i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

172 / The Extended Familywalls on the interior had developed long, irregular cracks. At the time ofNancy’s marriage to Richard, Neel began to trace them. What “emerged”from her “subconscious” into the space that was the center of her family lifeand the site of many of her portraits was “The Flight of the Mother,” the processof disconnection from the primal unitary bond represented in Subconscious.Richard stands full-length with his legs facing toward the doorway leadinginto the hall, but with his head facing back into the kitchen, staring across a femaletorso, whose one large breast is pressed against his arm. The maternalbreast, of course, is the symbol of the narcissistic unity the child imagines it haswith the mother. According to the psychoanalyst Michael Balint, all adult loverelationships attempt to replicate the primary mother-child bond: “This primarytendency, I shall be loved always, everywhere, in every way, my wholebody, my whole being . . . is the ƒnal aim of all erotic striving.” 29 In marrying,Richard leaves home but at the same time looks back toward his primary attachment,forcing his body into an unnatural posture.The maternal body, in its turn, is losing its head. Neel’s own wizened proƒlesweeps away from the torso and appears ready to defend itself against theencroachment of a cloudlike, amorphous, one-eyed “head” „oating up againstits right side, ƒnding its point of access at the ghostly right breast. Presumably,if this head-cloud-womb can get past the vigilant, threatening stare of theharpie/sphinx above her, the body will no longer be a fragment, but a new,complete whole. Neel’s body, dismembered in the process of being displaced,forms a treacherous bridge between Richard and the object of his desire.Like Tom Wesselman’s pop art multimedia works from the early 1960s,which may have served as a source here, Neel’s “installation” piece combineseveryday objects with painted fantasy. In Wesselman’s work as well, the breastis revealed as a fetish object comparable to the consumer items that surroundit. Yet in contrast to the pop art cool of Wesselman’s bathrooms, it is hot in thiskitchen. This mural looms large, and the battle it depicts, the battle Leonardoforesaw emerging from the spots on the wall, is a life and death struggle overthe ownership of the product of her own body, „esh of her „esh. Akin to grafƒtiart, it is a message scrawled from the unconscious to the New Hampshire–born Nancy: “Yankee Go Home!” Thus when Neel turned brie„y to the muralform, shortly before its revival in the politically concerned art of the late 1960s,she chose an internal rather than an external wall to make, not a public, but aprivate statement. Within the conƒnes of the kitchen, she broadcast the sceneof a bitter dispute over the body’s domain.Loneliness (1970, ƒg. 178) depicts the inevitable aftermath of that battle.Like all of her nonportrait work, the painting served as an object of mourning.As the painter May Stevens eloquently noted, “The paintings painted when noone was there to sit for her show us what she sees when she is a woman alone