i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

The Creation (of a) Myth / 5to 107th Street on the Upper West Side, the two worlds that had intersected inher art, the creative and intellectual on the one hand and the marginalizedand impoverished on the other, began to diverge. She subsequently concentratedalmost exclusively on her own family and on members of the New Yorkartworld. Nonetheless the core of her artistic philosophy—her belief that anindividual’s body posture and physiognomy not only revealed personal idiosyncracies,but embodied the character of an era—remained unchanged.Neel’s career and the critical reception of her work—painting in her homewithout institutional recognition—are representative of the situation of manywomen artists and part of a cultural pattern of devaluating women’s work.When broken, this pattern has often resulted in the overcompensation of adulation.Yet the critical extremes of the darkness of obscurity and the glare ofpublicity can hardly be expected to shed an even light on an artist’s work, asNeel’s career attests. Between 1926 and 1962, she was given six one-persongallery exhibitions; between 1962 and her death in 1984, she had sixty. Publishedreviews and articles also increased exponentially, but remained biographicallybased.Just as the career trajectory of women artists in the twentieth century hasbeen a belated and dizzying climb from the valleys of obscurity to the peaks offame, so too the critical reception of their work has been based on the anachronisticassumption that art by men explains the world, whereas art by womenexplains their life. Neel’s lectures served to reinforce that familiar cliché. Forexample, in her 1989 essay “Tough Choices: Becoming a Woman Artist, 1900–1970,” art historian Ellen Landau found the careers of the ƒrst generation ofwomen modernist artists to be marked by emotional con„ict. Enumeratingtheir psychological problems—their suicide attempts, alcoholism, and depressions—Landauimplies that their personal difƒculties were due to the con„ictsthe women experienced between their desire to be mothers and to be artists;their careers thus present a “pattern whose implications should not be ignored. . . Work was not always enough to satisfy these women, and it often took ahigh psychic toll.” 2 Without question the con„icts of motherhood and careerexacted a high toll from many artists, including Neel, but it does not followthat art making was unrewarding without the compensating fulƒllment of familylife. Perhaps the lack of support they received in trying to balance careerand motherhood was a cause of stress, or, again, a lifetime of personally rewardinglabor that remained unrecognized.In 1958, Neel recognized that, if her art were to enter history, she would notonly have to create it but participate in developing its audience. During theƒfties, close friends who were also frustrated by the critical neglect of her workencouraged her to develop a slide presentation. One of her ƒrst venues was theWestchester Community Center in White Plains, where she spoke to an art