i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

5The Cold War Battles:1940–1980The war years were both artistically and politically bleak for Neel, as social realismdeclined, the WPA was terminated, and Neel was increasingly isolatedfrom mainstream postwar art. Her task in the Cold War years was to maintainher allegiance to the principles of a social realist art, which she did by producingillustrations for Masses & Mainstream, by continuing the political commentaryof her social realist tableaux, by extending her proletarian portraitgallery to include communist leaders, and, ƒnally, by creating a wing of hergallery devoted to the residents of Spanish Harlem. Her illustrations and tableauxcontinue her activities from the 1930s; her portraits, her most radicalcontribution, will be the subject of the following chapter.During the war, left-wing arts organizations suffered the same vicissitudesas those of the Communist Party. After the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, fellowtravelers were pressed to support a policy of “Peace” and nonintervention, butafter the Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941, they abandoned domestic agendas tosupport the war effort to “save the fatherland.” When, in 1943, Stalin dissolvedthe Comintern as a gesture of appeasement to the West, Earl Browder hailed itas a step toward “new and favorable conditions for the integration of theCPUSA into our own American democratic way of life ...” 1 Such optimism,expressed while Party membership was at its historic height, was short-lived.67