i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

From Portraiture to Pictures of People / 21through the consumption of such images—and Rockwell’s work has long beena staple of our cultural diet—that ideology is internalized. Neel’s choice ofthose very elements of society that were most resistant to the pressures of conformitythus takes on increased importance.Obviously, in her anti-establishment, noncommissioned portraiture, Neelwas not limited by governmental requirements but was free to experimentwith the repertoire of modernist portraiture’s poses, gestures, and facial expressionsso that the range of cues to character could encompass both the variedterrain of individual types and the different levels of our social hierarchy. Nonetheless,the gulf between professional and artistic portraiture is not as wide aspainters wished it to be. Each had to learn conventions for representing character,and this acquired knowledge could be used either honoriƒcally or “psychologically.”Neel’s portraits of Helen Merrell Lynd, Virgil Thomson, andLinus Pauling, and even her own nude self-portrait, are thus at home in thecollection of the National Portrait Gallery alongside their ideological opposite,the Nixon portrait.Those researchers who have studied facial expression and body languagehave argued that our physical appearance—posture, gesture, the set of one’sfeatures—communicates powerful messages that are universally, if not alwaysaccurately, interpreted. 29 When looking at a portrait painting, viewers respondre„exively to facial expression, gesture, and pose as they have been conditionedto do to a human presence: they marshall a fund of knowledge based onprevious interpersonal interaction. Viewers’ identiƒcation of both permanentcharacter traits and transitory emotions is habitual rather than systematic, anddifƒcult to either verbalize or quantify. And if we have no knowledge of theperson or situation, our interpretations of that “deeper reality” can be spectacularlywrong. Although numerous branches of science and social science, includinganthropology, linguistics, psychoanalysis, clinical psychology, socialpsychology, and sociology, continue to study facial expression, gesture, andbody language, no consensus has been reached concerning the meaning ofthe varying positions of the face or body, nor has “an invariant relation betweenexpressed behavior and internal motive” 30 been discovered.Moreover, as the artist well knows, the painting is not the equivalent ofdirect human contact, as it lacks the factor both of motion, which permits aninitial separation of permanent character traits from temporary feeling, and ofdepth, which provides a fuller sense of bodily proportion and the set of thefeatures. The artist must devise, therefore, a set of conventions that will evoke aresponse comparable to that of human interaction, but on the delimited, twodimensionalplane of the canvas.Throughout her life’s work Neel created and modiƒed a database of schemata,modifying established artistic precedent as well as inventing some con-