i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

xviii / Pictures of Peoplepression, the residents of Spanish Harlem during the McCarthy era, and theNew York artworld during the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. Herportrait gallery is a personal chronicle, a means of deƒning her life in terms ofthe people who entered it, a necessarily contingent sample of American culture.A visual novel, Neel’s multilayered narrative is held together by the consistentthread of her family life. In the course of seeking answers to her centralinvestigation of the parameters of personal identity at a given moment, Neelneglected few disputed terrains of American culture in her art—whether ofrace, class, or sex.Her sprawling gallery, some three thousand works long, was a means of freezinglife’s „ux in order to acknowledge the potential signiƒcance of even themost trivial or „eeting of human interactions. “Every person is a new universeunique with its own laws emphasizing some belief or phase of life immersed intime and rapidly passing by,” 1 Neel said. She examined any and all evidencefor what it might yield; for as a con„uence of history’s forces, no person couldbe uninteresting or insigniƒcant. Only a small proportion of her sitters belongedto the artistic elite who made lasting creative contributions to Americancultural life; the rest she rescued for history simply by recording their visagesas witnesses to their time.Neel referred to herself as an old-fashioned painter of portraits, still lifes,and landscapes. It was not merely her realistic subject matter that can be consideredanachronistic, however. In an age of mechanical reproduction, Neelused the medium of oil paint rather than photography to make her portraits. Inan era of mass communication, she made objects that had virtually no audienceat the time and have only a very limited audience today. A realist in theage of modernism, Neel based her efforts on the faith that her representationswould be consonant with an external reality. She held to realism’s fundamentaltenet that painting’s function was to mirror or re„ect reality, and because inher view individuals best re„ected the age, portraiture was the most appropriategenre for her realist art. Neel’s contribution to American art history wasthus not formal innovation but rather her ability to use a genre that was consideredexhausted and to invest it with renewed relevance. Because these subjectswere tied to the speciƒc instance—poverty as an Hispanic male suffering fromdisease, pregnancy as the physical discomfort and anxiety of a white woman—Neel’s realism claimed by implication a documentary authority. The daringwith which she poured new wine into old bottles has given me permission tolink old-fashioned content analysis with cultural history. To address the work, toanalyze what appears there, and then to open it out to the larger cultural patternof which it is a piece is to initiate a process that I believe parallels Neel’s own.Neel provided her own pedigree for her approach. The model to which shereferred continually in her lectures was Honoré de Balzac’s Comédie Humaine: