i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository
i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository 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-
36 / The Subjects of the Artistphia to New York to see that exhibition, and she would also have missed by amonth Max Beckmann’s ƒrst New York exhibition at J. B. Neumann’s NewArt Circle gallery in April 1927. However, an important article on German expressionistart by Rom Landau in the July 1928 issue of The Arts argued thatthe emotional expressionism of Kirschner and Nolde had been replaced recentlyby “The New Reality” of George Grosz and Otto Dix: “once Expressionismlost its power, the younger generation began to long for the externalrealities of life. They tried to be objective instead of subjective.” 14 In Well-Baby Clinic, Neel combined what Landau termed the “inharmonious volcaniceruptions” of the ƒrst phase of expressionism with the searing socialcommentary of the second. In the late 1920s, Neel’s watercolors display a contrastof taut line and broad areas of wash to create an ominous mood, similar tothose George Grosz created after his arrival in New York in 1932. A few yearslater, after the 1931 exhibition “Modern German Painting and Sculpture” atthe Museum of Modern Art, Neel’s portrait paintings reveal a cold, clinicaleye akin to that of Dix, whose portrait of Dr. Mayer-Hermann also entered thepermanent collection that year.Whatever her familiarity with German art, Neel’s independently evolvedexpressionism is again signiƒcant for its gendered content. Although the hospitalsetting, locus of both illness and insanity, is used as a metaphor in Germanart for social ills, Grosz, Beckmann, and Nolde tended to load their depictionswith religious or moral symbolism. Neel, on the other hand, avoids both mysticismand moralism in her critical evaluation of both the maternal instinct andthe scientiƒc competence of the medical establishment. Mothers who cannotafford private pediatricians for their children take them to publicly fundedhospital clinics for care. Social corruption is less the subject here than the incompetentcare offered to the indigent.If the institution of public infant care was scathingly mocked in Well-BabyClinic, the emotional dimension of family tragedy is addressed in two worksexecuted several years apart. Requiem (1928, ƒg. 24) a watercolor painted afterher ƒrst daughter, Santillana, died of diphtheria in December 1927, depicts aheaving ocean of grief next to which lie two prone skeletal ƒgures, one robedin white, the other in black, screaming in pain while two embryo/ƒsh look dispassionatelyon. Remarkably similar in means to Edvard Munch’s The Scream(1893, ƒg. 25), the pain expressed here is very different from Munch’s paradigmof personal alienation. Neel’s trauma is not isolated but shared. Mourninghas locked together the two ƒgures (Alice and Carlos), so that a death inthe family becomes the death of the family. 15The sparest and most abstract of the modernist paintings from her ƒrst matureperiod is in addition her ƒrst overtly socially concerned painting as well,initiating a transition from her early modernist to her social realist art at the on-
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36 / The Subjects of the Artistphia to New York to see that exhibition, and she would also have missed by amonth Max Beckmann’s ƒrst New York exhibition at J. B. Neumann’s NewArt Circle gallery in April 1927. However, an important article on German expressionistart by Rom Landau in the July 1928 issue of The Arts argued thatthe emotional expressionism of Kirschner and Nolde had been replaced recentlyby “The New Reality” of George Grosz and Otto Dix: “once Expressionismlost its power, the younger generation began to long for the externalrealities of life. They tried to be objective instead of subjective.” 14 In Well-Baby Clinic, Neel combined what Landau termed the “inharmonious volcaniceruptions” of the ƒrst phase of expressionism with the searing socialcommentary of the second. In the late 1920s, Neel’s watercolors display a contrastof taut line and broad areas of wash to create an ominous mood, similar tothose George Grosz created after his arrival in New York in 1932. A few yearslater, after the 1931 exhibition “Modern German Painting and Sculpture” atthe Museum of Modern Art, Neel’s portrait paintings reveal a cold, clinicaleye akin to that of Dix, whose portrait of Dr. Mayer-Hermann also entered thepermanent collection that year.Whatever her familiarity with German art, Neel’s independently evolvedexpressionism is again signiƒcant for its gendered content. Although the hospitalsetting, locus of both illness and insanity, is used as a metaphor in Germanart for social ills, Grosz, Beckmann, and Nolde tended to load their depictionswith religious or moral symbolism. Neel, on the other hand, avoids both mysticismand moralism in her critical evaluation of both the maternal instinct andthe scientiƒc competence of the medical establishment. Mothers who cannotafford private pediatricians for their children take them to publicly fundedhospital clinics for care. Social corruption is less the subject here than the incompetentcare offered to the indigent.If the institution of public infant care was scathingly mocked in Well-BabyClinic, the emotional dimension of family tragedy is addressed in two worksexecuted several years apart. Requiem (1928, ƒg. 24) a watercolor painted afterher ƒrst daughter, Santillana, died of diphtheria in December 1927, depicts aheaving ocean of grief next to which lie two prone skeletal ƒgures, one robedin white, the other in black, screaming in pain while two embryo/ƒsh look dispassionatelyon. Remarkably similar in means to Edvard Munch’s The Scream(1893, ƒg. 25), the pain expressed here is very different from Munch’s paradigmof personal alienation. Neel’s trauma is not isolated but shared. Mourninghas locked together the two ƒgures (Alice and Carlos), so that a death inthe family becomes the death of the family. 15The sparest and most abstract of the modernist paintings from her ƒrst matureperiod is in addition her ƒrst overtly socially concerned painting as well,initiating a transition from her early modernist to her social realist art at the on-