i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

30 / The Subjects of the Artistself-conscious . . .—men, that is to say, are writing with only the male side oftheir brains.” 1 Women artists of Neel’s generation, including Woolf, participatedin various modernist movements and learned from the work of theirmale counterparts, but frequently their work included an implied critique ofthe themes of “virility and domination” that from their point of view renderedso many canonical modernist works simplistic and one-sided.Neel’s early work, created between 1927 and 1933 during a period of repeatedpersonal trauma, is important for establishing the themes she wouldpursue for the rest of her career. In addition, it shows her mastering the stylisticvocabularies of the European and American modernist traditions in order tosituate her subject matter within the realm of her family life. Neel’s contributionto American art in the late 1920s resides in her courageous attention tosubject matter—dysfunctional families, the death of a child, insanity—thathad counterparts in European painting but that had rarely been addressed inmodernist painting in the United States.Because there was little precedent for Neel’s subject matter within recentAmerican modernist painting, Neel may have drawn support for her venturefrom the fertile literary bohemia of New York’s Greenwich Village, just asMunch had done with the Christiania Bohême in Oslo. The years after WorldWar I have been described as a literary Renaissance, and by moving to NewYork in 1928 and later settling in the Village in 1931, Neel placed herself atthe center of a literary milieu characterized by “the directness of their attackon the social order.” 2 Among those fundamental social institutions, patriarchalfamily life and its constructions of gender were a primary target for writersas diverse as Eugene O’Neill, Djuna Barnes, Susan Glaspell, and SherwoodAnderson.Neel’s portrait gallery, and the seeds of her future political commitments,began at home, or rather, with her return to her parents’ home after living for ayear and a half in Cuba. Although Neel had enjoyed artistic success in thenewly formed Cuban avant-garde, where she gained a perspective on NorthAmerican culture she would carry throughout her career, she spoke later ofher resentment at the restricted role of women in Latino culture as well as ofher discomfort at the huge disparity between rich and poor. 3 In May of 1927,she returned home to Colwyn with her infant daughter, Santillana. By the fall,Carlos joined her and they moved to West 81st Street in New York. Santillanadied of diphtheria in December 1927; their Isabetta was born in November1928, after which the family moved to Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. OnMay 1, 1930, Carlos left for Havana with Isabetta, and Neel returned home toColwyn. In August 1930, she suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalizedin the Othopedic Hospital in Philadelphia. In late December, Carlos returnedfor a brief visit, and Neel was released from the hospital, only to attempt