i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

34 / The Subjects of the Artistcial status was established by 1845 in prints such as Cross-Section of a ParisianHouse: 1 January 1845: Five Stages of the Parisian World, from Paris Comique(ƒg. 19), where one ascends from the carefree concierges on the bottom „oorthrough the bored bourgeois couple on the première étage, to the destitutefamily and bohemian artist in the garret rooms. By the mid-nineteenth century,then, class stereotypes that were central to satirical cartoons were inplace: bourgeois family stability was equated with boredom, while the working-classcaretakers on the bottom „oor were seen as vital, and the neglectedartist, of course, was forced to starve. On various “levels,” this stereotype informsmuch of modernist painting, including American modernism.If the family could not support the mother as artist, the artworld was equallyincapable of accommodating the artist who is a mother. In The Intellectual(1929, ƒg. 20), Neel addressed this con„ict with the same satirical wit she haddemonstrated in The Family. When Alice and Carlos moved to New York in1927, she found a job in a Greenwich Village bookstore run by Fanya Foss(ƒg. 21), a woman with literary aspirations. In the watercolor, Foss, at right, affectsa mannered, Pre-Raphaelite pose in an overstuffed chair. At the far left, incontrast to Foss’s contemplative calm, sits a three-armed and three-legged Alicetrying desperately to participate in the discussion while struggling to keepan energetic toddler in check. Rarely has the hopelessness of maintaining anykind of intellectual life while single-handedly caring for an infant been sovividly imaged. Neel effects her revenge—a kind of female deballing—on herfriend for the creative leisure time she enjoys by opening her dress to reveal,not voluptuous breasts, but sagging teats. Her real revenge, of course, is thewatercolor itself, which serves as a material rebuke to Foss’s arid dreaming.The style of both The Family and The Intellectual is closely related to CharlesDemuth’s watercolor illustrations for novels and short stories (1915 and 1919),which may well have served as a source. A. E. Gallatin’s monograph on Demuth,the ƒrst book on the artist, had been published in 1927, and Neel maywell have seen some of these “scandalous” watercolors at the Daniel gallery inNew York. The thin, delicate pencil line, the exaggeration of anatomy thatleaves the head large and the hands and feet minuscule, and the wet, heavywash all suggest the in„uence of the early Demuth. The Intellectual recalls inparticular his illustrations for Zola’s Nana (1915–1916, ƒg. 22). Even if Demuthwas not a major impetus for abandoning the painterly stroke of the AshcanSchool for the taut line of early modernism, the shift from a painterly realistto a linear modernist style was crucial for her art, based as it was on a preciseand subtle gift for caricature.Demuth’s art may have been important as well because of his willingness tobase this phase of his art in his personal preoccupations. In Demuth’s case, thetheme of sexual corruption that pervades his choice of literature—as varied as