i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

24 / The Subjects of the Artistspeech. The ostrich and dog metaphors in the previous portraits expand but donot encompass possible interpretations, but on occasion Neel’s use of the animalis so unexpected that we literally see the meaning form in our minds. Herportrait of Ginny (1969, ƒg. 11), for example, looks like the very personiƒcationof the late 1960s with her miniskirt and long straight hair, but these generalizationsplay against her peculiar pose and facial expression, which despiteher hip, offhand sexiness, resemble something nonhuman . . . The splayed,sinewy legs, the bulging eyes—it’s a frog! Once the frog metaphor springs tomind, the sitter’s posture becomes legible: the hair and shirt begin to „ow likewater, and her „exed toes, balanced on the painting’s bottom edge, suggestthat her tensed body is poised to hop off the stool. The ontological metaphorhere is based not on animal characteristics (Fuller Brush’s doggishness), buton animal actions: in this instance that of leaping. To the thick-legged Neel,she must have looked like an entirely new species, evolved from the decade’senvironmental conditions. Thus, Ginny becomes the representative of a generationof liberated women in a period of rapid change: she crosses a decade’s—and an era’s—divide in a single leap.Ontological metaphors involving inanimate objects can be equally vivid. Atƒrst, the portrait of her son in Richard in the Era of the Corporation (1979, ƒg.12) creates a commanding diamond shape within the rectangle, but this is“offset” by his re„ection in the mirror, itself an unstable rhomboid. The senseof instability is increased by the tension between his upper and lower body,which face in different directions. The orientational structure is con„ictedand unstable. Here the ontological metaphor permits further elaboration: thewhite tub chair in which he sits is a rigid, cold block, an icy sepulchre that isrepeated in the white frame of the mirror. Within this frigid environment,Neel uses her nonƒnito to chilling effect: the top of Richard’s head—hisbrain—is vacant. Whereas Ginny is „uid, Richard is frozen in a bucket of ice,crystallized in an awkward, uncomfortable position. Color works to symbolicallyreinforce the reading: the severe black and white coloration is offset byRichard’s pallid face. The question of whether or not in reality Richard Neelwas unhappy with his choice of career is irrelevant to the interpretation of theportrait; it is quite evident that the depicted Richard is not comfortable in his(physical) position. Neel has used the sitter she had at hand, not so much toprovide a commentary on his personal situation, but to create the personiƒcationof an era. “[M]y things of the 1960s are different from the 1970s, and onlyat the end when I did Richard, did I know what the 1970s were about. The1970s was when corporations took over.” 36In using portraiture to map the social terrain, Neel revitalized the traditionof portraiture established by Edgar Degas. Returning, if you will, to Henri’s“point of origin,” she conceived of her sitters as an amalgam, the “individual-