Pictures of People

Pictures of People ’s American Portrait Gallery

Pamela Allara

Brandeis University Press Published by University Press of New England Hanover and Brandeis University Press Published by University Press of New England, Hanover, NH 03755 © 1998 by the Trustees of Brandeis University All rights reserved Printed in the of America ISBN for paperback edition: 978–1–61168–513–8 ISBN for ebook edition: 978–1–61168–049–2 cataloging-in-publication data

Allara, Pamela. Pictures of people : Alice Neel’s American portrait gallery / by Pamela Allara. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–87451–837–7 1. Neel, Alice, 1900– —Criticism and interpretation. 2. United States— Biography—Portraits. I. Neel, Alice, 1900– . II. Title. ND1329.N36A9 1998 97–18403 759.13—DC21

Throughout this book, “Estate of Alice Neel” includes works in the collections of Richard Neel, Hartley S. Neel, their respective families, and Neel , Inc.

5432 NOTE TO EREADERS

As electronic reproduction rights are unavailable for images appearing in this book’s print edition, no illustrations are included in this ebook. Readers interested in seeing the referenced here should either consult this book’s print edition or visit an online resource such as aliceneel.com or artstor.org. vi CONTENTS

illustrations included in the print edition ix acknowledgments xv

Introduction: The Portrait Gallery xvii

PART I: THE SUBJECTS OF THE ARTIST

Chapter 1: The Creation (of a) Myth 3

Chapter 2: From Portraiture to Pictures of People: 13 Neel’s Portrait Conventions

Chapter 3: Starting Out from Home, 1927–1932 29

vii viii / Contents

PART II: NEEL’S SOCIAL REALIST ART: 1933–1981

Chapter 4: Art on the Left in the 45

Chapter 5: The Cold War Battles: 1940–1980 67

Chapter 6: El Barrio: Portrait of Spanish Harlem 90

PART III: THE ART NETWORK: 1960–1980

Chapter 7: A Gallery of Players: Artist-Critic-Dealer 111

Chapter 8: The Women’s Wing: Neel and 127

PART IV: THE EXTENDED FAMILY

Chapter 9: Truth Unveiled: The Portrait 147

Chapter 10: Shifting Constellations: The Family (Dis)Membered 162

notes 177 bibliography 213 photography credits 233 ILLUSTRATIONS INCLUDED IN THE PRINT EDITION

Frontispiece: Jonathan Brand, Alice Neel Fig. 1. Anon., Mae West Fig. 2. Alice Neel, Annie Sprinkle Fig. 3. Alice Neel, Beggars, Havana Fig. 4. Alice Neel, Woman in Pink Velvet Hat Fig. 5. , The Journalist Fig. 6. , Eva Green Fig. 7. Alice Neel, Two Black Girls (Antonia and Carmen Encarnacion) Fig. 8. Norman Rockwell, Richard Milhous Nixon Fig. 9. Alice Neel, Sol Alkaitis Fig. 10. Alice Neel, Fuller Brush Man Fig. 11. Alice Neel, Ginny Fig. 12. Alice Neel, Richard in the Era of the Corporation Fig. 13. Alice Neel, Benny and Mary Ellen Andrews Fig. 14. Edgar Degas, Edmondo and Therese Morbilli Fig. 15. Alice Neel, Bessie Boris Fig. 16. Alice Neel, Last Sickness

ix x/Illustrations in the Print Edition

Fig. 17. Alice Neel, The Family Fig. 18. Alice Neel, Helen Merrell Lynd Fig. 19. Anon., “Cross-Section of a Parisian House” Fig. 20. Alice Neel, The Intellectual Fig. 21. Alice Neel and Fanya Foss outside of Foss’s bookstore Fig. 22. Charles Demuth, Scene after Georges Stabs Himself with the Scissors Fig. 23. Alice Neel, Well-Baby Clinic Fig. 24. Alice Neel, Requiem Fig. 25. Edvard Munch, The Scream Fig. 26. Alice Neel, Futility of Effort Fig. 27. Alice Neel, Suicidal Ward, General Hospital Fig. 28. Alice Neel, Symbols (Doll and Apple) Fig. 29. Alice and Isabetta, February 2, 1929, Sedgwick Avenue, Fig. 30. Frida Kahlo, Henry Ford Hospital Fig. 31. Carlos Enriquez, Alice Neel Fig. 32. Carlos Enriquez, Isabetta Fig. 33. Alice Neel, Isabetta Fig. 34. Ben Shahn, The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti Fig. 35. Alice Neel, Snow on Cornelia Street Fig. 36. Alice Neel, Uneeda Biscuit Strike Fig. 37. Alice Neel, Nazis Murder Fig. 38. Alice Neel, T. B. Harlem Fig. 39. Alice Neel, Sam Putnam Fig. 40. Anon., Sam Putnam, c. 1933 Fig. 41. Alice Neel, Max White Fig. 42. Alice Neel, Fig. 43. Alice Neel, Joe Gould Fig. 44. Alice Neel, Fig. 45. Alice Neel, Pat Whalen Fig. 46. Nahum Tschacbasov, Deportation Fig. 47. Alice Neel, Childbirth or, Maternity Fig. 48. “Canvases . . . Are Sold for Junk” Fig. 49. Alice Neel, A Quiet Summer’s Day Fig. 50. Alice Neel, A Bird in Her Hair Fig. 51. Alice Neel, Judge Medina Fig. 52. Alice Neel, Angela Calomaris Fig. 53. Alice Neel, The Death of Mother Bloor Fig. 54. Alice Neel, Eisenhower, McCarthy, Dulles Illustrations in the Print Edition /xi

Fig. 55. Alice Neel, Save Willie McGee (detail) Fig. 56. Shurpin, The Morning of Our Fatherland Fig. 57. Alice Neel, Sam Fig. 58. Alice Neel, Sam Fig. 59. Alice Neel, Fig. 60. Alice Neel, Art Shields Fig. 61. Alice Neel, Bill McKie Fig. 62. Alice Neel, Alice Childress Fig. 63. Alice Neel, Fig. 64. Alice Neel, Mike Gold, In Memoriam Fig. 65. Alice Neel, David Gordon Fig. 66. Alice Neel, Virgil Thomson Fig. 67. Alice Neel, Jar from Samarkand Fig. 68. Alice Neel, The Soyer Brothers Fig. 69. , Alice Neel and at the Graham gallery Fig. 70. Alice Neel, Fig. 71. Komar & Melamid, Stalin in Front of a Mirror Fig. 72. Alice Neel, Call Me Joe Fig. 73. Alice Neel, Fire Escape Fig. 74. Alice Neel, José Fig. 75. Alice Neel, José (Puerto Rico Libre!) Fig. 76. Alice Neel, Alice and José Fig. 77. Alice Neel, José and Guitar Fig. 78. Alice Neel, Puerto Rican Mother and Child (Margarita and Carlitos) Fig. 79. Alice Neel, The Spanish Family Fig. 80. Dan Weiner, Morris Levinson, The President of Rival Dog Food and His Family Outside Their Home in Scarsdale Fig. 81. Alice Neel, Black Spanish-American Family Fig. 82. Alice Neel, Richard and Hartley Fig. 83. Alice Neel, Two Puerto Rican Boys Fig. 84. Alice Neel, Three Puerto Rican Girls Fig. 85. Alice Neel, James Farmer’s Children (Tami and Abbey Farmer) Fig. 86. Alice Neel, Georgie Arce Fig. 87. Alice Neel, Georgie Arce Fig. 88. Alice Neel, Georgie Arce Fig. 89. Alice Neel, Ballet Dancer Fig. 90. Alice Neel, Harold Cruse Fig. 91. Alice Neel, James Farmer xii / Illustrations in the Print Edition

Fig. 92. Alice Neel, Abdul Rahman Fig. 93. , Early Sunday Morning Fig. 94. Alice Neel, Fire Escape Fig. 95. “Broader Horizons,” 1920s; advertisement for A. T. & T. Fig. 96. Alice Neel, Rag in Window Fig. 97. , Parade, Hoboken, New Jersey Fig. 98. Alice Neel, Sunset in Spanish Harlem Fig. 99. Alice Neel, Snow Fig. 100. Alice Neel, 107th and Broadway Fig. 101. Alice Neel in Fig. 102. Alice Neel, Milton Resnick and Pat Pasloff Fig. 103. Alice Neel, Frank O’Hara, No. 2 Fig. 104. Alice Neel, Randall in Extremis Fig. 105. Alice Neel, Hubert Crehan Fig. 106. Alice Neel, Walter Gutman Fig. 107. Alice Neel, Red Grooms and Mimi Gross, No. 2 Fig. 108. Alice Neel, The Family (John Gruen, , and Julia) Fig. 109. Larry Rivers, O’Hara Fig. 110. Alice Neel, Christopher Lazare Fig. 111. Charles Demuth, Distinguished Air Fig. 112. Alice Neel, Paul Kuyer Fig. 113. Alice Neel, Fig. 114. Alice Neel, Andy Fig. 115. Alice Neel, Duane Hanson Fig. 116. Alice Neel, Robbie Tillotson Fig. 117. Alice Neel, Gerard Malanga Fig. 118. Alice Neel, Jackie Curtis and Rita Red Fig. 119. Alice Neel, David Bourdon and Gregory Battcock Fig. 120. Christopher Makos, Fig. 121. Alice Neel, Fig. 122. , Bill Duckett in the Rooms of the Philadelphia Art Students League Fig. 123. Alice Neel, Kate Millet Fig. 124. Alice Neel, Marxist Girl () Fig. 125. Alice Neel, Jack Baur Fig. 126. Alice Neel, Nancy and the Rubber Plant Fig. 127. Alice Neel, and Chuck Fig. 128. Alice Neel, Fig. 129. Alice Neel, Bella Abzug Fig. 130. June Blum, Betty Friedan as the Prophet Fig. 131. Alice Neel, and Daisy Illustrations in the Print Edition / xiii

