i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

From Portraiture to Pictures of People / 15is a liaison that Neel had to overcome as a portrait painter, for her own strugglefor recognition was unquestionably hampered by the fact that she could nothitch her portraits of fellow artists to their stars. Since her portraits were notpublished in the mass media, which was the realm of photographic reproduction,but remained instead within the boundaries of the artist’s production, thestatus of the portraitist’s sitter could not augment by re„ected radiance herown reputation. No painting of an artworld ƒgure, no matter how in„uential,could assure artistic recognition.Neel acknowledged portrait painting’s ambivalent artworld status when respondingto a critic’s question about why she, as a serious artist, concentratedon the genre:. . . actually portraits are where more crimes are committed than in any other formof art. I mean, witness college professors that hang on walls in petriƒed form. I thinkthey are frightful . . . they are portraits of so-called distinguished people; but I breakthese rules. 5Because the term had become thoroughly pejorative, Neel winced when shewas called a portrait painter, preferring to distance herself from the corpse ofofƒcial art by calling her paintings “pictures of people.” The linguistic feintdid not convince her contemporaries, however, who remained uncomfortablewith her seemingly exclusive preoccupation with the genre. Neel’s defensewas equivocal: rather than attempting to argue that she was transforming thetradition of realist and expressionist portraiture within modernism, she simplydefended the portrait as a legitimate subject in a period that nominally grantedthe artist complete freedom of choice. “I think that you can make just as greata painting of a person as you can of anything else . . . After all, the human creature—that’sit.” 6This statement was published in an interview Gerrit Henry conducted in1975 with ten contemporary artists working primarily in portraiture: Elaine deKooning, George Segal, Alex Katz, Philip Pavia, Alfred Leslie, George Schneeman,Sylvia Sleigh, Hedda Sterne, Chuck Close, and Neel. In explaining theresurrection of a genre only recently declared dead, Henry credited the “newpluralism” of the 1970s with having renewed interest in artists who had persistedin making portraits over the previous thirty years. 7 In the 1970s, with therigid doctrine of Greenbergian modernist formalism under siege, abstractpainting yielded its dominance to a diverse variety of trends, from photo realismto feminism to postmodernism. With renewed interest in realism in generaland portraiture in particular, Neel’s art could ƒnally be released from itssecond-class status. Her late success thus owes as much to the seismic shifts inthe New York artworld of the 1970s as it does to the speciƒc support of feminist