i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

22 / The Subjects of the Artistventions of her own. Common to all of her subjects is their awareness of beingobserved. It is not easy to be scrutinized for hours at a time, and so each sitterhas to set his or her visage in neutral and to relax the body sufƒciently to let themind wander, to leave Neel’s apartment for the world of private thought. Sittersmay be more or less open or guarded, more or less interested or bored,more or less obliging or resistant, but their pose is ƒrst and foremost the resultof their relationship to the task at hand and to Neel. Yet, no matter how theymay choose to position their body or set their face, the reading of that pose isNeel’s: she determines how much or how litle of the body to present and fromwhat angle. What we see is Neel’s point of view, so that, while if we were tomeet the sitters we might well recognize them, they are likely to create a quitedifferent impression in our minds. While the sitter’s task is to pose—and by sittingto yield one’s carefully crafted façade up to someone else, Neel’s task is toprovide strong enough cues to character to convince us of her interpretation ofthis person as an accurate representative of the time.Because the meaning of a given pose resides not in the individual detailsbut in the relationship of each detail to the other, proportion plays a centralrole in Neel’s portraiture, providing the core element around which the meaningsof the other elements are built. Neel’s backgrounds are never more thanschematically rendered; she is not concerned with the physical setting butwith the manner in which the ƒgure occupies pictorial space. The relationshipbetween the proportions of the ƒgure and the proportions of the canvasform the fundamental proposition, the thesis that will be further argued in facialexpression and gesture. These proportions of body to frame create a dominantparadigm, which the viewer can interpret metaphorically. The body islegible, but not until the dominant metaphor has been established will physicaldetail gain signiƒcance. The successful portrait does not so much look likethe sitter (in the sense of replicating the features precisely) as it looks like anobject that serves as a metaphor for that person’s character.The literature on metaphor suggests that it is not simply a ƒgure of speechbut is central to all thought processes. In Metaphors We Live By (1980), linguisticphilosophers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that the metaphorswe use to discuss concepts do not simply elaborate but actually construct themeaning of those concepts. 31 In orientational metaphors, our bodies’ physicalorientation to the environment organizes a system of abstract concepts aroundspatial ones. In ontological metaphors, concepts are structured in terms of physicalentities. 32 Lakoff and Johnson claim that “we typically conceptualize thenonphysical in terms of the physical—that is, we conceptualize the less clearlydifferentiated in terms of the more clearly differentiated.” 33 I would argue thatmetaphorical thinking structures both speech and visual art, and that orientationaland ontological metaphors intersect to create meaning in Neel’s portaits.