i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

Shifting Constellations / 173by the windows, by the sink, or by the dining room table with its empty drawnupchairs, feeling the life in the inanimate world and the death that comesclose in the pain of absence.” 30 Painted after Hartley was married, it is a compellingvisualization of the trauma that goes under the trivializing nomenclatureof “empty nest syndrome.” One of her densest metaphors, this exceptionallytall, narrow painting opposes stasis to movement within a conƒning frame. Inthe play of rectangles in the upper half, a black shade is drawn down as if tocover the framed view of the two empty windows on the opposite facade. In thelower, the oxblood leather chair, unmoored by the amorphous shadows on theground plane, turns away from the view toward the interior of the room. An ontologicalmetaphor for the mother’s loss of self when her children leave home,Neel painted her body as her apartment, with her children now permanentlyoutside its boundaries and her identity (the chair) consequently destabilized.In the last ƒfteen years of her life Neel charted the growth and changes inher grandchildren as she had done for her own children and her extended“Spanish Harlem family.” Her narrative of her experience of parenting, culminatingin Loneliness, had been a chronicle of con„ict and loss. The picture ofher children’s families is, at least superƒcially, a quite different one, dominatedby attractive women and charming children. As her grandchildren grewfrom infancy into childhood, Neel painted their portraits, one at a time, as individualsas well as part of a family or mother-child unit. Because Richard andNancy lived only seven blocks south of her West Side apartment, and becauseNancy was her administrative assistant as well as her daughter-in-law, many ofher portraits were of Nancy and of her ƒrst child, Olivia. In this sense, her familyportraits do replicate the family album in that the majority of pictures are ofthe ƒrstborn. As such, they belong more properly to a biography; for our purposesthe importance of the later work lies in Neel’s continued meditation onlife cycles and their relation to speciƒc moments in history.The softening of Neel’s critique of the construction of the family in herlater work may be due to her increased ƒnancial stability as well as her justiƒablepride in her sons’ successful professional careers. And even though theyhad adopted conventional life-styles, her children were living through whatNeel knew were “revolutionary changes,” when “The Madonna has been replacedby abortion and the wife and helpmate has become woman the aggressorand so she should.” 31 While indulging in her role as the doting grandmother,Neel kept her eye on how those revolutionary changes were playingout. Returning to the Madonna and Child motif permitted her to examine thechanges in the woman as wife-helpmate and mother-caregiver, while pointingout that child rearing remained the sole responsibility of the mother. The newworkplace equity had not taken into account the workplace in the private home.Her earliest portrait of Nancy and the infant Olivia is typical of the series. As