Fig. 132. Alice Neel, Portrait of Ellen Johnson Fig. 133. Alice Neel, Marisol Fig. 134. Alice Neel, Louise Lieber, Sculptor Fig. 135. Alice Neel, Mary D. Garrard Fig. 136. Alice Neel, Faith Ringgold Fig. 137. Alice Neel, Sari Dienes Fig. 138. Alice Neel, Kanuthia Fig. 139. Alice Neel, Self-Portrait Fig. 140. Alice Neel, Ethel Ashton Fig. 141. Alice and Nadya in Greenwich Village Fig. 142. Alice Neel, Nadya Olyanova Fig. 143. Alice Neel, Nadya Nude Fig. 144. Alice Neel, Nadya and Nona Fig. 145. Alice Neel, Kenneth Doolittle Fig. 146. Alice Neel, Kenneth Doolittle Fig. 147. Alice Neel, Kenneth Doolittle Fig. 148. Alice Neel, Joie de Vivre Fig. 149. Alice Neel, untitled (Bathroom Scene) Fig. 150. Alice Neel, Alienation Fig. 151. Raphael Soyer, Nude Fig. 152. Alice Neel, Pregnant Maria Fig. 153. Alice Neel, Blanche Angel Pregnant Fig. 154. Cover, Ms. magazine, 1972 Fig. 155. Alice Neel, Pregnant Woman Fig. 156. Alice Neel, Margaret Evans Pregnant Fig. 157. Edvard Munch, Puberty Fig. 158. Alice Neel, Hartley Fig. 159. Alice Neel, Drafted Negro Fig. 160. Alice Neel, Thanksgiving Fig. 161. Alice Neel, Dead Father Fig. 162. Alice Neel, The Sea Fig. 163. Alice Neel, Cutglass Sea Fig. 164. Alice Neel, Sunset, Riverside Drive Fig. 165. Alice Neel, Dr. James Dineen Fig. 166. Alice Neel, Georgie Neel Fig. 167. Alice Neel, Annemarie and Georgie Fig. 168. Alice Neel, The Family Fig. 169. Alice Neel, Pregnant Julie and Algis Fig. 170. Alice Neel, Subconscious Fig. 171. Alice Neel, The Flight of the Mother Fig. 172. Salvador Dali, The Architectonic Angelus of Millet xiv / Illustrations in the Print Edition

Fig. 173. John Graham, Head of Woman Fig. 174. Alice Neel, Sam and Richard Fig. 175. Alice Neel, Richard at Age Five Fig. 176. Alice Neel, Minotaur Fig. 177. Alice Neel, Peggy Fig. 178. Alice Neel, Loneliness Fig. 179. Alice Neel, Mother and Child (Nancy and Olivia) Fig. 180. Alice Neel, Nancy and Victoria Fig. 181. Alice Neel, Nancy and the Twins (5 months) Fig. 182. Alice Neel, The Family ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project began while I was teaching at Tufts University, and for their help with organizing the exhibition Exterior/Interior: Alice Neel, I thank my col- leagues there: Erika Ketelhohn, then acting curator at the Tufts University Art Gallery, Elizabeth Wylie, the gallery director, Chris Cavalier, Fine Arts De- partment photographer, and my graduate research assistants Nancy Chute, Renata Hedjuk, and Catherine Mayes. I also thank Prof. Margaret Henderson Floyd for her continuing support of my research. At Brandeis University, I received the Mazer Grant for Faculty Research and the Marver and Sheva Bernstein Faculty Fellowship for a semester’s leave to complete the manuscript. Among my colleagues at Brandeis, Nancy Scott in the Fine Arts Department and Erika Harth in the Romance Languages De- partment have provided helpful critiques of my arguments. Kathryn Hamill, a graduate student at Massachusetts College of Art, helped to compile sitters’ bi- ographies. My student Sarah Shatz has been an invaluable help in all phases of the manuscript preparation. The research for this book was completed under a senior postdoctoral fel- lowship at the Research and Scholars Center of the National Museum of Amer- ican Art, , where I received valued imput from cura-

xv xvi / Acknowledgments tors Virginia Mecklenburg and Harry Rand, as well as from Judy Throm, chief archivist for the , and Carolyn K. Carr, deputy direc- tor of the National Portrait Gallery. A number of colleagues in the ƒeld have kindly read and commented on speciƒc sections of this book, and I would like to thank in particular Patricia Hills, Susan Platt, Virginia Hagelstein Mar- quardt, Mary Garrard, Andrew Hemingway, Juan Martinez, and Trevor Fair- brother. I am especially grateful to my friend and colleague in the Fine Arts Department at Brandeis, Prof. Lynette Bosch, for patiently reading and com- menting on all of the initial drafts. Among those people who consented to be interviewed for the book, May Stevens, Rudolf Baranik, Margaret Belcher, Philip Bonosky, and Peggy Brooks have been especially generous with their time and information. Central to the entire project, of course, has been the Neel Family—Neel’s sons, Richard and Hartley, and her daughter-in-law Nancy. Nancy was invaluable as Neel’s assis- tant during the artist’s lifetime, and my gratitude for her un„agging assistance on this project could never be adequately acknowledged. Adam Sheffer and the staff at the Robert Miller Gallery has also been unfailingly helpful in pro- viding information and reproductions. John Cheim, at the Cheim and Read Gallery, was especially supportive in the early phases of this project. John Hose, executive assistant to the president of Brandeis and governor of the Brandeis University Press, has guided the manuscript through to publica- tion with consummate professionalism. To Paul Schnee, formerly at the Uni- versity Press of New England, and Phyllis Deutsch, who took over the project, I give thanks for insightful editorial comment. Finally I thank my family, especially my grown children Mark and Ann Marie, for their love and support. This book is dedicated to the memory of my late husband, Michael.

P.A. Introduction

The Portrait Gallery

Alice Neel made her ƒrst mature in 1927 and continued until her death in 1984. A realist whose primary genre was portraiture, she con- sidered herself fortunate to have been active from the early to the late twenti- eth century and to have recorded the changes and continuities within that span of time as they were registered in the faces and bodies of her sitters. In 1960, she described herself as a collector of souls, a phrase ground into a cliché by critics in the 1970s. But because her work did not begin to sell until she was past seventy, she was most certainly a collector of her own work; her sitters maintained their presence in her apartment long after their physical depar- ture. Her home was thus a portrait gallery of vivid likenesses stacked together like geological strata marking the various “epochs” of the century. I have cho- sen the portrait gallery as the dominant metaphor for this thematic discussion of Neel’s work because it suggests the collective, historical nature of her art. However, this public monument is the product of an idiosyncratic, individual vision. Cumulatively, Neel’s paintings of people provide an artist’s interpretation of signiƒcant social, political, and intellectual trends in twentieth-century Ameri- can culture, as exempliƒed by three overlapping populations in : the left-wing artists and political activists in Greenwich Village during the De-

xvii xviii / Pictures of People pression, the residents of Spanish Harlem during the McCarthy era, and the New York artworld during the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. Her portrait gallery is a personal chronicle, a means of deƒning her life in terms of the people who entered it, a necessarily contingent sample of American cul- ture. A visual novel, Neel’s multilayered narrative is held together by the con- sistent thread of her family life. In the course of seeking answers to her central investigation of the parameters of personal identity at a given moment, Neel neglected few disputed terrains of American culture in her art—whether of race, class, or sex. Her sprawling gallery, some three thousand works long, was a means of freez- ing life’s „ux in order to acknowledge the potential signiƒcance of even the most trivial or „eeting of human interactions. “Every person is a new universe unique with its own laws emphasizing some belief or phase of life immersed in time and rapidly passing by,”1 Neel said. She examined any and all evidence for what it might yield; for as a con„uence of history’s forces, no person could be uninteresting or insigniƒcant. Only a small proportion of her sitters be- longed to the artistic elite who made lasting creative contributions to Ameri- can cultural life; the rest she rescued for history simply by recording their vis- ages as witnesses to their time. Neel referred to herself as an old-fashioned painter of portraits, still lifes, and landscapes. It was not merely her realistic subject matter that can be con- sidered anachronistic, however. In an age of mechanical reproduction, Neel used the medium of oil paint rather than photography to make her portraits. In an era of mass communication, she made objects that had virtually no audi- ence at the time and have only a very limited audience today. A realist in the age of , Neel based her efforts on the faith that her representations would be consonant with an external reality. She held to realism’s fundamen- tal tenet that painting’s function was to mirror or re„ect reality, and because in her view individuals best re„ected the age, portraiture was the most appropri- ate genre for her realist art. Neel’s contribution to American was thus not formal innovation but rather her ability to use a genre that was consid- ered exhausted and to invest it with renewed relevance. Because these subjects were tied to the speciƒc instance—poverty as an Hispanic male suffering from disease, pregnancy as the physical discomfort and anxiety of a white woman— Neel’s realism claimed by implication a documentary authority. The daring with which she poured new wine into old bottles has given me permission to link old-fashioned content analysis with cultural history. To address the work, to analyze what appears there, and then to open it out to the larger cultural pattern of which it is a piece is to initiate a process that I believe parallels Neel’s own. Neel provided her own pedigree for her approach. The model to which she referred continually in her lectures was Honoré de Balzac’s Comédie Humaine: Introduction: The Portrait Gallery / xix

