i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

4Art on the Left in the 1930sLa VanguardiaNeel’s concept of the function of a socially concerned art as a critique of dominantculture was formulated during the year and a half (January 1926–May1927) she spent in Havana after her marriage to the Cuban painter Carlos Enríquezde Gomez. 1 Neel arrived in Havana at a propitious moment, just intime to join the burgeoning avant-garde movement there. Among the writersshe befriended were Nicolas Guillen, Marcelo Pogolotti, and Alejo Carpentier.The awareness on the part of these Hispanic writers of the injusticesin„icted on Latin American peoples by capitalism and colonialism permanentlyshaped her political attitudes, which Neel expressed in broad terms:“Another thing, this Cuban husband had given me a Latin American mentality.I hated everything American. Jose Martí, the Cuban leader exiled in NewYork, called America, ‘the colossus of the North.’” 2 The shock of the gulf betweenrich and poor in Cuba intensiƒed her outrage. Although her portraits ofAfro-Cuban street people were a continuation of the Ashcan School–inspiredwork that she had begun in Philadelphia, their subjects are a prelude to herSpanish Harlem portraits.According to the art historian Juan Martinez, although the visual arts were45