i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

Notes / 187only one repeated entry, the story of the death of Gould’s father, a prominent Bostonphysician. “The Oral History of Our Time” was nothing more than the wordsGould used to describe his project, a charade formulated to sustain an identity.50. Neel claims that Gould in fact requested to pose nude.51. In 1962, for instance, Hubert Crehan was obliged to remove it from the exhibitionhe had organized at Reed College. It was ƒrst published in the underground magazineMother in 1965. Linda Nochlin published a small black and white photographof the painting in her “seminal” essay “Eroticism and Female Imagery inNineteenth-Century Art,” in Woman as a Sex Object (ARTnews, 1972), 15, whereNochlin predicted that “The growing power of woman in the politics of both sexand art is bound to revolutionize the realm of erotic representation.” In 1973, JohnPerreault included it, along with Neel’s nude portrait of him, in an exhibit at theSchool of Visual Arts gallery at N.Y.U. However, in 1975, Gould was removed fromthe “Three Centuries of the American Nude” exhibition at New York’s CulturalCenter, and in the same year, at Neel’s exhibition at the Georgia Museum of Art,he appeared in the catalogue but not in the „esh.52. Sigmund Freud, “The Medusa’s Head,” quoted in Laura Mulvey, Visual andOther Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana Unversity Press, 1989), 6.53. Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 9.54. Neel’s portrait gallery is notable for its absence of women, and despite the presenceof writers of the stature of Kay Boyle and Meridel LeSueur in the community. However,Malcolm Cowley’s After the Genteel Tradition from 1936 did not discuss a singlewoman writer, nor, a half a century later, did Alan M. Wald’s New York Intellectuals(1987). The sole woman entrant was not part of Greenwich Village bohemia,but a WPA bureaucrat who is subjected to a vicious caricature lacking the subtletyof the Gould parody. Neel’s portrait of Audrey McMahon (1940) reduces the attractive,hard-working regional director of the WPA/FAP in New York City to a toothlesshag, with eye bags drooping to meet three stunted ƒngers on a rigid yardstick ofan arm. In 1938, when McMahon had written that “it is no longer essential . . . thatwe produce antiquated allegorical subjects . . . that we go in heavily for sweetnessand light,” she could have had no idea how literally one of the artists under her supervisionwould take that statement. Quoted in Lucy R. Lippard, “Empathy and Indignation,”Women Artists of the New Deal Era (Washington, D.C.: National Museumof Women in the Arts, 1988), 16. As Neel’s “boss” on the WPA, McMahonwas forced on more than one occasion to lower Neel’s wages as the result of cutbacksin the program. In his essay, “The Easel Division of the WPA Federal ArtProject,” in F. V. O’Connor, ed., The New Deal Art Projects: An Anthology of Memoirs(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1972), 119, Joseph Solmanwrites that, as head of the grievance committee of the Artists Union, he had to interveneto prevent Neel from being transferred to the teaching division.55. Neel did not use the device again until the late 1960s, in her portrait of the theatricalproducer Joseph Papp.56. In the preface to his 1956 book of collected poems, which includes an extended polemicagainst McCarthyism and censorship in the media, Fearing acknowledged