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16 / The Subjects of the Artistartists and art historians. Neel told Henry that “I do feel vindicated by the returnof realism. Wouldn’t you? . . . I have all this backlog of all these years . . .” 8Neel’s deƒnition of “the human creature” as an individual re„ecting in aunique way the “Zeitgeist” of a given era must nonetheless have continued tosound old-fashioned in a decade when humanistic concepts of individualismand identity were questioned. The decade when ƒgurative art gained acceptancecoincided with the problematizing of individual identity in postmoderntheory. Although admired by her younger contemporaries, Neel never acknowledged,as they did, the dominating presence of photography, which hadforced a reconsideration of the very nature of personal identity.Instead, Neel was at her most radical in the choice of the subjects of herportraiture, and in her insistence that identity was inseparable from publicrealms of occupation and class. As with her contemporaries, many of her sitterswere connected to her personal life, either family or friends in the artworld.But Neel’s democratic sweep included examples from all segments of Americansociety, from middle-class professionals to people on the margins of Americanculture because of race, class, political afƒliations, or sexual orientation.Her inclusivity was an insistence that American culture could no longer bedeƒned as white middle class, and that modern art must shift its focus from theprivate and insular to the public.When, in reviewing her 1974 exhibition at the Whitney, Hilton Kramer accusedNeel of an inability to record anything but a direct response to a sitter,he paid her an unintended compliment, for it is precisely in her knowledge ofthe conventions of psychological portraiture and her ability to manipulatethem to convey the illusion of a direct record of empirical observation thatNeel’s artistic intelligence resided. Established in France by Edgar Degas andin America by Thomas Eakins, this realist tradition was transmitted to Neel inlarge measure through the art and writings of Robert Henri. This she combinedwith the expressionist tradition of Edvard Munch, Oskar Kokoschka,and in particular, the German new realists, Otto Dix and George Grosz, whoseportraits bridge individual and collective psychology.Neel was ƒrst exposed to that tradition during her training at the PhiladelphiaSchool of Design for Women from 1921 to 1925. Although the teachingat the PSDW had become thoroughly conventional when Neel studied there, 9the founder of the Ashcan School, Robert Henri, who had taught at the PhiladelphiaSchool in the 1890s, remained the school’s most admired artist. Withher friends Rhoda Medary and Ethel Ashton, the most adventurous membersof the student body, Neel set out to renew the now moribund legacy of theAshcan School. The three supplemented their training at the Graphic SketchClub where the models were “real people, including old, poor and city people.”10 According to the Belchers, Medary, the ringleader, “encouraged them