i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

Art on the Left in the 1930s / 49trope that happened to have encapsulated Neel’s personal experience. 10 Althoughthe social realist movement in the United States was in„uenced primarilyby the Mexican mural movement, the connections with the Cubanavant-garde were also signiƒcant. 11Social Realism, 1930–1940Thus, when Neel moved to Greenwich Village in 1931, she found herself atanother artistic center committed to social and political change. The Depressionhad precipitated the emergence of social realism, which gathered momentumbetween 1932 and 1935 and was characterized by the use of overtlypolitical subject matter, emphasizing the plight of the destitute worker. 12 Althoughthe product of a speciƒc set of historical conditions during the 1930s,social realism, examined in broad terms, can also be seen as part of a consistentstream of socially concerned art that threads throughout the twentieth century.Although rarely explicitly sectarian, nonetheless American social realism, as atrend rather than a movement, maintained a belief that an oppositional artwhose subject matter addressed sociopolitical problems could serve as a powerfulimpetus to social reform. Neel is thus a social realist in the narrow sensethat her paintings after 1930 are part of that emerging movement, and a socialrealist in the broader sense of a politically concerned, reformist art. Neel andher more prominent social realist colleagues, such as Ben Shahn, WilliamGropper, Phillip Evergood, and Jack Levine, continued throughout their careersto make art that critiqued the varying historical circumstances of a givenera from a left perspective. Although Neel’s contribution to the revolutionarytableaux characteristic of the social realist movement of the 1930s is relativelyminor, her invention of the proletarian portrait gallery is a genuine contribution,important not only for its alternative vision of social realism during theDepression, but also for its contribution to a larger trend of socially concernedart in America. Neel’s work provides one signiƒcant example of the way inwhich politically engaged artists adjusted the expression of their left-wing idealsin the face of changing historical circumstances. However, her continuingassociation with the Communist Party makes charting the political content ofher work a particularly challenging task.The years between the onset of the Depression in 1929 and the end of WorldWar II in 1945 were so tumultuous that terms such as revolutionary art, proletarianart, and social realist art are still buffeted by its winds, as are its loosely relatedcommunist terms: proletcult art, Zhdanovism, socialist realism. If thecommunist system, as exempliƒed by the U.S.S.R., provided the most deƒnitiveeconomic alternative to the collapse of capitalism in 1929, it nonetheless