i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

184 / Notestured a wooden bust of Castro by the Russian artist V. Telishev, and the confrontationbetween the United States and the Soviet Union that October may have precipitatedher note.11. While she was living in Cuba, Carlos had painted a ƒne portrait of the turn-of-thecenturyCuban revolutionary leader Jose Martí. For Neel, no doubt, Castro’s regimewas the realization of Martí’s vision of a Cuba independent of North Americanpolitical interference. Prevented by practical exigencies from portraying thiscommunist leader, she instead represented his martyred comrade, Che Guevara.An undated drawing inscribed “Aij-Aij-Aij” was no doubt done from the newpaperphotographs of Che Guevara’s corpse, circulated by the Bolivian government in1967 as proof of the guerilla leader’s death. As might be expected from her Cubanconditioning, Neel saw American imperialism at work in the charismatic Guevara’sdemise: “The Green Berets murdered him.” Hills, Alice Neel, 128.12. Matthew Baigell has written that although Herman Baron’s ACA gallery, whichwas speciƒcally devoted to politically engaged, left-wing art, was founded in 1932,Baron did not feel that social realism as a movement could be said to exist until afterJoe Jones’s exhibit there in 1935. Matthew Baigell, The American Scene: AmericanPainting of the 1930s (New York: Praeger, 1974), 58.13. The Communist Party will not release the dates of her membership, and a requestto the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act elicited the following bureaucraticevasion: “We have located documents which may pertain to your request andwill assign them for processing . . . In view of the large volume of requests on hand,delays in excess of one year are not uncommon.” Letter of February 4, 1994, fromJ. Kevin O’Brien, Chief, Information Resources Division, FBI. As this book goes topress, the FBI has still not answered my request.14. Among the canonical texts in her library are: Marx and Engels, The CommunistManifesto (1948 trans.); “Workers of the World Unite” (Literature of the CentralOrgan of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers, 1931); V. I. Lenin, TheState (1919); The War and the Second International (1930); Imperialism: The HighestStage of Capitalism (1939); Joseph Stalin, The Problems of Leninism (1934),Mao Tse-Tung, On Contradiction (1953). With thanks to Antonia Neel for compilingthis list.15. Annette T. Rubenstein, “The Cultural World of the Communist Party: An HistoricalOverview,” in New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism, ed.Michael E. Brown, et al. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993), 241.16. Irwin Granich (Mike Gold), “Towards Proletarian Art,” The Liberator 4/2 (February1921), 21–22.17. Barbara Melosh, Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New DealArt and Culture (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 95.18. Ibid., 14.19. Reviewing the exhibition for Art Front, Harold Rosenberg argued that the “socialcauses” that motivated van Gogh’s artistic expression can be better understood in1936 than they could in his own time: “in our own day, van Gogh might not havefound his original efforts to speak to the working people in whose society he lived soinconsistent with the movement of art . . . [T]hough van Gogh converted his art