i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

68 / Neel’s Social Realist ArtDuring these early war years, Neel joined United American Artists (foundedin 1939), the left-wing organization that had evolved from the Artists Unionand, like the Union, worked “to protect and expand the art project and to ultimatelycreate a Government Bureau of Fine Arts.” 2 In 1942, the group reorganizedas the Artists League of America. Chaired by Lynd Ward, the UAA wasofƒcially a union—local 60 of the Union of Ofƒce and Professional Workersof America (UOPWA), a CIO afƒliate. Rockwell Kent was the UAA’s nominalpresident and provided the group’s clearest statement of purpose: “The UnitedAmerican Artists is a labor union. Its membership is composed of men andwomen who as workers in the ƒne arts hold themselves with some pride to bemembers of that working class . . .” 3 In other words, it extended the principlesof the American Artists Congress and the Artists Union, as well as of the shortlivedNew York Group.In addition to the publication of a journal, New York Artist (Jack Tworkov,ed.), the UAA established its credibility as the body continuing the principlesof the American Artists Congress and the Artists Union by organizing two ambitiousexhibitions in May-June of 1940. The ƒrst, a juried selection of 39artists held jointly at the ACA and Hudson D. Walker galleries, was fulsomelypraised by the critic Elizabeth McCausland. 4 At the same time, the ƒrst (andlast) annual UAA exhibit was held at the Associated Press Building at 50 RockefellerPlaza. Clearly the second tier, there was no jury for the exhibition andany member “in good standing” paying $2 could be included. Alice Neel wasone of the 295 artists who elected to do so, selecting for exhibition one of hermore radical recent works, Childbirth or, Maternity (1939, ƒg. 47).Neel had commemorated the birth of her son Richard in September 1939with a portrait of her hospital roommate Goldie Goldwasser writhing on herbed in the throes of an agonizing labor. Although the subject might seem tolack political implications, the issue of women’s health care had been an importantCP issue in the 1930s. The historian Robert Shaffer has argued that “Arecurrent theme in the CP Press was the danger to women in the United Statesof childbirth itself. Many articles claimed that the Soviet Union, because of itssocialized medical system and maternity insurance for women workers, had alower mortality rate in childbirth.” 5 The distorted ƒgure recalls the sufferingwomen in Picasso’s Guernica (1937), which during the Popular Front epitomizeda work of art that was both modernist and antifascist; Neel no doubt sawit when it was exhibited at the Valentine Gallery in New York in 1938. As withher submission of Well-Baby Clinic to the New York Group exhibit the previousyear, perhaps Neel might have wanted the communist-leaning UAA toprovide recognition of this speciƒc form of women’s work. 6By 1943, as far as her friends knew, Neel had become one of many promisingartists who seemed to drop through the cracks of history as the Old Left