i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

Starting Out from Home / 37set of the Depression. Futility of Effort (1930, ƒg. 26), a metaphor for the deadendingof her marriage with the departure of Carlos and Isabetta for Cuba onMay 1 of that year, was generated by “a notice in the newspaper about how achild crawled through the end of a bed and got strangled through the bedposts.The mother was ironing in the kitchen.” 16 Although the subject of the death ofinnocent children would be found fairly frequently in left-wing periodicalssuch as Art Front (the journal of the Artists Union), where this painting was reproducedin 1936, Neel’s early approach to the subject would prove exceptional.In most social realist art the mother remains the bulwark of the family,clinging to her children no matter how desperate the circumstances. Instead,Neel limns a harsher, less sentimental story with minimal means. The dolllike,lifeless ƒgure hangs from a bedpost suspended in a neutral grey ƒeld, withthe sketchy proƒle of the parent to the right, and with the black diamondshapedaperture of the window on the left marking the point of life’s departureinto death. The painting is as distilled as a memory, an image of a moment ofnegligence branded permanently onto the mind. The title supplied by ArtFront—Poverty—underscores the cause of the “accident,” which was deprivationas much as individual negligence, but Neel’s own title, Futility of Effort,conveys the hopelessness of lives lived in the grey, dimensionless, unchartedregion of indigence. The painted metal bed frame reprises the chair seats inWell-Baby Clinic, thus identifying poverty as an institution into which societyconƒnes certain of its members, sentencing them to ongoing family tragedy.Like the body of the child, Neel’s own psychic health had been broken in1930, and she became a resident of the medical institutions she so effectivelyparodied in Well-Baby Clinic. Like the earlier oil, the pencil drawing SuicidalWard, Philadelphia General Hospital (1931, ƒg. 27) documents the disjunctionbetween hospital care and the cure it claims to provide. The lines of examiningtables are now rows of beds, equally incapable of soothing their agonizedoccupants. The affable doctor, a wooden, insensitive ƒgurehead in controlof himself if nothing else, occupies the center of the medical arena.Drawn from her memory after release from the Philadelphia General Hospital,Suicidal Ward is a document of medical sadism presaging documentaryƒlms such as Richard Leacock’s Titicut Follies.Within modernism, insanity has been generalized into the trope of the sufferingartist, whose genius necessarily entails antisocial behavior. Neel makesno such romantic connection between creativity and insanity. Rather her interesthere is in its institutionalization: the restraint and ineffectual treatmentof those diagnosed as insane. The authority in control, Dr. Breitenbach, posesas the competent ofƒcial he imagines himself to be. According to Michel Foucault’sMadness and Civilization, the physician became “the essential ƒgure ofthe asylum” during the nineteenth century, converting it “into a medical space”: