i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

4 / The Subjects of the Artistexplain her choice of an artistic vocation and to justify the direction it wouldtake.Like many American women artists, Alice Neel (1900–1984) painted in relativeobscurity for many years before achieving artistic prominence in the1970s. During that time, she began to compensate for the years of artistic neglectby crisscrossing the United States to deliver slide lectures on her work. Awitty and intelligent woman, Neel developed an enthusiastic following, eachlecture spawning new invitations. The cumulative effect of these popular lectureswas that her art was and continues to be accepted as she presented it: asan illustration of her life, as extended autobiography.The art historian, however, is bound to ask what place Neel’s art occupiesin American art and culture. I will argue that Neel’s work presents a paradigmof the course of socially concerned art in the twentieth century. We mustexamine the anecdotal version of Neel for what it is: a particular instance ofthe complex relationship between art and biography that troubles any monographicstudy of an artist’s work. My objection to a biographical approach toher work, which she instigated as a means of bringing her art to the widest possibleaudience, is not that the account of her life is untrue—it is not any moreor less “true” than any biography—but that it has obscured her work.Trained at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women from 1920 to1925, Neel aligned herself with the Ashcan School artists of the previous generationand with the legacy of the unsparing depiction of urban life establishedin Philadephia by its founders, Robert Henri and John Sloan. Neel took theAshcan School’s premises literally. Her nascent interest in a socially concernedart was reinforced by the year she spent in Havana (1925–1926) with the earlymembers of the Cuban avant-garde.During the 1930s, while living in Greenwich Village, Neel participated inthe WPA’s programs, joined the Communist Party, and was strongly in„uencedby the communist call for a proletarian art. However, as a portrait painter,she only occasionally peopled her art-for-the-millions with the masses. Instead,she insisted on depicting each representative of a given class as an individualand, in doing so, created an alternative version of social realism. A basic assumptionof the work is that the quotidian reality of twentieth-century Americansof all classes was centered in family life. There, Neel identiƒed such physicaland psychological consequences of poverty as disease and child abuse,recording them long before they were thought to be germane to an activist art.After World War II, when she had settled with her two sons in SpanishHarlem, Neel retained her realist style, resisting the centrist political forcesthat were branding it as anachronistic. Not only did her portraits from theseyears redeƒne the notion of family, but they also reconƒgured urban space interms of the experiences of those in poverty. By the early 1960s, having moved