i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

18 / The Subjects of the Artist“Art is a form of history . . . Now, a painting is a [speciƒc person], plus the factthat it is also the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age.” 19In an effort to emulate the intuitive response we have on ƒrst meeting a person,Henri argued that recording the individual-as-history was less a matter ofdeliberation than of unpremeditated action. In order to respond directly to thesubject, to the life that is the source for all art, Henri believed that the artistshould paint quickly and cultivate a strong visual memory:Realize that your sitter has a state of being, that this state of being manifests itself toyou through form, color and gesture . . . Work with great speed . . . the most vitalthings in the look of a face or of a landscape endure only for a moment. Workshould be done from memory. The memory is of that vital moment . . . The memoryof that special look must be held, and the “subject” can now only serve as an indifferentmanikin [sic] of its former self. The picture must not become a patchworkof parts of various moods. 20Neel also claimed credit for spontaneity: “When I paint . . . I deliberately crosseverything out . . . and just react, because I want that spontaneity and concentrationon that person to come across.” 21 She also paraphrased Henri’s emphasison memory in her description of Woman in Pink Velvet Hat (1944, ƒg. 4):You can’t paint any good portrait unless you have a good memory, because thereare tiny changes all the time. You know what the Chinese say: “You never bathe inthe same water twice.” [sic] And if you follow those changes you just have nothing.I deliberately set out to memorize, even in art school. 22In its crudeness, Woman in Pink Velvet Hat certainly appears spontaneous,as if it were executed at the greatest possible speed in order to maintain the inexplicablesense of fear and revulsion we occasionally feel when passing apedestrian on a city street. Yet, the ideal of a direct, one-shot, unmediated recordingof experience, so central to American artistic mythology via Henri orPollock, is in fact attained through reference to pre-existing visual models. Thepedestrian’s look of distraction—unfocused eyes and the gaping mouth—isfound, for instance, in portraits by Neel’s contemporary, the caricature artistPeggy Bacon. The painting’s distortions also recall German expressionist portraitssuch as Otto Dix’s The Journalist Sylvia von Harden (1926, ƒg. 5), whoselong, pointed face and nose, red-rimmed eyes, and downturned mouth createan impression of decadence similar to Neel’s portrait. Memory, then, is not amatter of retaining a single impression long enough to translate it into paint;the “direct response” of Woman in Pink Velvet Hat is doubly coded, by establishedvisual conventions and by written text. Artistic spontaneity has been littlemore than a consciously cultivated look, part of the modernist ideology ofindividual expression.