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40 / The Subjects of the Artistmistakably convey the sacriƒce/conversion of her American-born daughter toCuban culture in the name of a rigidly delimiting and dehumanizing conceptof motherhood. Her child had been returned to the very society whose patriarchalvalues she had „ed.Neel’s early work opens up new territory within the history of Americanmodernism by looking at the most intimate of family experiences and connectingthem with prevailing institutions and ideologies. Her early expressionism,an eclectic synthesis of European and American precedents from Munch andEnsor to Demuth served less as a means to directly express intense emotionthan as an objectifying device, a pitiless spotlight to train on the traumaticevents of her life, revealing both its tragedy and absurdity. The family, whosefragile bonds were severed by psychic and social forces, was exposed in all itsweakness. The works had no audience until the 1960s, and even after they becameknown, were generally considered less important than her later work.In his aforementioned review of Hills’s 1984 biography, Alloway stated: “Isee her as a late, very late starter and count the last twenty years of her art farmore highly than the ƒrst forty.” 24 Moreover, the late starter was consideredvery conventional stylistically. For instance, even though in 1982 curator andcritic Robert Storr would admiringly describe Symbols (Doll and Apple) as“The sparsest of icons to private female hurt . . .,” he nonetheless concludedthat her work was in no way innovative: “often the mood of the paintings is establishedaround subjects that are in themselves . . . downright cliched . . .what commands one’s respect, in fact, is the energy with which she attackssuch set pieces.” 25 As feminist art historians have pointed out, bias against traditionis frequently synonymous with bias against art by women. Even theseperceptive and supportive critics failed to adequately appreciate the innovativecontent of Neel’s early work. Her work thus conƒrms Lucy Lippard’s 1976 hypothesisthat:Within the old, “progressive,” or evolutionary context, much women’s art is “notinnovative,” or “retrograde.” . . . One of the major questions facing feminist criticismhas to be whether stylistic innovation is indeed the only innovation, or whetherother aspects of originality have yet to be investigated . . . [P]erhaps women . . . [differ]from the traditional notion of the avant-garde by opposing not styles andforms, but ideologies. 26If this be the case, the painter from a provincial town outside of Philadelphiawith a conventional art school training had been able, during a period ofgreat personal trauma, to isolate from the broad currents of American and Europeanmodernism those aspects relevant to her autobiographical concernsand to create a body of work unparalleled in its deconstruction of the ideolo-