i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

From Portraiture to Pictures of People / 17to sneak out . . . without the required gloves and hats, to take their easels to theReading Railroad yards or to the Italian market on South Ninth Street ...” 11Adopting the macho stance of the Eight, Neel bragged that she “was too roughfor the Philadelphia School of Design,” painting sailors with cigarettes insteadof girls in „uffy dresses. 12After her graduation, when she moved to Havana with Carlos, she had ampleopportunity to extend Henri’s painterly style to the ethnic populace there.Her Beggars, Havana (ƒg. 3) from 1926 shows a student adapting the broadtreatment and strong light/dark contrast of the paintings reproduced in Henri’sThe Art Spirit. Neel’s portrayal of her sitters is so generalized that the work canbarely be considered a portrait, and it is likely that in the end her approach toportraiture was in„uenced more strongly by Henri’s writings than by his painting.Indeed, The Art Spirit (1923), his widely read book, could serve as a statementof Neel’s aesthetic principles if not of her artistic conventions. It waspublished during Neel’s third year at the Philadelphia School of Design, andshe no doubt read it shortly thereafter, for while in Havana she gave a copy as agift to the novelist Alejo Carpentier. 13Henri’s biographer, William Innes Homer, has observed that “Every generation,it seems, requires its artist’s bible; the eager acceptance of The Art Spiritleaves no doubt that Henri satisƒed this need.” 14 As with any important bookthat one reads when approaching intellectual maturity, Neel may well have sointernalized the ideas of this most widely published of art manuals that theybecame her own, beginning with Henri’s deƒnition of realism. EchoingFrench critics from the previous century, he emphasized “truth” over “beauty,”often repeating Zola’s famous dictum that art is “nature seen through a temperament”(although he attributed the phrase to Corot). The goals of realism,he felt, were best achieved through the human ƒgure. 15 Like Eakins, Henriconsidered the model on the stand to be “a piece of history”: “It is the study ofour lives, our environment . . . They are real historical documents . . . Ordinaryhistories estrange us from the past . . . works of [art] bring us near it.” 16The concept of a “readable” urban physiognomy, transmitted to Henrithrough his study of Manet and Degas in Paris at the turn of the century, hadbeen articulated as early as 1876 in Edmond Duranty’s review of that year’s impressionistexhibition: “With one back, we desire that a temperament shouldbe revealed, the age, the social class; with a pair of hands, we must express amagistrate or a merchant; with one gesture, a whole series of sentiments . . .Hands sunk in pockets could be eloquent...” 17 For Neel as well, portraits werethe truest expression of culture and history. In her doctoral address at theMoore College of Art in 1971, Neel stated that “people’s images re„ect the erain a way that nothing else could. When portraits are good art they re„ect theculture, the time and many other things ...” 18 She later elaborated to Hills: