzes her imagination, and then imposes its gracious protection,which is in reality a snare, a travesty on human character.” 9 Given her be-