i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

Art on the Left in the 1930s / 55My only aim is to paint a good picture—a work of art—and, on this level plain, tosay what I want about life.As a matter of pure fact all good art throughout the ages has been social art.And because good art of the past has portrayed human beings and their habits, ithas constituted the most pleasing record of the past that exists. 31Socially concerned art, according to this apology, had nothing to do with radicalpolitics. And frequently in this decade, Evergood’s art was so burdenedwith allegory that its political message was muf„ed.As the political subject matter of social realism became more oblique, themessage was obviously ever less accessible to the masses. The most importantof her later social realist works, marking the transition from group afƒliation toan independently-evolved art of social concern, T. B. Harlem (1940; ƒg. 38)might initially be interpreted as an allegorical reference to the Spanish CivilWar (1936–1939), as the wounded male is Hispanic. 32 However, the painting’stitle dispels the possibility of misidentiƒcation. At the moment when themovement’s social agenda had been abruptly diverted, Neel insistently callsattention to the ongoing “massacre of the innocents” not by fascism’s war machinebut by the economics of capitalism. His “uniform” is a body brokenthrough the effects of tenement living, like the infant cipher in Futility of Effort.His even stare cannot be de„ected or avoided; we must acknowledge hissituation and our possible complicity in it.Neel’s social realist paintings thus on occasion served as an interventioninto the course of the movement: T. B. Harlem redirects the emphasis on internationalpolitics during the war toward a domestic agenda. 33 Signiƒcantly, it isa portrait.The Proletarian Portrait GalleryNeel’s contribution to American Social realism lies not in her tableaux but inher portraits, or what I have chosen to call her proletarian portrait gallery. IfNeel’s social realist art was conceived in Havana from 1926 to 1927, it was nurturedin the equally vital milieu of Greenwich Village from 1930 to 1939. Inboth locales, the concentration of artists, writers, and political radicals provideda fulcrum for her own work. If her Cuban portraits presaged her SpanishHarlem series after World War II, so her portraits of the Greenwich Village intelligentsiainitiated her “Proletarian Portrait Gallery” in the 1930s, which sheextended to include her portraits of aging communist leaders in the 1950s.Neel’s portrait gallery represents an alternative to the prevailing concept ofsocial realism as history painting in the form of social critique. By concentrat-