i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

From Portraiture to Pictures of People / 27the most brilliant caricaturist of all time, Honoré Daumier, he argued, caricaturewould not have been separated from humor, and Edvard Munch would“never have evolved his intensely tragic, distorted physiognomies, nor couldthe Belgian Ensor . . . have created his idiom of terrifying masks which so excitedthe German expressionists.” 43It is to the tradition of caricature that Neel turns when recording physiognomyand hand gesture. In Bessie Boris (1940, ƒg. 15), the painter’s egg-shapedhead is wedged at a precarious angle between the twin buttresses of her coat’slapels; from its sleeves spring her prominent hands, whose extended ƒngers aremaking opposing “points.” The unfocused eyes and half open mouth, “on theother hand,” suggest that she has momentarily forgotten what she had to say.Just how the wide, glassy eyes, furrowed brow, heavy caplike hair and tiltedhead can suggest someone eager to engage in conversation but unable to expressherself is itself difƒcult to articulate, but clearly Neel does not use caricatureas a reductive tool to isolate one aspect of a personality but rather to createa montage of features and gestures. The drawing is simpliƒed and reduced, butthe effect is anything but one-dimensional: she condenses in a single line boththe likeness and the exaggeration needed to convey character, creating therebythe indelible impression of a (hesitantly) “speaking likeness.”Like the European expressionists she so admired, Neel shifted caricaturefrom the realm of comedy to that of tragedy. In her moving depiction of oldage and death, Last Sickness (1953, ƒg. 16), we do not need Enkman and Freisen’sphysiognomy studies to tell us that, because the inner ends of her eyebrowsare raised and the corners of mouth are turned down, she is sad. 44 Childrenlearn to read and to deliberately assume this expression by the age of two.What is important is that Neel has used caricature’s devices of isolation and exaggerationto signal the intense emotions of fear and regret that dominate thelast months of the woman’s life. Her plaid bathrobe, in „esh-colored reds andpinks, patterns her sagging body into a falling house of cards; her limp, bonelesshands signal helplessness and lack of resistance. Again, we cannot inferfrom the image that Neel’s mother was in fact a bitter, fearful woman; rather,she serves, like the symbolic lemons above her, as a double omen of the bitternessof both living and dying.In Interaction Ritual, sociologist Erving Goffman argues that face is a socialconstruct, something we assume to signal the way we wish to be treated and theway we intend to treat others. This public face is the mask, that which in RolandBarthes’s words makes a face into “the product of a society and of its history.”45 For Barthes, whatever is uniquely individual—the subjective, the personal,the “private life”—“is nothing but that zone of space, of time, where Iam not an image...” 46 Neel’s task was to create the conventions by which that