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The Cold War Battles / 69became increasingly fragmented and the hegemony of abstract expressionismwas established critically and institutionally. Writing to Jacob Kainen inSeptember of that year, Joseph Solman listed the whereabouts of the nowscatteredmembers of the New York Group, adding “Someone informs meAlice Neel is doing portrait commissions for a living. Sounds unbelievable,but anything is possible with her.” 7 That same month, the ƒnal prop for hercareer gave way with the termination of the WPA. Neel’s art would all but disappearfrom the galleries between 1940 and 1950. Her exhibit at Rose Fried’sPinacotheca gallery in 1944 was reviewed unfavorably, 8 and when in 1951 shewas given an exhibition at the ACA gallery for the ƒrst time since 1939, the ArtDigest reviewer mistakenly but understandably called it “her ƒrst one-manshow.”Ironically, the demise of the WPA provided Neel with a quite unwelcomeform of publicity. 9 On April 17, 1944, Life magazine announced the WPA’send with the sneering headline “Canvases Which Cost the Government$35,000,000 Are Sold for Junk” (ƒg. 48). Stored in a government warehouse inFlushing and subsequently sold to a Long Island junk dealer for four cents apound, many of the paintings were purchased in bulk by Henry C. Roberts,owner of a Lower East Side shop. As luck would have it, one of Neel’s paintings,“New York Factory Buildings,” was reproduced in the Life article, theonly painting of hers to be reproduced in this decade. Like Joseph Solman,who had initially located the abandoned artwork, Neel had sufƒcient respectfor her art, despite Life’s verdict, to buy back as many paintings as she couldlocate.Perhaps as a result of this article, Neel became the symbol of the WPA’ssorry end for her old Greenwich Village friend, Kenneth Fearing. In his 1946hard-boiled mystery, The Big Clock, a central character is the eccentric but exceptionalpainter Louise Patterson, who lives in a studio loft that is “a paradisefor rats and termites,” and whose former lover had been proud to “destroysomething new and creative” by displaying the “pile of scraps and ashes andcharred fragments, all that was left of ƒve years’ work, heaped up in the ƒreplace.”The plot hinges on Patterson’s ability to identify the protagonist, GeorgeStroud, as a murderer, which she declines to do because “I haven’t got so manyadmirers I can afford to let any of them go to the electric chair.” 10 Fearing’screation of Louise Patterson, layering parody of her unconventional behaviorwith admiration for her creativity, is the most extended literary portrait we haveof Neel.The plot begins when Strout/Fearing outbids Patterson/Neel—an “overweight”customer with a “face like a cyclone” and a “blood curdling laugh”—for one of her WPA paintings in a junk shop. 11 Despite this caricature of herappearance, Fearing’s portrait is in the end an affectionate one, from an ad-