i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

Art on the Left in the 1930s / 61recalls that Freud saw the Medusa’s Head as “a conƒrmation of the technicalrule according to which a multiplication of penis symbols signiƒes castration.”52 The univocal male voice that normally and normatively accompaniesthe intact member is as silent as the pile of empty notebooks that Gould left athis death. According to Peter Brooks’s gloss of Lacan, “patriarchy is the basis ofknowledge and power, and [because] the gaze is phallic . . . to display the penisis to turn subject into object, a twist or per-version.” 53 Neel’s twist uncaps, Pandora-like,the female gaze, a gaze that undermines certain fundamental assumptionsof patriarchal culture.Recognizing its landmark importance, Neel inscribed the painting’s datebetween Gould’s legs. Neel’s con„ation of the genres of portraiture and thenude, like her con„ation of history painting, portraiture, and literature, simultaneouslyde-constructs existing conventions and substitutes new ones in theirplace. Her gallery of New York intellectuals, the creative male elite, is perhapsnot as potent as its own self-image, since its “members” can be added to ordeleted without signiƒcant alteration. 54 Yet the fact that until World War IINeel’s proletarian portrait gallery omitted women artists and activists indicatesthat despite her protofeminist criticism of patriarchal culture, she retained itsbiases. Her friendships were with men.Neel’s visual history is sharpened and clariƒed by comparison. The Putnam-White pairing charts the emergence of proletarian literature between 1933and 1935, whereas her 1935 portraits of Kenneth Fearing and Pat Whalenunite intelligentsia and worker to visualize the period’s proletarian ideal. In anexception to Neel’s customary practice of isolating her sitters against a plainground, in Kenneth Fearing (ƒg. 44) the poet and his “literary setting” areunited. Seated with shirtsleeves rolled up beneath the bare bulb of “inspiration,”the gaunt, angular artist—with his hair bristling, his ƒsts clenched, andhis ears tuned to the city’s sounds—projects contained energy. The device ofsurrounding an author with his cast of characters is unusual in Americanpainting, although it is found in popular sources such as magazine illustration.55 Neel’s allusion may refer to the style of Fearing’s writings, which arepart of the tradition of hard-boiled, or pulp ƒction. 56Fearing’s pose, three-quarter view, seated facing left, with resolute stare andclenched ƒst, so closely matches that of the maritime union activist PatWhalen (1935, ƒg. 45) that the two contemporary portraits seem designed tohang together. So paired, they present the ideal rather than the reality of theera, that of intellectuals and blue-collar workers sharing a vision of a new communistsociety and working side by side for the revolution. With his unwaveringstare, ƒrm-set jaw, and clenched ƒsts, Whalen is a cliché of the proletarianhero found throughout socially concerned art of this period. From the DailyWorker headline beneath his ƒsts, “Steel, Coal Strikes Set for June 16,” 57 one