i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

Art on the Left in the 1930s / 57read, expressed a similar concept of artistic truth in “A View of Dawn in theTropics.” The poem recounts an incident involving a sugar plantation ownerwho commemorated the signing of a generous contract with his workers with aphotograph; when the black cloth was lifted the “camera” was revealed to be amachine gun, which the owner used to execute the assembled work force. Theauthorial voice concludes: “The story could be true or false, but the timesmade it believable.”The ƒrst entrants into the gallery, then, are drawn from her literary milieuin the 1930s, many of whom she met through her lover at the time, KennethDoolittle. According to the Belchers:Doolittle seemed to know everyone in the Village. Through him, Alice met suchVillage ƒxtures as the poet Christopher Lazar and the writer Philip Rahv, the Communistlongshoreman Paddy Whalen, and the left-wing activist Sam Putnam. Thepoet Kenneth Fearing smoked opium with Doolittle; Putnam slept for a while on asofa in their apartment. Within a year of her arrival in the Village, Alice was activelyinvolved with and had been accepted by the political-intellectual community. 35Greenwich Village at the end of the roaring twenties and the beginning ofthe Depression had a persona Neel adopted in 1932 by “elective afƒnity.” Itwas there that she ƒrst joined the New York art network by exhibiting in theGreenwich Village outdoor art festival in Washington Square during the summerof 1932. In the next booth was the painter Joseph Solman, who would behelpful to her in the early years 36 ; impressed with her work, he included it in asmall show he organized at the International Book and Art Shop on WestEighth Street in January 1933, Neel’s ƒrst New York exhibit. The district remaineda Village in which the bohemian residents all knew one another.Caroline Ware’s Greenwich Village, 1920–30, written in 1935, characterizedbohemia’s attitudes with the same dispassionate observation used byRobert and Helen Lynd to study middle-America’s mores. In her openingchapter, “The Village in American Culture,” Ware describes the character ofthe “Villagers”: “In the War and post-War years, Greenwich Village became asymbol of the repudiation of traditional values. Here congregated those forwhom the traditional pattern in which they grew up had become so empty ordistorted that they could no longer continue a part of it and submit to thesocial controls which it imposed.” 37 The neighborhood was one that attractedintelligent people and stressed social tolerance. 38 A diverse population ethnically,the “Villagers” viewed “art and sex as avenues of escape,” and “carriedon those activities, especially artistic, which had little or no place in a civilizationdominated by either the remains of the Calvinist ethic or by the purely acquisitiveimpulse . . . It was to art as a way of life that all turned, either as a