“That’s really what life is—The Human Comedy. And put together, that’s what my paintings are.”2 If this nineteenth-century French novelist seems a rather remote point of origin, Neel, in referencing Balzac, located her own position within the spectrum of American cultural life. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, when Neel’s aesthetic ideas were being formulated, Balzac was cited in broad terms as a precedent for a socially concerned art by radical writers. Neel’s admiration for Balzac is indicative not simply of her personal taste but of the literary criticism of the period. With Georg Lukacs, for instance, she would have insisted that realist art, to properly depict the “forces” of history, must be about “individuals and individual destinies.” During the 1930s, the signiƒcance of popular culture as the artistic expres- sion of the masses was also recognized. An interest in the study and exhibition of folk art, for instance, was paralleled by an interest in the oral traditions of the working class. Neel’s visual history, like the oral histories collected by the Fed- eral Writer’s Project of the Works Progress Administration, served as a voice for those segments of society unacknowledged in previous histories. This ap- proach entered mainstream historical writing during the 1970s. As the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg wrote in his Preface to the Cheese and the Worms (1976):

In the past historians could be accused of wanting to know only about the great deeds of kings, but today this is certainly no longer true. More and more they are turning toward what their predecessors passed over in silence, discarded, or simply ignored. “Who built Thebes of the seven gates?” Bertolt Brecht’s “literate worker” was already asking . . . The sources tell us nothing about these anonymous masons, but the question retains all its signiƒcance . . . [W]e have come to recognize that those who were once paternalistically described as “the common people in a civi- lized society” in fact possessed a culture of their own . . . Even today the culture of the subordinate class is largely oral.3

The portrait, however anachronistic it seemed as a genre to Neel’s own con- temporaries, is in fact ideally suited to a project modeled on oral history. We are introduced to individuals, one on one, and to their history as told to a narra- tor/translator. Visualizing history as it is embodied in people who at one and the same time may be academics and revolutionaries, Black Muslims and taxi drivers, is a means of understanding it as shaped by human action rather than by abstract forces. As a woman artist working in the retrograde medium of portraiture, Neel occupied a marginalized position in the New York artworld, a position repli- cated in her living and family arrangements. In order to pursue a professional career, the artist fashioned herself as a rebel, adapting the pre-existing persona xx / Pictures of People of the bawdy woman in order to “create her own world” rather than replicating existing social constructs. Her antisocial behavior created the autonomy or distance necessary for her cultural critique. Alone in her own domain (her home and the genre of portraiture), she could create a body of work that by re- maining on the periphery could lay claim to the avant-garde tradition within modernism. Because I believe that Neel’s working method and its premises were insepa- rable from the product, I have tried to organize this text in a manner that would be faithful to her method. I conceive of her method, her modus ope- randi, as piecework. Neel did not start from a grand design; rather, she started from what was available, at hand, lodging the work in the proximate. Pictures of People is also piecework, constructed from thematic blocks: radical politics, the artworld, and the family. The historian cannot move from the work to the artist “behind” it, as that being is so clearly a construct. The Neel referred to in this text is not, then, Neel the person, whom I never met. “Neel” is an infer- ence made from the work, and built from the visual evidence it offers. I have chosen a thematic rather than a chronological approach because, although threaded into the New York artworld from 1927 to 1984, Neel’s art was in many ways out of its time. As I have put it together, Neel’s art is both antiquated and prophetic, from nineteenth-century realism while anticipating many of the concerns of feminist art of the 1970s. The umbrella of cultural history has provided the space to examine literary as well as visual parallels in order to substantiate my argument that Neel was not alone in her thinking, and that comparable critiques can be found in the artists and writers who were her peers. In using the metaphor of the portrait gallery, I have deliberately differenti- ated Neel’s painting from other works of high art destined for a museum. In an art museum, the portrait is important only as an example of a famous artist’s work. Within the art museum world, the portrait gallery’s status is compro- mised by its valuation of the historical importance of the portrait’s sitter over the painting’s “aesthetic” qualities. Neel’s portrait gallery is her world and the viewer acknowledges each painting as “a Neel,” but the viewer is also charged with identifying the sitter, if not speciƒcally, at least as a product of a given era. In asking “who is it?” we must frame the answer in terms of what the subject tells us about his or her history, and, by extension, that of American culture. The portrait gallery permits the viewer to question the scheme of things, to view the individual in and as history. Neel’s accumulative approach, one plus one, becomes for the viewer a one on one, an imaginary conversation. The result of this conversation is a metaphor created by relating personality to historical context. Neel’s approach required that she remain open to the interpretive possibilities of each generation’s dress and pose. The individual Introduction: The Portrait Gallery / xxi in/as history represents a con„uence of constantly shifting and changing forces, without a stable continuity provided by specious “bloodlines” or ques- tionable “great deeds.” But because each portrait is a synecdoche, the part sub- stituting for the whole, the viewer must recreate, however provisionally, the historical situation the portrait represents. According to George Lakoff, the “[m]etaphorical imagination is a crucial skill in creating rapport and in com- municating the nature of unshared experience. This skill consists, in large measure, of the ability to bend your world view and adjust the way you catego- rize experience.”4 Neel was a feminist and a political radical, but her ability to grow artistically over a period of a half century was tied to her openness to exchange. Like all great portrait artists, Neel’s pictures create the compelling illusion of a human presence. Her metaphors are not abstractions. In his essay on met- aphor, Paul Ricoeur quotes Aristotle: “The vividness of . . . good metaphors consists in their ability to ‘set before the eyes’ the sense that they display.”5 Just as the mind makes metaphors on the basis of embodied experience, so Neel’s portraits are metaphors for a concept of identity that is characterized by a con- tinual traversing of boundaries between public and private, interior and exte- rior. Her vivid portrayals help us to see American cultural history from varying perspectives. The individual was her focus, but framing her vision as she painted was the person’s place on the social ladder and in the historical mo- ment. These deƒning terms, these frames of reference, were never absent from Neel’s “peripheral” vision. Her portraits open out in many directions: to cul- tural concerns as expressed in literature, politics, and visual art. All of these will overlap in this text to create a broad-based reading.

Part I

The Subjects of the Artist

1 The Creation (of a) Myth

I lived in the little town of Colwyn, , where everything happened, but there was no artist and no writer. We lived on a street that had been a pear or- chard. And it was utterly beautiful in the spring, but there was no artist to paint it. And once a man exposed himself at a window, but there was no writer to write it. The grocer’s wife committed suicide after the grocer died, but there was no writer to write that. There was no culture there. I hated that little town. I just despised it. And in the summer I used to sit on the porch and try to keep my blood from circu- lating. That’s why my own kids had a much better life than I had. Because boredom was what killed me.

Thus opens “Alice by Alice,” Alice Neel’s autobiography, published the year before she died.1 Neel was a painter: her strong visual sense pervades her speech. In her old age, the images from her childhood, indelibly painted in her mind, carried with them all of the emotional weight of their initial impres- sion. Colwyn, Pennsylvania was a sight, but there was no one there to record its beauty or its perversity. Neel’s words suggest that as a child she knew that she had to become an artist in order to record that life in all its aspects. But of course, these are the words of an adult at the end of a long and productive artis- tic career. In the manner of any good storyteller, Neel has created a parable to

3 4/The Subjects of the Artist explain her choice of an artistic vocation and to justify the direction it would take. Like many American , Alice Neel (1900–1984) painted in rel- ative obscurity for many years before achieving artistic prominence in the 1970s. During that time, she began to compensate for the years of artistic ne- glect by crisscrossing the United States to deliver slide lectures on her work. A witty and intelligent woman, Neel developed an enthusiastic following, each lecture spawning new invitations. The cumulative effect of these popular lec- tures was that her art was and continues to be accepted as she presented it: as an illustration of her life, as extended autobiography. The art historian, however, is bound to ask what place Neel’s art occupies in American art and culture. I will argue that Neel’s work presents a paradigm of the course of socially concerned art in the twentieth century. We must examine the anecdotal version of Neel for what it is: a particular instance of the complex relationship between art and biography that troubles any mono- graphic study of an artist’s work. My objection to a biographical approach to her work, which she instigated as a means of bringing her art to the widest pos- sible audience, is not that the account of her life is untrue—it is not any more or less “true” than any biography—but that it has obscured her work. Trained at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women from 1920 to 1925, Neel aligned herself with the artists of the previous gen- eration and with the legacy of the unsparing depiction of urban life established in Philadephia by its founders, Robert Henri and John Sloan. Neel took the Ashcan School’s premises literally. Her nascent interest in a socially concerned art was reinforced by the year she spent in Havana (1925–1926) with the early members of the Cuban avant-garde. During the 1930s, while living in Greenwich Village, Neel participated in the WPA’s programs, joined the Communist Party, and was strongly in„u- enced by the communist call for a proletarian art. However, as a portrait painter, she only occasionally peopled her art-for-the-millions with the masses. Instead, she insisted on depicting each representative of a given class as an individual and, in doing so, created an alternative version of . A basic as- sumption of the work is that the quotidian reality of twentieth-century Ameri- cans of all classes was centered in family life. There, Neel identiƒed such phys- ical and psychological consequences of poverty as disease and child abuse, recording them long before they were thought to be germane to an activist art. After World War II, when she had settled with her two sons in Spanish Harlem, Neel retained her realist style, resisting the centrist political forces that were branding it as anachronistic. Not only did her portraits from these years redeƒne the notion of family, but they also reconƒgured urban space in terms of the experiences of those in poverty. By the early 1960s, having moved The Creation (of a) Myth /5 to 107th Street on the Upper West Side, the two worlds that had intersected in her art, the creative and intellectual on the one hand and the marginalized and impoverished on the other, began to diverge. She subsequently concen- trated almost exclusively on her own family and on members of the New York artworld. Nonetheless the core of her artistic philosophy—her belief that an individual’s body posture and physiognomy not only revealed personal idio- syncracies, but embodied the character of an era—remained unchanged. Neel’s career and the critical reception of her work—painting in her home without institutional recognition—are representative of the situation of many women artists and part of a cultural pattern of devaluating women’s work. When broken, this pattern has often resulted in the overcompensation of adu- lation. Yet the critical extremes of the darkness of obscurity and the glare of publicity can hardly be expected to shed an even light on an artist’s work, as Neel’s career attests. Between 1926 and 1962, she was given six one-person gallery exhibitions; between 1962 and her death in 1984, she had sixty. Pub- lished reviews and articles also increased exponentially, but remained bio- graphically based. Just as the career trajectory of women artists in the twentieth century has been a belated and dizzying climb from the valleys of obscurity to the peaks of fame, so too the critical reception of their work has been based on the anachro- nistic assumption that art by men explains the world, whereas art by women explains their life. Neel’s lectures served to reinforce that familiar cliché. For example, in her 1989 essay “Tough Choices: Becoming a Woman Artist, 1900– 1970,” art historian Ellen Landau found the careers of the ƒrst generation of women modernist artists to be marked by emotional con„ict. Enumerating their psychological problems—their suicide attempts, alcoholism, and depres- sions—Landau implies that their personal difƒculties were due to the con„icts the women experienced between their desire to be mothers and to be artists; their careers thus present a “pattern whose implications should not be ignored . . . Work was not always enough to satisfy these women, and it often took a high psychic toll.”2 Without question the con„icts of motherhood and career exacted a high toll from many artists, including Neel, but it does not follow that art making was unrewarding without the compensating fulƒllment of fam- ily life. Perhaps the lack of support they received in trying to balance career and motherhood was a cause of stress, or, again, a lifetime of personally reward- ing labor that remained unrecognized. In 1958, Neel recognized that, if her art were to enter history, she would not only have to create it but participate in developing its audience. During the ƒfties, close friends who were also frustrated by the critical neglect of her work encouraged her to develop a slide presentation. One of her ƒrst venues was the Westchester Community Center in White Plains, where she spoke to an art 6/The Subjects of the Artist class at the invitation of another friend, the socially concerned painter Rudolf Baranik. Beyond their ready wit and broad range of knowledge, Neel’s lectures consistently beguiled their audience with the contrast between her grand- motherly appearance and her provocative language. With the arrival of the Women’s Movement in the late 1960s, Neel was constantly in demand. Driven by the desire to bring her art to the public, Neel appeared at almost every one of the openings of her solo exhibitions, no matter how remote their location, and invariably her lecture would be part of the opening night festivi- ties. Her artistic reputation thus became inextricably bound up with her talks, and unfortunately the journalistic press, sensing the broad popular appeal of a juicy life story, enthusiastically bought into it, adding their own decorative „ourishes. The format of the newspaper and magazine articles on Neel forms an un- varying litany into which passing reference to her work is made to ƒt. The ƒrst few paragraphs invariably contain a sexist description of Neel’s grandmotherly appearance and its con„ict with her “unladylike” personality:

