i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

Art on the Left in the 1930s / 59trait pictures a gaunt, glassy-eyed man staring upward as if possessed. Putnamhad a long, irregular scar on his forehead (photograph, ƒg. 40), which Neelchose to exaggerate to create a metaphor for psychic disturbance. Only twospots of color enliven the dark surface: the matching reds of the wine in hisglass and the lips surrounding the black hole of his mouth. Almost as if he werea proƒle out of his 1947 book Paris Was Our Mistress: Memoirs of a Lost andFound Generation, Putnam personiƒes the writer of the 1920s, disturbed,heavy drinking, absorbed in his own world. The fact that he had recently convertedto communism and that by the mid-1930s his writing held tenaciouslyto the Party line had no bearing on Neel’s vision. 44 Neel chose not to paint thisnewly-committed Marxist in a social realist style, but to cast him instead in hisprevious incarnation as an expatriate writer.In a bracing contrast, the representative of the new group of proletarianwriters, Max White (1935, ƒg. 41) implacably confronts the viewer. Neel lessensthe „at stylizations of the Putnam portrait and adopts a more naturalistic stylethat endows White with the projecting volume of a sculptural relief. His rectangularbody a wall, his cylindrical head a bollard, White is planted before usas an immovable bulwark. The large head and hands are assertive, with the“punctum” of the blackened nail on his middle ƒnger creating a signal of past(and possible future) aggression. White occupies not the realm of the mindbut, looming before the viewer, the “real,” material world, where he is a forceto be reckoned with, the new ideal of the worker-writer, who has come down toƒght in the streets for the revolution. Yet, according to his literary biography,Charles Edmund “Max” White (b. 1906) was a cosmopolitan who lived inFrance and Italy and was the author of a gourmet cookbook for which Neel designedthe cover. The protagonists of his novels are misunderstood artistic geniuses:In the Blazing Light (1946) is based on Goya, The Midnight Gardener(1948) on Baudelaire. 45 Proletarian he was not, but no matter, for with his“Olmec head,” as Neel described him, he certainly looked the part. 46The oddest character in the literary lineup, Joe Gould (1933, ƒg. 42), is alsoseated frontally, his hand on his knee, but in contrast to Max White’s hero,Gould plays the fool, the pathetic representative of the Greenwich Village bohemiain decline. Although he counted among his friends the writer MalcolmCowley, the photographer Aaron Siskind, the poet e.e. cummings, and thepainter Joseph Stella, who made a beautiful proƒle drawing of Gould, Neel’sdepiction accords him little respect. With his unkempt hair, watery eyes, andbroad smirk, Gould can only be a charlatan or a lunatic. In fact he was both,and after painting him as a Village writer, Neel revealed just how bizarre hewas in a spectacular, full-length portrait nude (1933, ƒg. 43).An excerpt from Joseph Mitchell’s Joe Gould’s Secret (1965) tells his story: