i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

Introduction: The Portrait Gallery / xxiin/as history represents a con„uence of constantly shifting and changingforces, without a stable continuity provided by specious “bloodlines” or questionable“great deeds.” But because each portrait is a synecdoche, the part substitutingfor the whole, the viewer must recreate, however provisionally, thehistorical situation the portrait represents. According to George Lakoff, the“[m]etaphorical imagination is a crucial skill in creating rapport and in communicatingthe nature of unshared experience. This skill consists, in largemeasure, of the ability to bend your world view and adjust the way you categorizeexperience.” 4 Neel was a feminist and a political radical, but her abilityto grow artistically over a period of a half century was tied to her openness toexchange.Like all great portrait artists, Neel’s pictures create the compelling illusionof a human presence. Her metaphors are not abstractions. In his essay on metaphor,Paul Ricoeur quotes Aristotle: “The vividness of . . . good metaphorsconsists in their ability to ‘set before the eyes’ the sense that they display.” 5 Justas the mind makes metaphors on the basis of embodied experience, so Neel’sportraits are metaphors for a concept of identity that is characterized by a continualtraversing of boundaries between public and private, interior and exterior.Her vivid portrayals help us to see American cultural history from varyingperspectives. The individual was her focus, but framing her vision as shepainted was the person’s place on the social ladder and in the historical moment.These deƒning terms, these frames of reference, were never absent fromNeel’s “peripheral” vision. Her portraits open out in many directions: to culturalconcerns as expressed in literature, politics, and visual art. All of thesewill overlap in this text to create a broad-based reading.