Alice Neel is like an old pagan priestess somehow overlooked in the triumph of a new religion. Indeed, with her shrewdly cherubic face, her witty and wizard eyes, she has the mischievous look of a maternal witch whose only harm lies in her com- pulsion to tell the truth. (Jack Kroll, Newsweek, 1966)

Seated in front of a [canvas] in her blue smock, her bright little green eyes squinting and blinking behind her glasses, her plump legs spread forcefully apart and her space-shoed feet planted solidly on the „oor, she picked up her brush gingerly and wailed, “I’m just scared to death . . .” While she formed our torsos . . . she chattered on incessantly . . . but when she came to our faces, she became transformed; her face became ecstatic, her mouth hung open, her eyes were glazed and she never uttered a word. (Cindy Nemser, catalog essay, Georgia Museum of Art, 1975)

Such patronizing descriptions are the content of a newspaper’s “Living” pages, to which the reviews of Neel’s work were frequently relegated. Although such extended attention to physical appearance is unlikely to be found in the critical discussion of art by men, the cliché of the creative artist who is seized with “ecstasy” while painting is as old as art history itself. Its relentless repeti- tion in the literature on Neel revives that stereotype for the purpose of estab- lishing a myth of origins for the women’s movement. Such a myth, of course, requires a narrative of triumph against all odds. The highlights of Neel’s gen- uinely difƒcult life story inevitably followed the journalist’s establishment of the persona: The hypersensitive child in a parochial Philadelphia suburb; marriage to an “exotic” Cuban artist, Carlos Enríquez de Gomez (1925); the The Creation (of a) Myth /7 death of their ƒrst child, Santillana (1927); the break-up of their marriage and loss of custody of their second child, Isabetta, followed shortly therafter by a nervous breakdown (1930); the post-recovery move to the bohemian world of Greenwich village (1931); the destruction of over 300 of her paintings and wa- tercolors by her jealous lover, Kenneth Doolittle (1934); the move, with José, to Spanish Harlem, where her two sons, Richard (1939) and Hartley (1941), were born; years of poverty in Spanish Harlem (1939–1962); the beginnings of her own professional success as her sons entered their careers; and ƒnally, fame, and ƒnancial and critical success (1974–1984). This narrative, repeated in all of the newspaper reviews of her exhibitions, culminated in Patricia Hills’s judiciously edited autobiography from 1983. Al- ice Neel is Neel’s life as she wanted it told, the grand summation of her lectures and interviews. Indeed, it reads like a psychological novel of the 1930s such as her friend Millen Brand would have written. Lively and engaging, the book is a testimony to Neel’s prodigious and vivid memory for people and events, and to her exceptional storytelling abilities. Her life’s traumas are not at all irrele- vant to her artwork, but it is important to recognize that Neel was fashioning the recounting of her life as if it were a piece of ƒction. In a true stroke of “ge- nius,” she did not write her own autobiography, even though she was a ƒne writer; she let others use the material she supplied in interviews to write it for her, so that the recounting conveyed a sense of objectivity. Yet, the traumatic events thus transcribed can help elucidate her art only when lodged in the social and intellectual milieu of which she was a part, as noted in his review of Hills’s book in Art Journal: In Patricia Hills’ Alice Neel . . . the hand of the artist seems a bit heavy to me. The bulk of the book, “Alice By Alice” . . . is the artist’s oral history of herself, and Hills is present only as the author of an eight-page, unillustrated Afterword. This disparity would matter less if a solid core of critical discussion on Neel had already existed, or if her monologue were more interesting. Anyone who has heard the artist’s gar- rulous lectures will recognize many of the anecdotes printed here . . . [T]he artist should have realized that if she is to move off the lecture circuit and enter art his- tory, the cooperation of people like Hills should not be abused.3 The anecdotes and observations so familiar from Neel’s lectures are best understood in their art historical context, where they provide clues to the sources of her intellectual development. Although isolated in terms of her exclusion from exhibitions, she was highly visually and critically literate. Al- though she professed disinterest in other artists and used her lectures as a vehi- cle for reinforcing the notion that her art stemmed directly from her personal life rather than from any outside in„uence, her extensive knowledge of art and literature permitted her to forge her art from a very broad base. 8/The Subjects of the Artist

The role Neel’s lectures and interviews played in the creation of a myth of her life story is hardly exceptional. Art in general, and the artistic personality in particular, have always been bound up with mythmaking. If Neel understood that a successful career would have to involve the “marketing” of a public per- sonality, from which sources did she create her artistic persona? In this area, Neel, like other women artists, would have lacked role models. Women artists have endured strong social pressure to construct their identity as “female,” to emphasize their womanliness despite their artistic talent. Yet without an image, an artist lacks substance. Without a myth, no fame validates one’s art. Women artists have long understood that these strictures against unconventional be- havior have served as a means of assuring that women would never fully be ac- cepted as artists. Because the breaking of rules of social behavior has been con- sidered since the Renaissance to be a means of freeing oneself from outmoded artistic conventions, then women’s acceptance of conventional roles would perforce constrain the creative impulse. Virginia Woolf’s need to kill “The Angel in the House”—the domestic self that is required to be sympathetic, charming, self-sacriƒcing—in order to become an effective writer has by now become a feminist truism. During the 1920s, when Neel came of age, the American poet Louise Bogan described the repercussion of women’s socializa- tion as docile dependents: “Women have no wildness in them, / They are provident instead, / Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts, / To eat dusty bread.” Neel’s writing during this decade reveals that she had adopted this feminist view: “Oh, the men, the men, they put all their troubles into beauti- ful verses. But the women, poor fools, they grumbled and complained and watched their breasts grow „atter and more wrinkled. Grey hair over a grey dishcloth...”4 In her lecture at Bloomsburg State College in 1972, Neel put it even more directly. “In the beginning, I much preferred men to women. For one thing I felt that women represented a dreary way of life always help- ing a man and never performing themselves, whereas I wanted to be the artist myself!”5 Although one can hardly hope to assess the effect of Neel’s nervous break- down at age twenty-nine on the subsequent course of her art and career, bio- graphical accounts by Marcelo Pogolotti, the Belchers, and others suggest a change from a rather naive if rebellious young woman to a conƒrmed bo- hemian.6 After her total collapse, Neel adopted a stance of resolute opposition to virtually everything that smacked of middle-class propriety or politics. She could have returned to her parents’ home to complete her recovery but chose instead to summer in New Jersey with her friend Nadya Olyanova, through whom she had met Kenneth Doolittle. When, at the end of the summer, she moved to Greenwich Village to live with the drug-addicted seaman who, as a member of the IWW, was also left-wing, Neel claimed citizenship in a “coun- The Creation (of a) Myth /9 try” that John Sloan and Marcel Duchamp had once mockingly declared had seceded from the United States. Although the Greenwich Village of the early 1930s had lost the revolutionary fervor of the prewar years, it remained the lo- cus of alternative life-styles as well as of much important creative activity. The utopian visions of a socialist activist like Polly Holliday may have been re- placed by the barbed commentary of the essayist Dorothy Parker; nonetheless the Bohemia of Greenwich Village could still be counted on to remain a thorn in the side of polite society. The artistic and literary example of New York’s bohemia in these years pro- vided rather „imsy material on which to construct an identity, however. Neel came to maturity during the great age of ƒlm, and as Robert Sklar has observed, many men and women learned about social relations, and male-female rela- tionships in particular, from what they saw on the screen. A prototype enjoying wide popularity in media culture—the bawdy comedic type personiƒed by Mae West—may have provided the most compelling topos for the construction of Neel’s persona. Although the stereotypical virgin-whore opposition that dominated ƒn-de- siècle art was perpetuated in the roles played by early ƒlm stars such as Lillian Gish and Theda Bara, a ƒgure such as Mae West could irreverently mock the entire system with her outrageous screen behavior (ƒg. 1). Aggressive and loud- mouthed, but with her hair dyed platinum and her hourglass ƒgure swathed in sequined gowns, West was part temptress, part truck driver. Like the trans- vestite she appeared to be, she could at once play and parody female sex roles. Perhaps for males, her homeliness and sexual ambiguity allowed them to laugh at her jokes without feeling threatened by her professed voracious sexual appetite, but for women, her lack of concern for male opinions or approbation must have provoked a different kind of awe. Here was a woman whose dedica- tion to her own sensual pleasure was so strong that she would refuse to conƒne herself by giving her hand in marriage to even the most cinematically desir- able screen bachelor. For young women, including Neel, who watched her as they reached the age of consent, West offered the possibility of saying “no” to society’s expectations by insisting on putting her own needs ƒrst. According to June Sochen, bawdy comediennes such as Mae West and vaudevillian Eva Tanguay used bathroom humor and sexual jokes to take

