i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

Starting Out from Home / 35Emile Zola and Frank Wedekind on the one hand and Henry James and WalterPater on the other, gave him permission to obliquely address, in artisticterms, his homosexuality. If perhaps these very private works also gave Neelthe courage to address her personal life, they may have been important as wellas a precedent for gay subject matter, one of Neel’s central concerns. Demuthhad all but abandoned his intimate ƒgurative work when Neel began hers, butthe parallels between them reveal the shared interests of these two members ofthe American bohemian avant-garde.Society’s professed concern for the health and welfare of its children is parodiedin Well-Baby Clinic (1928–1929, ƒg. 23), where Neel brought her secondchild, Isabetta, for free neonatal care. 12 Continuing to employ caustic satire,Neel erased the factitious boundary between public and private life, as shewould continue to do subsequently. Crudely painted in oil, the revolting displayof “sloppy humanity, all ragged at the edges,” as Neel put it, depicts the infantsas „ayed monkeys and the mothers as demented hysterics. Only the bizarrelyhatted nurse/madonna at the center of the composition has her infantswaddled and under control; at left a doctor, proffering tranquilizer pills as ifthey were glasses of champagne, attempts to pacify the screeching mother.There is no natural relation between mother and child here, nor is there abenevolent support system. The impersonal institution cannot accommodate,but only sedate, the human difƒculties it ostensibly has the expertise to alleviate.The white tables could belong to either a clinic, a hospital, or a morgue,and the red, writhing bodies pass across them as if on an assembly line at ameat-packing plant. Isolated at the edge of the painting, Neel’s self-portraitseems as oblivious to her surroundings as she was in The Family, perhaps onceagain indicating her inability to escape from the con„icts of her prescribedmaternal role except through denial. The professionals manage and controlinfant care with a detachment that bears no relation to the psychological spaceinhabited by the patients, who in this clinic are not so much the babies as theunpaid, untrained mothers, who are assumed to have some sort of naturalexpertise.Stylistically, Neel has moved beyond the freely drawn caricature of TheFamily to an extreme painterly expressionism parallelling the most fevered visionsof a James Ensor or an Emil Nolde. The crude paint application and hotcoloration are conventional signs in expressionist painting for lack of rationalcontrol and for the release of subjective emotion. However, Neel could havehad only limited knowledge of German expressionist art in 1928. As SusanNoyes Platt has documented, there were few major exhibitions of German artin the United States in the 1920s. The most important was “A Collection ofModern German Art,” which W. R. Valentiner organized for the AndersonGalleries in October 1923. 13 It is unlikely that Neel traveled from Philadel-