i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

188 / Noteshis debt to Marxism. In a statement again applicable to Neel’s portrait gallery, hesaid he was writing “about the people and events of this time and this place, throughimaginary characters and transposed circumstances, all of it coming in the end toan expression of the changing relationships between people in varied crises ...”Kenneth Fearing, “Preface,” New and Selected Poems (Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress, 1956), xxiii.57. This is not the Daily Worker headline for that date, but the paper had been ƒlledwith discussions of strikes during the previous months.58. Hills, Alice Neel, 64–65.59. Bruce Nelson, “Introduction,” Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremenand Unionism in the 1930s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 1, 5.60. Ibid., see ch. 3, “Red Unionism: The Communist Party and the Marine WorkersIndustrial Union.” Founded in 1930, the Marine Workers Industrial Union contributedgreatly to the era of insurgency between 1933 and 1935. The MWIU triedunsuccessfully to end the ethnic particularlism of the docks, which was maintainedby the International Longshoreman Union’s head, Joseph P. Ryan. As part of its callfor the end of racial and ethnic particularism, the MWIU fought actively for therights of black workers.61. Ibid., 89–90.62. Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, The American Communist Party (New York: Praeger,1957), 458.63. Herman Bahr’s Expressionism, the earliest text on expressionism, had been translatedinto English in 1920; in 1934, the American critic Sheldon Cheney publishedExpressionism in Art.64. Charmion von Wiegand, “Expressionism and Social Change,” Art Front 2/10(November 1936), 12.65. J. K., (Jacob Kainen), “Exhibitions and Reviews,” Art Front 2/11 (December 1936),16.66. Jacob Kainen, “Our Expressionists,” Art Front 3/1 (February 1937), 15.67. For a more sophisticated discussion of this subject, see Ernst Bloch, “Discussing Expressionism”(1938), in Aesthetics and Politics: The Key Texts of the Clasic DebateWithin German Marxism, ed. Fredric Jameson (London: Verso, 1977; 1980), 22.68. Von Wiegand’s essay is cited in Virginia Hagelstein Marquart, “Art on the PoliticalFront...” Art Journal 52/1 (spring 1993), 80.69. For a thorough history of The Ten, which includes a brief discussion of The NewYork Group, see Isabelle Dervaux, Avant-Garde in New York, 1935–1939: The Ten,Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1992.70. Neel was included in von Wiegand’s article on the expressionist movement, but notin Kainen’s. However, Kainen obviously recognized Neel’s importance by includingher in the group.71. Dervaux, The Ten, 12.72. “The New York Group,” ACA gallery exhibition brochure, May 23–June 4, 1938.Special Collections, Museum of Modern Art library, New York.73. I have not traced the two other paintings, “La Bailarina,” and “Golden Boy,” whichI assume are portraits.