the Eve image and turn it around; no longer was woman’s sexuality viewed as evil . . . They also displayed, as all iconoclasts do, a marked irreverence for sacred sub- jects. Nothing was out of bounds. No gesture, no thought, no action had to be self- censored or controlled . . . The female rebel performer would not ever become a comfortable part of popular culture because she was too avant-garde, too out- rageous in her words and actions.7 10 / The Subjects of the Artist

Because such sexual freedom has long been the purview of the male avant- garde artist, Neel could easily have linked the two realms—high art and popu- lar culture—in terms of image making. Both aimed to épater les bourgeois, the middle-class consumer, providing the common ground for West’s irreverent wit and that of the artistic avant-garde. Neel’s outrageous stories, then, were geared to adding lustre to her role as the quintessential bohemian. Neel wanted to perform—Neel wanted to be the artist, and so at the end of her life she per- formed her life and art.8 By using bawdy humor to reduce the powerful and the famous to the basest common denominator, Neel’s naughtiness demystiƒed the artworld’s elites, thereby also pointedly rebuking those who for so long ignored her work. The edge to Neel’s humor, like West’s, stemmed ultimately from anger—her mock- ing laughter and outrageous language perhaps the only effective means for ex- pressing genuine outrage and exposing the artiƒciality, if not the devastating psychological consequences, of the conventional constructs of woman and of artist. Her lecture at Harvard University’s “Learning From Performers” series at the Carpenter Center on March 21, 1979, exempliƒes her ƒne-tuned presen- tations, and although her humor is considerably dulled in my summary, her vi- olation of every rule of feminine decorum should be evident. Her chronologi- cal survey began with her early training at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women. She went on to express her disdain for many of the in„uential re- alist painters of her generation, for example the Art Students League’s Eugene Speicher and his “cow-like women.” Having summarily dismissed the artistic context in which she worked, she began a chronological sequence of slides of her work. When she came to her Ethel Ashton of 1930, herself a bovine woman profoundly ashamed of her naked body, she asked the audience to “look at all that furniture she is carrying around.” With reference to Nadya and the Wolf (1931), Neel claimed that her friend, the handwriting expert, could not have children because “she used drugs for douches,” while her portrait of Nadya Nude could not be photographed because in 1933 “you could not make a slide of pubic hair.” Symbols (Doll and Apple), one of the artist’s most wrenching works, is described as “sexy,” and the outrageous triple genitals in the 1933 por- trait of Joe Gould “look like St. Basil’s domes upside down.”9 Near the end of the Harvard lecture, when she showed her double portrait of the artists Red Grooms and Mimi Gross, and described Grooms as “ready to jump up and perform,” she openly acknowledged her belief that contemporary artists had of necessity become “performers.”10 Neel was far from the only female artist-rebel of her generation, but she was one of only a few who rebelled through both an unconventional life-style and a The Creation (of a) Myth /11 biting wit, actions and words that indicated an absence of self-censorship, a de- termination to disrupt polite society. Neel joins the ranks of those writers and painters—among them Gertrude Stein, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and Romaine Brooks—who ignored their physical appearance and/or permitted themselves the comfort and convenience of male garb. It was not until the 1970s that Neel’s unfashionable persona was adopted by younger feminist performance artists. Annie Sprinkle (ƒg. 2), whom Neel painted in 1982, pushed the Mae West image even further toward outrageous camp, which Neel captured per- fectly in Sprinkle’s blowsy expression, tacky feathered hat, overblown breasts, and pussy ring. Flaunting sexuality was the means for all three women to gain creative as well as economic autonomy. By refusing sexual subservience, they became sufƒciently threatening to be let alone, and perhaps to gain a grudging respect. In a culture that restricted women’s options, the strategy worked. Much as Neel’s autobiography has obscured her art, it is essential to it and inextricable from it. Were it not for her efforts to narrate her life, her work might have remained unknown. She realized this when she was in her ƒfties, and spent the rest of her life insuring that her work would not be lost to history. “When Sleeping Beauty wakes up / she is almost ƒfty years old,”11 wrote poet Maxine Kumin, brilliantly pinpointing the moment when many women real- ize that a passive life is a lost life. To conserve her transgressive art, created at great emotional cost, she had to translate it into another medium, whose form would make clear how „agrantly she had violated the unspoken rules of the appropriate in realist art and in real life. According to the feminist psychologist Nancy K. Miller, “To justify an unorthodox life by writing about it is to re- inscribe the original violation, to reviolate masculine turf.”12 Neel’s lectures were part of her battle to secure a well-earned piece of art historical turf. Having recognized the futility of waiting passively for recogni- tion, Neel admitted to Hills in 1983 that she had had “a block, I still have it, against publicity . . . I reached the conclusion that if I painted a good picture, it was enough to paint a good picture . . . I didn’t know how to go-get, so I just put it on the shelf.”13 In her ƒfties, after her children were in college, Neel took charge. Although hardly a wall„ower previously, she was now ofƒcially off the shelf. In Writing a Woman’s Life, Carolyn Heilbrun has identiƒed this “awak- ening” as the key moment in a woman’s artistic career: “[A] woman’s selfhood, the right to her own story, depends upon her ‘ability to act in the public do- main.’”14 To take one’s life into the public domain, one must write it as narrative. Neel chose the genre of satire, the female equivalent of modernist irony. Yet it is important to remember that Neel “wrote” her long life well after she had be- gun to paint it. She created her autobiography twice, with the later version di- 12 / The Subjects of the Artist rected toward popular consumption, and the creation of a market and a public space for efforts long conƒned to her studio/home. Her talents as a raconteur put her work into the public domain. The art historian’s task is to situate it within the matrix of American culture. 2 From Portraiture to Pictures of People: Neel’s Portrait Conventions

The Portrait Tradition

The career obstacles Neel faced as a woman in the artworld were compounded by her choice of genre: portraiture. Just as Neel had to create an artistic persona that would bring her work into the public realm, so, basing her art in the repre- sentation of the human ƒgure, she had to rethink the outworn conventions of the genre and to provide it with renewed relevance to modernist artistic practice. One route, taken by artists such as Andy Warhol and Philip Pearl- stein after 1960, would have been to invert the premises of the tradition of self- portraiture as expressive of personal identity and to question the very existence of a private realm. Neel’s art remained rooted in the modernist faith that the portrait could represent individual psychology, but she revitalized the legacy of psychological portraiture from Degas to van Gogh by reinvesting it with its social and political aspects. Both her work and her words indicate that Robert Henri’s The Art Spirit served as an important source of ideas that remained fundamental to her concept of portraiture as metaphor. By analyzing the con- ventions she developed to elaborate the metaphorical dimension of the por- trait, it will be possible to understand the means she used to create an image of an individual qua era.

13 14 / The Subjects of the Artist

It is a truism that after the invention of photography in 1839 portrait paint- ing lost much of its raison d’être and nearly all of its prestige. Painters who spe- cialized in ofƒcial portraiture and who worked for ƒrms such as Portraits, Inc., were excluded from serious consideration as artists. In turn, artists who did not make portraits for hire but whose work consisted primarily of portraiture were found guilty of commercialism by association, and their reputations suffered. By the mid-1950s, American critics had declared the tradition of portrait paint- ing dead. Writing in Reality magazine in 1955, the social realist painter George Biddle lamented: “Yes, portrait painting as an art—rather than as a debased form of chromolithography—is very nearly a lost tradition.”1 Four years later, at the height of abstract , Frank O’Hara conƒrmed portraiture’s demise: “And the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all . . . You sud- denly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them.”2 The curator Henry Geldzahler provided an explanation for the decline of portraiture: it was the result, he declared, of a lack of enlightened patronage: “As curator in a museum, I get the question about once a month from the wife of a Supreme Court justice or from a governor, from somebody who has to have an ofƒcial portrait done . . . It seems to me that Larry Rivers, Jim Dine, and Andy Warhol are the natural portraitists of our age, but most of the institu- tions of government haven’t gotten around to understanding that yet.”3 With both artist and patron wary of each other, portrait painting fell into the gulf be- tween modern art and its public. From the mid-nineteenth century on, that gulf was spanned by the art photographer, whose role in the demise of portrait painting was at least as important as the lack of sophisticated patronage. The history of modern portraiture is inextricable from the history of photog- raphy. Signiƒcantly, art photographers have played a central role in the repre- sentation of ƒne artists. From and Edward Steichen to Arnold Newman, Hans Namuth, and Richard Avedon, these practitioners have con- ƒrmed the cultural myth of creativity with as much authority as Joseph Karsh has formulated the image of leadership for a business elite. Their work evi- dences the symbiotic relationship between art photography and modernism: a portrait by an art photographer (rather than a commercial photographer) helped to validate the historical importance of the artist, while at the same time verifying (by metonymy), the photographer’s own artistic status. Stieg- litz’s photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe and Namuth’s of were crucial to the establishment of the painters’ careers. That hybrid entity, the art photographer, has been a bridge between the artist, isolated in the impractical realm of creativity, and the visually literate public.4 The liaison between artist and art photographer thus serves as a support to the artist-critic-dealer network that constitutes the artworld; in turn, the art- world shapes our concept of the art historical signiƒcance of an artist’s work. It From Portraiture to Pictures of People /15 is a liaison that Neel had to overcome as a portrait painter, for her own struggle for recognition was unquestionably hampered by the fact that she could not hitch her portraits of fellow artists to their stars. Since her portraits were not published in the mass media, which was the realm of photographic reproduc- tion, but remained instead within the boundaries of the artist’s production, the status of the portraitist’s sitter could not augment by re„ected radiance her own reputation. No painting of an artworld ƒgure, no matter how in„uential, could assure artistic recognition. Neel acknowledged portrait painting’s ambivalent artworld status when re- sponding to a critic’s question about why she, as a serious artist, concentrated on the genre:

