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2From Portraiture to Pictures of People:Neel’s Portrait ConventionsThe Portrait TraditionThe career obstacles Neel faced as a woman in the artworld were compoundedby her choice of genre: portraiture. Just as Neel had to create an artistic personathat would bring her work into the public realm, so, basing her art in the representationof the human ƒgure, she had to rethink the outworn conventionsof the genre and to provide it with renewed relevance to modernist artisticpractice. One route, taken by artists such as Andy Warhol and Philip Pearlsteinafter 1960, would have been to invert the premises of the tradition of selfportraitureas expressive of personal identity and to question the very existenceof a private realm. Neel’s art remained rooted in the modernist faith that theportrait could represent individual psychology, but she revitalized the legacyof psychological portraiture from Degas to van Gogh by reinvesting it with itssocial and political aspects. Both her work and her words indicate that RobertHenri’s The Art Spirit served as an important source of ideas that remainedfundamental to her concept of portraiture as metaphor. By analyzing the conventionsshe developed to elaborate the metaphorical dimension of the portrait,it will be possible to understand the means she used to create an image ofan individual qua era.13