i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

48 / Neel’s Social Realist Artalthough the latter concentrated on the rural rather than the urban poor. 8 Afterthey separated in 1930, however, their artistic concerns diverged, and Neel’slater unblinking social realism appears completely removed from the romantic,mythologized Cuban landscapes that established Enríquez as one of Cuba’smost prominent modern artists.To the extent that their very different oeuvres meet, it is on the commonground of the nude body. For both artists, sexuality was a continual preoccupation.Both depicted the nude with a frankness and lack of idealization that wasevidence of their Philadelphia training, and both had their nudes removedfrom exhibitions because of indecency. Enríquez’s paintings of Alice from1926–1927, of which two were published in Revista de Avance in 1927, are unabashedin depicting folds of „esh and (depilated) pubic areas (ƒg. 31); nonetheless,they seem modest in comparison with Neel’s nudes from 1930 on.The distance between their sensibilities is clearest in their 1934 portraits oftheir six-year-old daughter, Isabetta, with whom neither had had contact sinceshe was an infant. Painted after his return from Paris to Havana, Enríquez’s Isabettais doll-like and stiff, with generalized features that convey innocencebut little sense of individual character (ƒg. 32). On one of Isabetta’s visits toNew York that year, Neel, with remarkable boldness, painted her daughter as afull-length nude (ƒg. 33). Neel’s Isabetta strides forward, arms akimbo, bodylike a young sapling, ƒlled with the energy of growth, as indicated by the exuberant,luxurious hair that erupts from her head. Here the Freudian vision ofchildhood sexuality is translated as unself-conscious pleasure in one’s ownbody. Her cylindrical limbs and torso recall Gauguin’s Tahitian natives, as wellas the depictions of Cuban peasants Antonio Gattorno had made in the late1920s under the French artist’s in„uence. Planted on her “primitive” rug, Isabettathus becomes Neel’s interpretation of Cubanidad, a primal being who isonly incidentally Neel’s daughter.Coincidentally, the previous year, John Dos Passos had created a literaryportrait in The Big Money (1933), that was a double for the “Cuban” Neel.The vignette, entitled “Margo Dowling,” follows the fortunes of a beautifulyoung woman—“a knockout”—who marries a Cuban, moves to Havana, suffersunder the culture’s restrictive attitudes toward women, and endures severaldays of painful labor in delivering a daughter who dies shortly thereafter.Margo then escapes home to New York City, telling her mother: “. ..it waspretty bad. His people are pretty well off and prominent and all that but it’shard to get on to their ways. Tony’s a bum and I hate him more than anythingin the world. But after all it was quite an experience . . . I wouldn’t have missedit.” 9 Cuba was a source of interest to many American artists in the 1930s, fromDos Passos and Hemingway to Walker Evans. Dos Passos’s understanding ofthe clash of North and South American cultures was used to create a literary