. . . actually portraits are where more crimes are committed than in any other form of art. I mean, witness college professors that hang on walls in petriƒed form. I think they are frightful . . . they are portraits of so-called distinguished people; but I break these rules.5

Because the term had become thoroughly pejorative, Neel winced when she was called a portrait painter, preferring to distance herself from the corpse of ofƒcial art by calling her paintings “pictures of people.” The linguistic feint did not convince her contemporaries, however, who remained uncomfortable with her seemingly exclusive preoccupation with the genre. Neel’s defense was equivocal: rather than attempting to argue that she was transforming the tradition of realist and expressionist portraiture within modernism, she simply defended the portrait as a legitimate subject in a period that nominally granted the artist complete freedom of choice. “I think that you can make just as great a painting of a person as you can of anything else . . . After all, the human crea- ture—that’s it.”6 This statement was published in an interview Gerrit Henry conducted in 1975 with ten contemporary artists working primarily in portraiture: , George Segal, Alex Katz, Philip Pavia, Alfred Leslie, George Schnee- man, , Hedda Sterne, , and Neel. In explaining the resurrection of a genre only recently declared dead, Henry credited the “new pluralism” of the 1970s with having renewed interest in artists who had per- sisted in making portraits over the previous thirty years.7 In the 1970s, with the rigid doctrine of Greenbergian modernist formalism under siege, abstract painting yielded its dominance to a diverse variety of trends, from photo real- ism to to postmodernism. With renewed interest in realism in gen- eral and portraiture in particular, Neel’s art could ƒnally be released from its second-class status. Her late success thus owes as much to the seismic shifts in the New York artworld of the 1970s as it does to the speciƒc support of feminist 16 / The Subjects of the Artist artists and art historians. Neel told Henry that “I do feel vindicated by the re- turn of realism. Wouldn’t you? . . . I have all this backlog of all these years . . .”8 Neel’s deƒnition of “the human creature” as an individual re„ecting in a unique way the “Zeitgeist” of a given era must nonetheless have continued to sound old-fashioned in a decade when humanistic concepts of individualism and identity were questioned. The decade when ƒgurative art gained accep- tance coincided with the problematizing of individual identity in postmodern theory. Although admired by her younger contemporaries, Neel never ac- knowledged, as they did, the dominating presence of photography, which had forced a reconsideration of the very nature of personal identity. Instead, Neel was at her most radical in the choice of the subjects of her portraiture, and in her insistence that identity was inseparable from public realms of occupation and class. As with her contemporaries, many of her sitters were connected to her personal life, either family or friends in the artworld. But Neel’s democratic sweep included examples from all segments of Ameri- can society, from middle-class professionals to people on the margins of Amer- ican culture because of race, class, political afƒliations, or sexual orientation. Her inclusivity was an insistence that American culture could no longer be deƒned as white middle class, and that modern art must shift its focus from the private and insular to the public. When, in reviewing her 1974 exhibition at the Whitney, Hilton Kramer ac- cused Neel of an inability to record anything but a direct response to a sitter, he paid her an unintended compliment, for it is precisely in her knowledge of the conventions of psychological portraiture and her ability to manipulate them to convey the illusion of a direct record of empirical observation that Neel’s artistic intelligence resided. Established in France by Edgar Degas and in America by Thomas Eakins, this realist tradition was transmitted to Neel in large measure through the art and writings of Robert Henri. This she com- bined with the expressionist tradition of Edvard Munch, Oskar Kokoschka, and in particular, the German new realists, Otto Dix and , whose portraits bridge individual and collective psychology. Neel was ƒrst exposed to that tradition during her training at the Philadel- phia School of Design for Women from 1921 to 1925. Although the teaching at the PSDW had become thoroughly conventional when Neel studied there,9 the founder of the Ashcan School, Robert Henri, who had taught at the Phila- delphia School in the 1890s, remained the school’s most admired artist. With her friends Rhoda Medary and Ethel Ashton, the most adventurous members of the student body, Neel set out to renew the now moribund legacy of the Ashcan School. The three supplemented their training at the Graphic Sketch Club where the models were “real people, including old, poor and city peo- ple.”10 According to the Belchers, Medary, the ringleader, “encouraged them From Portraiture to Pictures of People /17 to sneak out . . . without the required gloves and hats, to take their easels to the Reading Railroad yards or to the Italian market on South Ninth Street...”11 Adopting the macho stance of the Eight, Neel bragged that she “was too rough for the Philadelphia School of Design,” painting sailors with cigarettes instead of girls in „uffy dresses.12 After her graduation, when she moved to Havana with Carlos, she had am- ple opportunity to extend Henri’s painterly style to the ethnic populace there. Her Beggars, Havana (ƒg. 3) from 1926 shows a student adapting the broad treatment and strong light/dark contrast of the paintings reproduced in Henri’s The Art Spirit. Neel’s portrayal of her sitters is so generalized that the work can barely be considered a portrait, and it is likely that in the end her approach to portraiture was in„uenced more strongly by Henri’s writings than by his paint- ing. Indeed, The Art Spirit (1923), his widely read book, could serve as a state- ment of Neel’s aesthetic principles if not of her artistic conventions. It was published during Neel’s third year at the Philadelphia School of Design, and she no doubt read it shortly thereafter, for while in Havana she gave a copy as a gift to the novelist Alejo Carpentier.13 Henri’s biographer, William Innes Homer, has observed that “Every gener- ation, it seems, requires its artist’s bible; the eager acceptance of The Art Spirit leaves no doubt that Henri satisƒed this need.”14 As with any important book that one reads when approaching intellectual maturity, Neel may well have so internalized the ideas of this most widely published of art manuals that they became her own, beginning with Henri’s deƒnition of realism. Echoing French critics from the previous century, he emphasized “truth” over “beauty,” often repeating Zola’s famous dictum that art is “nature seen through a tem- perament” (although he attributed the phrase to Corot). The goals of realism, he felt, were best achieved through the human ƒgure.15 Like Eakins, Henri considered the model on the stand to be “a piece of history”: “It is the study of our lives, our environment . . . They are real historical documents . . . Ordinary histories estrange us from the past . . . works of [art] bring us near it.”16 The concept of a “readable” urban physiognomy, transmitted to Henri through his study of Manet and Degas in at the turn of the century, had been articulated as early as 1876 in Edmond Duranty’s review of that year’s im- pressionist exhibition: “With one back, we desire that a temperament should be revealed, the age, the social class; with a pair of hands, we must express a magistrate or a merchant; with one gesture, a whole series of sentiments . . . Hands sunk in pockets could be eloquent...”17 For Neel as well, portraits were the truest expression of culture and history. In her doctoral address at the Moore College of Art in 1971, Neel stated that “people’s images re„ect the era in a way that nothing else could. When portraits are good art they re„ect the culture, the time and many other things...”18 She later elaborated to Hills: 18 / The Subjects of the Artist

“Art is a form of history . . . Now, a painting is a [speciƒc person], plus the fact that it is also the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age.”19 In an effort to emulate the intuitive response we have on ƒrst meeting a per- son, Henri argued that recording the individual-as-history was less a matter of deliberation than of unpremeditated action. In order to respond directly to the subject, to the life that is the source for all art, Henri believed that the artist should paint quickly and cultivate a strong visual memory: Realize that your sitter has a state of being, that this state of being manifests itself to you through form, color and gesture . . . Work with great speed . . . the most vital things in the look of a face or of a landscape endure only for a moment. Work should be done from memory. The memory is of that vital moment . . . The mem- ory of that special look must be held, and the “subject” can now only serve as an in- different manikin [sic] of its former self. The picture must not become a patchwork of parts of various moods.20 Neel also claimed credit for spontaneity: “When I paint . . . I deliberately cross everything out . . . and just react, because I want that spontaneity and concen- tration on that person to come across.”21 She also paraphrased Henri’s empha- sis on memory in her description of Woman in Pink Velvet Hat (1944, ƒg. 4): You can’t paint any good portrait unless you have a good memory, because there are tiny changes all the time. You know what the Chinese say: “You never bathe in the same water twice.” [sic] And if you follow those changes you just have nothing. I deliberately set out to memorize, even in art school.22 In its crudeness, Woman in Pink Velvet Hat certainly appears spontaneous, as if it were executed at the greatest possible speed in order to maintain the in- explicable sense of fear and revulsion we occasionally feel when passing a pedestrian on a city street. Yet, the ideal of a direct, one-shot, unmediated re- cording of experience, so central to American artistic mythology via Henri or Pollock, is in fact attained through reference to pre-existing visual models. The pedestrian’s look of distraction—unfocused eyes and the gaping mouth—is found, for instance, in portraits by Neel’s contemporary, the caricature artist . The painting’s distortions also recall German expressionist por- traits such as Otto Dix’s The Journalist Sylvia von Harden (1926, ƒg. 5), whose long, pointed face and nose, red-rimmed eyes, and downturned mouth create an impression of decadence similar to Neel’s portrait. Memory, then, is not a matter of retaining a single impression long enough to translate it into paint; the “direct response” of Woman in Pink Velvet Hat is doubly coded, by estab- lished visual conventions and by written text. Artistic spontaneity has been lit- tle more than a consciously cultivated look, part of the modernist ideology of individual expression. From Portraiture to Pictures of People /19

