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i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

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194 / Notesprinted in Alice Neel: Paintings Since 1970 (Philadelphia: The Pennsylvania Academyof the Fine Arts, 1985), n.p.59. In Samuel Sillen, ed., The Mike Gold Reader (New York: International Publishers,1954), 28.60. Art Shields, “Pittsburgh: Peace on Trail,” Masses & Mainstream 4/4 (April 1951),18, 21.61. In 1959, when the McKie Memorial Library was opened in Dearborn, Neel sent theportrait to the dedication ceremonies. Correspondence with Lou Leny, Secretary,McKie Memorial Library, Dearborn, Michigan, April 3, 1959; undated letter from1960; Neel correspondence, Neel Arts, New York City. A document of the historyof the U.S. labor movement, McKie’s portrait should ideally be placed with his papers.62. Neel did ask Annette Rubinstein to sit for her, but the writer did not have the time.63. Not until 1974, when they were mainstream issues, did the CPUSA create theWomen for Racial and Economic Equality to address equality of opportunity andpay for women. See Rosalyn Baxandall, “The Question Seldom Asked: Women andthe CPUSA,” in Brown, et al., New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism,158.64. Margrit Reiner, “The Fictional American Woman: A Look at Some Recent Novels,”Masses & Mainstream 5/6 (June 1952), 10.65. Alice Childress, “Florence,” Masses & Mainstream 3/10 (October 1950), 34–47.66. Childress was to enjoy increasing recognition: she was given the Obie Award forTrouble in Mind in 1956 and voted into the Black Filmmaker’s Hall of Fame in1977. In the preface to the second edition of Of Woman Born, Adrienne Rich citesthe literary achievements of women of color, praising “Florence” for its depiction ofa mother who is “ƒercely determined to support her daughter’s aspirations in a worldwhich wants her daughter to be nothing but a domestic worker.” Adrienne Rich,“Ten Years Later: A New Introduction,” Of Woman Born (New York: W. W. Norton,1986), xxv.67. In the April 1955 Masses & Mainstream, Charles White’s autobiographical “Path ofa Negro Artist” voiced the author’s frustration when in high school in Chicago heasked about Frederick Douglass, or mentioned the painters Bannister and Tanner:“My teachers answered smugly and often angrily. The histories from which wewere taught, they would say, were written by competent people, and whatever theydid not mention was simply not important enough to mention.” Charles White,“The Path of a Negro Artist,” Masses & Mainstream 8/4 (April 1955), 36.68. Letter of Oct. 31, 1958, from Mike Gold to Alice Neel, Neel correspondence, NeelArts, New York City.69. The four untitled drawings were published in the June 1958 issue.70. The editors remained the old guard: Charles Humboldt, Aptheker, Bonosky, Gellert,Lawson. There were more women on the list—Barbara Giles, Meridel LeSueur, Annette T. Rubinstein, and Shirley Graham—but who precisely the “snootyoung intellectuals” were is impossible to say.71. Both share a disdain for American materialism that marks Gold’s “120 Million”(1929) as the predecessor of Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1955–1956). Both pummel theears with a rhythmic barrage of short, declarative phrases and rhetorical questions

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