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20 / The Subjects of the Artistand understandably uncomfortable in a white woman’s apartment”—“black”being but one word in a complex sentence. Wedged into the conƒning pictorialspace, the girls confront, in the unseen person of the artist, the unmarked,unexamined norm of whiteness against which they, even now, must begin tomeasure themselves. The potentially demeaning cliché—the childlike Negro—that served as Neel’s point of departure is revealed as the very stricture thatobstructs the childrens’ self-deƒnition.Inspired, along with several generations of American students, by Henri’sartistic principles, Neel put them into practice in creating visual codes sufƒcientlybroad and „exible to slip around stereotype and to create, with eachportrait, a complex layering of expressive codes. She intersected with the traditionof psychological portraiture at an historical moment when a new territoryhad been identiƒed but not adequately explored. For despite his genuine concernfor people of all classes, Henri had not succeeded in extending psychologicalportraiture successfully to marginalized groups. This Neel achieved.The Portrait as MetaphorPortrait paintings are most compelling when we feel that we are seeing past thefacial expression, pose, and dress to an imagined zone of privacy. Yet how dowe discriminate between the exterior and the interior person when all that isavailable for the artist’s use and for our interpretation is surface appearance?How do we know what character traits and/or emotions are being represented?Ofƒcial portraiture provides the simplest example. In recent history, governmentofƒcials who might have commissioned a Rivers, Dine, or Neel to“immortalize” a dignitary more often turned instead to a stable of competent,highly paid professionals, among them Andrew Wyeth, Norman Rockwell,and Gardner Cox, who conƒned their portraits within the narrow bounds ofpropriety and „attery. In his 1968 portrait of Richard Milhous Nixon (ƒg. 8),for instance, Rockwell took a face whose forbidding features had been thenewspaper cartoonists’ dream, softened the mouth and jowls, and used an uncharacteristicallyinformal pose, so that Nixon assumes the attributes of a kind,thoughtful teacher or clergyman. Rockwell provides no hint of the complexitiesand contradictions of the politician’s personality, but instead, through patientaccumulation of detail, provides convincing visual reassurance of a moral,high-minded individual. Far more potent than a written record, such portraitsmaintain patriarchal authority by physically embodying a society’s mostvalued ideals. As Sheldon Nodelman pointed out in his study of Roman portraiture,such “realistic” portraits assemble “a set of conventions dictated byideological motives . . . [and formed] into an interpretative ideogram.” 28 It is