i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

26 / The Subjects of the Artistpher-wife’s inferior position vis-à-vis her prominent, activist husband is emphaticallystated. Her red bowler hat and pigtails infantilize her, accentuatingher blank facial expression, and setting up contrasts of naiveté vs. sophistication.In presenting the Morbilli’s relationship, Degas created a physical connectionbetween them to suggest an emotional and matrimonial bond, howevertentative. Neel, on the other hand, separates and isolates the Andrewsesby changing the normally blue stripes of the chair to the grey of Benny’s hair,shirt, and socks, so that, in her blue pants, Mary Ellen is isolated both compositionallyand coloristically. Even their shoes “walk” to opposite edges of thecanvas: a couple uncoupled.The contrasts of conƒdence and insecurity expressed in the portraits areemphatically gendered, and studies of body language conƒrm the propositionsadvanced in both of these portraits. Nancy M. Henley’s Body Politics: Power,Sex and Non-Verbal Communication (1977) observes that “most of our nonverbalbehavior, far from being ‘natural’ has probably been developed andmodiƒed to embody and display sex and class differences.” 38 She argues thatin our culture “femininity is gauged by how little space they [women] take up,while men’s masculinity is judged by their expansiveness.” 39 Henley quotes anearlier study, Nierenberg and Calero’s How to Read a Person Like a Book(1971), which conƒrms that an expansive gesture such as “sitting with one’sleg over the arm of the chair . . . is said to indicate authority.” 40 There is noquestion in either the Neel or the Degas about who is on top.The anthropologist Gregory Bateson has argued that our iconic languagefunctions differently from our verbal language, conveying matters of relationshipbetween self and others. 41 But how does the face, that culminating pointof the portrait, carry its meaning? How do we know that Benny Andrews regardsus with a mixture of supercilious indifference and restrained aggressiveness?Unfortunately, it is here, where the literature on the relationship betweenfacial expression, gesture, and human emotion should be most useful, that it isoften most disappointing. In the majority of her portraits, Neel emphasizedthe importance of the face as a carrier of relationships by exaggerating its size:“the head contains most of the senses. You feel all over, but you hear, see,smell and taste with the head. You also think with the head. It’s the center ofthe universe, really . . . I don’t put any more emphasis than I think should bethere.” 42 The face occupies the same proportional importance in her portraitsas it does in human communication. For the same reason, the exaggeration ofthe size of the head is a standard device of caricature. In his well-known chapterin Art and Illusion, “The Experiment in Caricature,” Ernst Gombrich acknowledgedthe role that caricature has played in twentieth-century portraiture’ssearch for the “essence” of a sitter’s personality. Without the legacy of