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Shifting Constellations / 175void below them. As a single mother, Neel had improvised an alternative familystructure; her children in turn had returned to the nuclear ideal in a periodin which one out of two marriages would end in divorce. In Richard in the Eraof the Corporation, painted the previous year, her son is the traditional breadwinnerlocked in his professional role. Here, the women in his family areconƒned to an arrangement that conforms to Morris’s biologically determineddivision of labor. The home (the house at Spring Lake) is light and sunny, butthe women are trapped by a model of family life that supposedly orginated inthe caves but that is now an anachronism.These paintings recognize the nuclear family as the locus of colliding socialforces. By painting separate portraits of Richard and of Nancy and theirchildren, Neel replicated the sexual division of labor that feminism in its variousformulations had been challenging for a century. In 1971, a wol„ike Nancyhad released her “Romula and Rema” into the world, swimming toward a futureof social change. But by 1980, American society was still structured accordingto the binary oppositions of public and private, masculine and feminine,and so Neel’s meditations on sexual identity and the family continue to picturethe stresses caused by those oppositions. Isolated from the bright outside world,the women are bound together by what Jung would term “this massive weightof meaning that ties us to the mother and chains her to her child...”In her study Motherhood as Representation, E. Ann Kaplan cites recent sociologicalresearch that addresses “the inadequacy of our institutions to newsocial developments regarding the mother . . . North America retains the nineteenth-centuryconcept of the nuclear family as its predominant concept forchild rearing, despite the fact that the social roles, and the division of labour requiredin such a family, no longer routinely apply...” 33 It is for this reason thatNeel’s family portraits retain their relevance.Concluding RemarksArtistically, Alice Neel’s achievement was the revival of portraiture not as a valorizationof the individual, but as a cumulative record, perhaps the only validway of picturing twentieth century America in all of its complexity. Whatsaved her project from turning into a Tussaud’s museum is her ability to readthe evidence presented by her sitter’s appearance and to interpret it in terms ofthe historical moment. Unlike the elect in the National Portrait Gallery, hersitters do not represent a single concept, either leadership or achievement, buta con„uence of forces that had to be indicated through subtleties of expressionand pose. The themes traced here are some of the historical trends that may begleaned from her work; potentially there are many others, which, when brought