One ƒnal legacy to Neel from Henri’s teaching may have been the model of the politically radical artist. Henri did not express his political beliefs in The Art Spirit, but in his painting his radicalism was implied by his choice of sub- ject matter. As Annette Cox has argued, Henri “was one of the ƒrst American artists to suggest that there could be a clear connection between art and social reform.”23 Henri’s portraits of blacks, in particular, are an important precedent for Neel’s Spanish Harlem work. At the turn of the century blacks were socially and artistically invisible,24 and Henri’s portraits can be credited with lifting them from the realm of stock players in genre scenes. Yet Henri seems to have had little concern either with referring to the actual economic and social con- ditions in which blacks lived or with truly probing character. His former stu- dent Rockwell Kent questioned the depth of Henri’s commitment to social re- form: “if Henri turned to . . . underprivilege . . . it was merely because, to him, man at this level was most revealing of his own humanity.”25 In extending Henri’s legacy in her mature work, Neel moved from general- ized painterly impressions to incisive linear depictions. In his portrait of a viva- cious young girl, Eva Green (ƒg. 6), Henri seems to have followed his own ex- hortation to “feel the dignity of the child.”26 Yet, we are given too little visual information to recognize in Eva any individual characteristics beyond those of an accommodating cheerfulness. Moreover, by concentrating on black chil- dren in his portraits, Henri reinforced the stereotype of the black as “childlike.” Neel’s Two Black Girls (Antonia and Carmen Encarnacion) (1959, ƒg. 7) could be considered as an homage to Henri. They are painted with Henri’s at- tention to individual facial expression and with a vigorous painterly stroke that, as in Eva Green, aids in conveying a sense of their vitality. The differences lie in her greater attention to their speciƒc features and expressions, and to the eloquence of their body language and dress, which are conveyed through her drawing. Like Degas before her, Neel grants to children the same psychologi- cal complexity as adults. The children’s tilted heads, and their awkward, angu- lar poses suggest a combination of shyness, insecurity, and curiosity, whereas their too-short dresses suggest tightened circumstances and its attendant vul- nerability. The poignancy of pose and dress is offset by one girl’s patience (the left-hand ƒgure) and the other’s inquisitiveness (the child on the right). Neel’s portrayal of childhood vulnerability and curiosity thus emerges from the ma- trix of a speciƒc confrontation across age and race. In a comment that is revealing of the unquestioned assumptions of his era, Henri said that “in the great [men], of which a nation may be proud, the race speaks.”27 By making “race” little more than one attribute inseparable from a complex of others, Neel mitigated its difference and undercut stereotypes. Her subjects are depicted as “two black girls who are probably sisters who grew up in difƒcult circumstances in Harlem in the 1950s and who are both curious 20 / The Subjects of the Artist and understandably uncomfortable in a white woman’s apartment”—“black” being but one word in a complex sentence. Wedged into the conƒning picto- rial space, the girls confront, in the unseen person of the artist, the unmarked, unexamined norm of whiteness against which they, even now, must begin to measure themselves. The potentially demeaning cliché—the childlike Negro —that served as Neel’s point of departure is revealed as the very stricture that obstructs the childrens’ self-deƒnition. Inspired, along with several generations of American students, by Henri’s artistic principles, Neel put them into practice in creating visual codes sufƒ- ciently broad and „exible to slip around stereotype and to create, with each portrait, a complex layering of expressive codes. She intersected with the tradi- tion of psychological portraiture at an historical moment when a new territory had been identiƒed but not adequately explored. For despite his genuine con- cern for people of all classes, Henri had not succeeded in extending psycho- logical portraiture successfully to marginalized groups. This Neel achieved.

The Portrait as Metaphor

Portrait paintings are most compelling when we feel that we are seeing past the facial expression, pose, and dress to an imagined zone of privacy. Yet how do we discriminate between the exterior and the interior person when all that is available for the artist’s use and for our interpretation is surface appearance? How do we know what character traits and/or emotions are being represented? Ofƒcial portraiture provides the simplest example. In recent history, gov- ernment ofƒcials who might have commissioned a Rivers, Dine, or Neel to “immortalize” a dignitary more often turned instead to a stable of competent, highly paid professionals, among them Andrew Wyeth, Norman Rockwell, and Gardner Cox, who conƒned their portraits within the narrow bounds of propriety and „attery. In his 1968 portrait of Richard Milhous Nixon (ƒg. 8), for instance, Rockwell took a face whose forbidding features had been the newspaper cartoonists’ dream, softened the mouth and jowls, and used an un- characteristically informal pose, so that Nixon assumes the attributes of a kind, thoughtful teacher or clergyman. Rockwell provides no hint of the complexi- ties and contradictions of the politician’s personality, but instead, through pa- tient accumulation of detail, provides convincing visual reassurance of a moral, high-minded individual. Far more potent than a written record, such por- traits maintain patriarchal authority by physically embodying a society’s most valued ideals. As Sheldon Nodelman pointed out in his study of Roman por- traiture, such “realistic” portraits assemble “a set of conventions dictated by ideological motives . . . [and formed] into an interpretative ideogram.”28 It is From Portraiture to Pictures of People /21 through the consumption of such images—and Rockwell’s work has long been a staple of our cultural diet—that ideology is internalized. Neel’s choice of those very elements of society that were most resistant to the pressures of con- formity thus takes on increased importance. Obviously, in her anti-establishment, noncommissioned portraiture, Neel was not limited by governmental requirements but was free to experiment with the repertoire of modernist portraiture’s poses, gestures, and facial expres- sions so that the range of cues to character could encompass both the varied terrain of individual types and the different levels of our social hierarchy. None- theless, the gulf between professional and artistic portraiture is not as wide as painters wished it to be. Each had to learn conventions for representing char- acter, and this acquired knowledge could be used either honoriƒcally or “psy- chologically.” Neel’s portraits of Helen Merrell Lynd, Virgil Thomson, and Linus Pauling, and even her own nude self-portrait, are thus at home in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery alongside their ideological oppo- site, the Nixon portrait. Those researchers who have studied facial expression and body language have argued that our physical appearance—posture, gesture, the set of one’s features—communicates powerful messages that are universally, if not always accurately, interpreted.29 When looking at a portrait painting, viewers respond re„exively to facial expression, gesture, and pose as they have been condi- tioned to do to a human presence: they marshall a fund of knowledge based on previous interpersonal interaction. Viewers’ identiƒcation of both permanent character traits and transitory emotions is habitual rather than systematic, and difƒcult to either verbalize or quantify. And if we have no knowledge of the person or situation, our interpretations of that “deeper reality” can be spectac- ularly wrong. Although numerous branches of science and social science, in- cluding anthropology, linguistics, psychoanalysis, clinical psychology, social psychology, and sociology, continue to study facial expression, gesture, and body language, no consensus has been reached concerning the meaning of the varying positions of the face or body, nor has “an invariant relation be- tween expressed behavior and internal motive”30 been discovered. Moreover, as the artist well knows, the painting is not the equivalent of direct human contact, as it lacks the factor both of motion, which permits an initial separation of permanent character traits from temporary feeling, and of depth, which provides a fuller sense of bodily proportion and the set of the features. The artist must devise, therefore, a set of conventions that will evoke a response comparable to that of human interaction, but on the delimited, two- dimensional plane of the canvas. Throughout her life’s work Neel created and modiƒed a database of sche- mata, modifying established artistic precedent as well as inventing some con- 22 / The Subjects of the Artist ventions of her own. Common to all of her subjects is their awareness of being observed. It is not easy to be scrutinized for hours at a time, and so each sitter has to set his or her visage in neutral and to relax the body sufƒciently to let the mind wander, to leave Neel’s apartment for the world of private thought. Sit- ters may be more or less open or guarded, more or less interested or bored, more or less obliging or resistant, but their pose is ƒrst and foremost the result of their relationship to the task at hand and to Neel. Yet, no matter how they may choose to position their body or set their face, the reading of that pose is Neel’s: she determines how much or how litle of the body to present and from what angle. What we see is Neel’s point of view, so that, while if we were to meet the sitters we might well recognize them, they are likely to create a quite different impression in our minds. While the sitter’s task is to pose—and by sit- ting to yield one’s carefully crafted façade up to someone else, Neel’s task is to provide strong enough cues to character to convince us of her interpretation of this person as an accurate representative of the time. Because the meaning of a given pose resides not in the individual details but in the relationship of each detail to the other, proportion plays a central role in Neel’s portraiture, providing the core element around which the mean- ings of the other elements are built. Neel’s backgrounds are never more than schematically rendered; she is not concerned with the physical setting but with the manner in which the ƒgure occupies pictorial space. The relation- ship between the proportions of the ƒgure and the proportions of the canvas form the fundamental proposition, the thesis that will be further argued in fa- cial expression and gesture. These proportions of body to frame create a domi- nant paradigm, which the viewer can interpret metaphorically. The body is legible, but not until the dominant metaphor has been established will physi- cal detail gain signiƒcance. The successful portrait does not so much look like the sitter (in the sense of replicating the features precisely) as it looks like an object that serves as a metaphor for that person’s character. The literature on metaphor suggests that it is not simply a ƒgure of speech but is central to all thought processes. In Metaphors We Live By (1980), linguis- tic philosophers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that the metaphors we use to discuss concepts do not simply elaborate but actually construct the meaning of those concepts.31 In orientational metaphors, our bodies’ physical orientation to the environment organizes a system of abstract concepts around spatial ones. In ontological metaphors, concepts are structured in terms of phys- ical entities.32 Lakoff and Johnson claim that “we typically conceptualize the nonphysical in terms of the physical—that is, we conceptualize the less clearly differentiated in terms of the more clearly differentiated.”33 I would argue that metaphorical thinking structures both speech and visual art, and that orienta- tional and ontological metaphors intersect to create meaning in Neel’s portaits. From Portraiture to Pictures of People /23

