i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

Starting Out from Home / 39harsh „uorescent light. The doll, with its painted blue eyes, could be eitherAlice or Isabetta: that is, both Neel herself (the artist/art) and Isabetta (thechild/motherhood) are being sacriƒed on this cruel piece of institutional furniture.The apple, normally a symbol of female fertility as well as of knowledge,is here obscenely related to Eve’s sin by being shoved rudely into thedoll’s crotch, where it serves as a contraceptive to creativity and/or fecundity.The doll is impaled on the irreconcilable con„ict between motherhood andartistic career. 21 For lack of a modest amount of ƒnancial or professional support,both her sanity and her child had been lost. In all of her lectures, Neelemphasized that a woman should never give up painting: “If you decide youare going to have children and give up painting during the time you havethem, you give it up forever . . . You get divorced from your art.” 22 But the inevitablecost to mother and to child of the marriage of the woman artist to artentails a sacriƒce of biblical dimensions. 23The symbols of the painting’s title—the dummylike doll, the red rubberglove, the fruit, and the harsh, raking light—are motifs found in Giorgio deChirico’s art and suggest another modernist in„uence on Neel in the early experimentalwork. Perhaps Neel saw the proto-surrealist’s work at the KurtValentine Gallery in New York in the late 1920s. Like de Chirico, Neel hasused the irrational juxtaposition of inanimate objects to convey the mind’sability to form disjunctive images around its pain as an oyster forms a pearl.Only a brief allusion here, surrealism would ƒgure prominently in Neel’s renewedmeditation on the family in 1942, when the European surrealists werein exile in New York.Symbols (Doll and Apple) is speciƒcally an image of a woman’s psychicpain, and in its iconic representation of female martyrdom bears a resemblanceto a work from the same year by Frida Kahlo, Henry Ford Hospital (ƒg.30). (Neel was familiar with the work of Kahlo’s husband, Diego Rivera, whohad enjoyed a successful one-person exhibition at the Museum of Modern Artthe previous winter, but she could not have known Kahlo’s work, which wasnot exhibited in New York until 1939.) The traumatic miscarriage that Kahlosuffered in Detroit in July is staged on a metal hospital bed, both artists apparentlyrecognizing the ironic connection between the cold, inhuman furnitureand the sacriƒcial altar. One unexpected and signiƒcant coincidence in thesecontemporary works is the fact that both turn to the religious rituals of folk artto speak of their respective inabilities to fulƒll their expected role as mothers.Kahlo’s painting is on tin, a deliberate reference to retablo paintings which inMexican culture are used as offerings by those who have survived a disaster.Neel’s reference to the private devotional altars that both Carlos’s parents andhis unmarried sisters kept in their homes is more oblique, but the scraped paint,suggesting peeling plaster walls, as well as the palm fronds, cross, and sun, un-