i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

202 / Notescent Ferrer at Sixty-sixth Street and Lexington Avenue”; in Kynaston McShine, ed.,Andy Warhol: A Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989), 36.36. Diana Loercher, “Alice Neel,” The Christian Science Monitor, March 4, 1978.37. For his part, Andy was sufƒciently ecumenical to permit Neel to interpret him as amodernist martyr, offering his standard empty cliché in perfunctory praise of Neel’sportrait: “I thought it was wonderful.” Interview with Andy Warhol, 6 November1978,” in Patrick S. Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films (Ann Arbor: UMI ResearchPress, 1986), 513. The art historian Ellen Johnson, a contemporary ofNeel’s, shared her modernist point of view: “I always felt . . . that beneath all the glitterand ironic sophistication was a fundamentally innocent person . . . Alice Neelcaptured that paradoxical truth . . . in her portrait of him: he exposes his woundedbody, but keeps his eyes closed. His life is public, but he remains hidden.” AthenaTacha, ed., Fragments Recalled at Eighty: The Art Memoirs of Ellen H. Johnson(North Vancouver, B.C.: Gallerie, 1993), 75.38. Quoted everywhere, e.g. McShine, ed., Andy Warhol, 13.39. Hills, Alice Neel, 138.40. Peter Schjeldahl has argued the case differently: “Whatever attitude one takes towardthe commodity-based logic of current capitalism, it ought to be possible toview such an extreme and subtle extension of it as Warhol’s in a positive light, as artthat says something about a culture and an era . . . Art with conscious, fully integratedsocial content is arguably a category transcending political lines . . . And bysuch a standard Warhol must be judged to rank as high as the best Socialist Realism,for instance.” Peter Schjeldahl, “Warhol and Class Content,” Art in America68/5 (May 1980), 118.41. Audiotape of lecture by Alice Neel, “Learning from Performers” series, The CarpenterCenter, Harvard University, March 21, 1979. Neel ƒles, Archives of AmericanArt, Washington, D.C.42. Michael Bronski, Culture Clash: The Making of a Gay Sensibility (Boston: SouthEnd Press, 1984), 99.43. Ellen H. Johnson, “Alice Neel’s Fifty Years of Portrait Painting,” Studio International193 (March 1977), 175.44. According to Judy Grahn, this typiƒes cross-dressing. “[O]ur point was not to bemen; our point was to be butch and to get away with it. We always kept somethingback: a high-pitched voice, a slant of the head, or a limpness of hand gestures,something that was clearly labeled female. I believe our statement was ‘Here is anotherway of being a woman,’ not ‘here is a woman trying to be taken for a man.’The fairies also held something back that prevented them from passing over intothe female gender . . .” Judy Grahn, Another Mother Tongue, 31.45. Both men enjoyed prominence in the artworld at the time, Bourdon for his writingson Calder and Christo (and, in 1987, on Warhol), and Battcock for his importantcritical anthologies.46. Battcock was stabbed to death by thugs. Neel saved the newspaper accounts of theChristmas eve murder in Puerto Rico. Neel correspondence, Neel Arts, New YorkCity.47. After Battcock’s death, Bourdon dismissed the painting as little more than “art