i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

28 / The Subjects of the Artistzone could be convincingly imaged. When the emotions to be represented areextreme, she could draw upon those masks familiar from daily experience andculturally reinforced in caricature, theater, ƒlm, and expressionist art.The premises of Neel’s realist-expressionism were ƒrmly rejected by thenext generation of ƒgurative artists, who returned to that most enduring ofAmerican genres, the portrait. Neel achieves the illusion of a sitter’s presence;as viewers, our empathy is substituted for hers as the sitter’s revealed personalitytriggers associations with our own emotional experiences and historicalmemory. The men who revived portraiture in the 1960s—Philip Pearlstein,Chuck Close, Alex Katz, and Andy Warhol—discarded the fundamental tenetof empathy while maintaining the speciƒcs of the era’s dress, pose, and gesture.For instance, Pearlstein had decided by the time of the “New Images ofMan” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1959 that expressionismwas just “a cheap way of getting a reaction.” 47 All four artists use depersonalizingconventions—clinical lighting, mechanical copying, or elimination of detail—toinsist on tension between the sitter’s psychological absence and his orher physical presence. In comparison Neel’s approach remains retardataire.But if Neel can be considered the last great exemplar of a tradition, by the endof the 1970s, with the emergence of identity politics, the nihilism of a Pearlsteinor Warhol would symbolize to a less established group of artists a denialof a selfhood that was just beginning to be articulated. For feminists and minorityartists, Neel’s precedent became increasingly important.