i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository
i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository 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
58 / Neel’s Social Realist Artmeans of satisfying themselves or for giving themselves status in a society inwhich art was the one recognized form of divergence.” 39 Clearly, art was anantibourgeois stance for Neel, a divergent position from which other kinds of“deviance”—political, social, ethnic—could be granted recognition.Ware concluded that “the social factors dominating this community werethose which led toward social disorganization and cultural confusion,” andshe ended her study with the questions: “What new patterns may develop to replacethe rampant individualism which ƒnds few outlets in the urban life oftwentieth-century America except in predatory action or escape? Whence maycome organizing forces which will canalize individual energies and give themsocial form?” 40 By the time Ware asked these questions in 1935, the Villagershad found their own antidote to the rampant individualism of the 1920s, withits distance from the social concerns of even its closest neighbors, the Italianimmigrant populace. The answer, for the near term anyway, was radical politicsand the vision of a communist utopia. For Neel, as for so many Village intellectuals,communism offered an alternative to the social structure she hadabandoned.In literature, this transition from art-for-art’s-sake individualism to an art ofsocial concern is exempliƒed by the shift from the Lost Generation of a Hemingwayor a Scott Fitzgerald to the social critiques of a John Dos Passos ora Mike Gold. 41 The earliest recruits to Neel’s alternative portrait gallery (c.1933–1935) were all drawn from this white, male, literary elite, a seemingly incongruousbeginning. All were representatives of the transitional literary generation,bohemian Villagers in the process of adopting a cause: Sam Putnam,Max White, Kenneth Fearing, and the well-known Greenwich Village ƒxtureJoe Gould. All except Gould were “New York Intellectuals,” in Alan Wald’sterm, 42 who were communists during the Depression, but who moved towardthe center after the war. All except White were members of the WPA’s FederalWriter’s Project, the counterpart to the Federal Art Project that supportedNeel until 1943.A prominent translator, novelist, and critic, the historical Samuel Putnamassumes the character of the quintessential bohemian in Neel’s portrait (SamPutnam, ƒg. 39), painted in 1933, the year he returned from France. Onceback in New York, Putnam joined the Communist Party, wrote a literary columnfor the Daily Worker, contributed to Art Front, and was an associate editorof the New Masses. In 1944, he quit the Party, citing “misguided humility.”By the time of his death in 1950, he had translated some ƒfty French, Spanish,Italian, Portuguese, and Russian works, including the deƒnitive version ofDon Quixote (1949). 43Painted in the spare expressionist style of her work of the late 1920s, the por-
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58 / Neel’s Social Realist Artmeans of satisfying themselves or for giving themselves status in a society inwhich art was the one recognized form of divergence.” 39 Clearly, art was anantibourgeois stance for Neel, a divergent position from which other kinds of“deviance”—political, social, ethnic—could be granted recognition.Ware concluded that “the social factors dominating this community werethose which led toward social disorganization and cultural confusion,” andshe ended her study with the questions: “What new patterns may develop to replacethe rampant individualism which ƒnds few outlets in the urban life oftwentieth-century America except in predatory action or escape? Whence maycome organizing forces which will canalize individual energies and give themsocial form?” 40 By the time Ware asked these questions in 1935, the Villagershad found their own antidote to the rampant individualism of the 1920s, withits distance from the social concerns of even its closest neighbors, the Italianimmigrant populace. The answer, for the near term anyway, was radical politicsand the vision of a communist utopia. For Neel, as for so many Village intellectuals,communism offered an alternative to the social structure she hadabandoned.In literature, this transition from art-for-art’s-sake individualism to an art ofsocial concern is exempliƒed by the shift from the Lost Generation of a Hemingwayor a Scott Fitzgerald to the social critiques of a John Dos Passos ora Mike Gold. 41 The earliest recruits to Neel’s alternative portrait gallery (c.1933–1935) were all drawn from this white, male, literary elite, a seemingly incongruousbeginning. All were representatives of the transitional literary generation,bohemian Villagers in the process of adopting a cause: Sam Putnam,Max White, Kenneth Fearing, and the well-known Greenwich Village ƒxtureJoe Gould. All except Gould were “New York Intellectuals,” in Alan Wald’sterm, 42 who were communists during the Depression, but who moved towardthe center after the war. All except White were members of the WPA’s FederalWriter’s Project, the counterpart to the Federal Art Project that supportedNeel until 1943.A prominent translator, novelist, and critic, the historical Samuel Putnamassumes the character of the quintessential bohemian in Neel’s portrait (SamPutnam, ƒg. 39), painted in 1933, the year he returned from France. Onceback in New York, Putnam joined the Communist Party, wrote a literary columnfor the Daily Worker, contributed to Art <strong>Front</strong>, and was an associate editorof the New Masses. In 1944, he quit the Party, citing “misguided humility.”By the time of his death in 1950, he had translated some ƒfty French, Spanish,Italian, Portuguese, and Russian works, including the deƒnitive version ofDon Quixote (1949). 43Painted in the spare expressionist style of her work of the late 1920s, the por-