i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

32 / The Subjects of the Artistnected, dismembered. As she depicts herself, Neel, ironically, is blind to thereality around her: the visual evidence that neither the father nor the motherfulƒll the roles expected of them.This biting commentary on the myth of the supportive family unit was currentin literature but exceptional in American painting. Accordingly, in 1966in her review of the exhibition of Neel’s early watercolors at the GrahamGallery, the critic Charlotte Willard described her portraits as “a kind ofWinesburg, Ohio in paint.” 5 The description is apt, for Sherwood Anderson’s1919 episodic novel of small-town American life has signiƒcant structural andthematic parallels with Neel’s autobiographical series. The occupants of the“New Willard House,” father, mother, and son George, an aspiring writer, areas isolated from each other as the members of Neel’s The Family, and in Neel’sdescription of her parochial hometown (see chapter 1), one hears echoes ofAnderson’s vivid, condensed prose. Each chapter of Winesburg, Ohio is presentedas a portrait of an individual citizen who embodies the disjunction betweenthe truth of established ideologies and the falsehood of the roles itforced its subjects to play—“what the world has done to them and their retaliation,”as Neel described her sitters. Moreover, Anderson’s literary portraits dependfor their vitality on vivid descriptions of physiognomy, body language,and dress that parallel Neel’s scrutiny of her sitters. For instance, his characterizationof Wing Biddlebaum’s hands—“The slender expressive ƒngers, foreveractive, forever striving to conceal themselves in his pockets or behind his back,came forth and became the piston rods of his machinery of expression” 6 —isequally applicable to Neel’s portrait of the painter Bessie Boris (ƒg. 15). In addition,his sympathy for the tragic role life had imposed on Wing because ofhis homosexuality also parallels Neel’s stance. Both painter and writer basetheir portraiture on ƒrst-hand experience, but simplify and distort the sitters tocreate an assemblage of “grotesques,” as Anderson called them, which they believedwould present a composite picture of interpersonal relationships at aspeciƒc place and time.Neel’s visual narrative, like Anderson’s literary one, was thus deliberatelyexpressive, but based on observations of family life that were conƒrmed by thecontemporary sociological study by Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown:A Study in American Culture (1925). As their pioneering researchdemonstrated, the American family was not the stable force popular culturehad made it out to be. For instance, citing statistics on the rise of divorce, theycommented:The way in which these antecedents of divorce are imbedded in the whole complexof Middletown’s culture touching the adjustments between a man and his wifeis suggested by comparing what Middletown regards as minimum essentials of mar-