As in personal interactions, when one views a portrait one attends ƒrst to the face, then to hand gestures, and then to body language. The artist, however, be- gins with the stretched canvas, and its proportions as well as the relationship of the ƒgure to the framing edge create the initial metaphor from which others are elaborated. Neel confessed to Hills: “You know what I enjoy almost the most of anything? Dividing up the canvas. When I was in high school I was very good at mathematics...”34 The fundamental pictorial metaphor, then, is an orien- tational one: the vertical or horizontal orientation of the rectangular plane is a metaphorical body against which the represented body is measured. What are the proportions of the canvas and what is the relation of the ƒgure to the fram- ing edges? Neel’s “deductive structure,” the relationship of ƒgure to frame, provides preliminary characteristics of expansion, constriction, harmony, and tension from which to deduce metaphors for the depicted personality. Having established the proportional relationship of ƒgure to canvas, Neel can be very free with anatomy, and expand, truncate, or torque the body as her purposes require. For instance, the 1965 portraits of Sol Alkaitis (ƒg. 9) and Fuller Brush Man (ƒg. 10) are vertical rectangles of equal size, 40" x 27". How- ever, their physical proportions in relation to those of the canvas are com- pletely different. Sol is an elongated rectangle, so tall that his head presses again the canvas’s upper edge. Sol is “up,” and he is going to stay that way be- cause the diagonal of the table top pins him there. The erect body and head signal alertness, but the secondary diagonal framing edge, cutting off the legs and feet (potential motion), signal rigidity and entrapment. The metaphor “alert” must link to “cornered”: Sol may affect a debonair pose, but he is also pressured. In contrast, Fuller Brush Man, lacking Sol’s shaftlike torso and long neck, is a symphony in squares: square hands, suit, shoulders, even the sam- ples in his pocket. He is guilelessly stolid, and the metaphor is not one of en- trapment but of stasis: going nowhere. Each ƒgure’s proportions, then, form the metaphor for character from which facial expression and gesture will be interpreted. Once the dominant character trait is established, Neel can elaborate on an individual personality through the use of ontological metaphor. In speech, ontological metaphors are frequently personiƒcations: concepts identiƒed as persons. In images ontological metaphors work in reverse: people are identi- ƒed as concepts, or as traits associated with animals or objects. Because Neel is a draftsman and creates a painted outline drawing before beginning to paint „esh and fabric, she limns physical features with surgical precision. Sol’s long neck, small head, and beaklike nose resemble an ostrich’s, whereas Fuller Brush’s crouched pose and begging paws resemble a dog’s.35 The use of animals as ontological metaphors for human characteristics is a fundamental device of caricature as well as an integral part of colloquial 24 / The Subjects of the Artist speech. The ostrich and dog metaphors in the previous portraits expand but do not encompass possible interpretations, but on occasion Neel’s use of the ani- mal is so unexpected that we literally see the meaning form in our minds. Her portrait of Ginny (1969, ƒg. 11), for example, looks like the very personiƒca- tion of the late 1960s with her miniskirt and long straight hair, but these gener- alizations play against her peculiar pose and facial expression, which despite her hip, offhand sexiness, resemble something nonhuman . . . The splayed, sinewy legs, the bulging eyes—it’s a frog! Once the frog metaphor springs to mind, the sitter’s posture becomes legible: the hair and shirt begin to „ow like water, and her „exed toes, balanced on the painting’s bottom edge, suggest that her tensed body is poised to hop off the stool. The ontological metaphor here is based not on animal characteristics (Fuller Brush’s doggishness), but on animal actions: in this instance that of leaping. To the thick-legged Neel, she must have looked like an entirely new species, evolved from the decade’s environmental conditions. Thus, Ginny becomes the representative of a gen- eration of liberated women in a period of rapid change: she a decade’s —and an era’s—divide in a single leap. Ontological metaphors involving inanimate objects can be equally vivid. At ƒrst, the portrait of her son in Richard in the Era of the Corporation (1979, ƒg. 12) creates a commanding diamond shape within the rectangle, but this is “offset” by his re„ection in the mirror, itself an unstable rhomboid. The sense of instability is increased by the tension between his upper and lower body, which face in different directions. The orientational structure is con„icted and unstable. Here the ontological metaphor permits further elaboration: the white tub chair in which he sits is a rigid, cold block, an icy sepulchre that is repeated in the white frame of the mirror. Within this frigid environment, Neel uses her nonƒnito to chilling effect: the top of Richard’s head—his brain—is vacant. Whereas Ginny is „uid, Richard is frozen in a bucket of ice, crystallized in an awkward, uncomfortable position. Color works to symboli- cally reinforce the reading: the severe black and white coloration is offset by Richard’s pallid face. The question of whether or not in reality Richard Neel was unhappy with his choice of career is irrelevant to the interpretation of the portrait; it is quite evident that the depicted Richard is not comfortable in his (physical) position. Neel has used the sitter she had at hand, not so much to provide a commentary on his personal situation, but to create the personiƒca- tion of an era. “[M]y things of the 1960s are different from the 1970s, and only at the end when I did Richard, did I know what the 1970s were about. The 1970s was when corporations took over.”36 In using portraiture to map the social terrain, Neel revitalized the tradition of portraiture established by Edgar Degas. Returning, if you will, to Henri’s “point of origin,” she conceived of her sitters as an amalgam, the “individual- From Portraiture to Pictures of People /25 era.” In creating the portrait of both the private and public person, Degas had to invent a vocabulary that was oblique rather than direct, suggestive of a realm of subjective thoughts and feelings released when a subject was distracted. In- stead of formal poses, head and body erect, Degas created signs for inadver- tence, so that the viewer might experience the feeling of catching the sitter un- aware. The positions the body assumed when not conscious of posing would reveal those characteristics that the more self-conscious sitter would take pains to hide. The new subject, the unwary sitter, emerged from Degas’s devices of unbalanced or clumsy posture, tentative hand gestures, or averted eyes. By de„ating the dignity of the formal portrait, Degas created visual evidence for the realms of mind and feeling. Neel’s psychological realism is similarly based on a reading of the uncon- sciously composed body and face as comprising a fund of cues to character: “Before painting, when I talk to the person, they unconsciously assume their most characteristic pose, which in a way involves all their character and social standing—what the world has done to them and their retaliation. And then I compose something around that.”37 From Degas, Neel would have learned that personality is a matter of façade, that plane where the exterior, social per- son and the interior, private person meet, and whose surface indicates both the beliefs of a given era (“the world”) and the individual’s response to it (“their retaliation”). Degas’ probing of interpersonal relationships may have provided a particu- larly important precedent for Neel. Her portrait of Benny and Mary Ellen An- drews (1972, ƒg. 13), for instance, appears to be a direct quotation of Degas’s portrait of his sister Therese and her husband, Edmondo and Therese Morbilli (c. 1865, ƒg. 14), which she would have seen ƒrsthand at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts when her son studied medicine at Tufts from 1965 to 1970. In the Degas, Morbilli’s body, seated astride his chair, with elbow thrust out, forms a vigorous cubic shape next to which his wife’s frontal, „attened silhouette seems to merge with the background. Placed high on the canvas, the Duke’s head conveys dominance, whereas Therese’s hands, the one on her husband’s shoulder and the other over her mouth, convey insecurity and dependence. The latter is a familiar example of Degas’s ability to translate inadvertent ges- ture into telling pose. Neel’s portrait uses a similar set of contrasting poses. The black writer and artist leans back in the chair, his leg propped up on its arm in a blasé, almost exaggeratedly casual gesture also found in Degas portraits. From this vantage point he scrutinizes the viewer with supercilious indifference and restrained aggressiveness. As with Morbilli, the expansiveness of Andrews’s pose con- stricts his wife to a narrow portion of the canvas. Huddled there, knees pressed together, hand resting tentatively on her cheek, eyes widened, the photogra- 26 / The Subjects of the Artist pher-wife’s inferior position vis-à-vis her prominent, activist husband is em- phatically stated. Her red bowler hat and pigtails infantilize her, accentuating her blank facial expression, and setting up contrasts of naiveté vs. sophistica- tion. In presenting the Morbilli’s relationship, Degas created a physical con- nection between them to suggest an emotional and matrimonial bond, how- ever tentative. Neel, on the other hand, separates and isolates the Andrewses by changing the normally blue stripes of the chair to the grey of Benny’s hair, shirt, and socks, so that, in her blue pants, Mary Ellen is isolated both composi- tionally and coloristically. Even their shoes “walk” to opposite edges of the canvas: a couple uncoupled. The contrasts of conƒdence and insecurity expressed in the portraits are emphatically gendered, and studies of body language conƒrm the propositions advanced in both of these portraits. Nancy M. Henley’s Body Politics: Power, Sex and Non-Verbal Communication (1977) observes that “most of our non- verbal behavior, far from being ‘natural’ has probably been developed and modiƒed to embody and display sex and class differences.”38 She argues that in our culture “ is gauged by how little space they [women] take up, while men’s masculinity is judged by their expansiveness.”39 Henley quotes an earlier study, Nierenberg and Calero’s How to Read a Person Like a Book (1971), which conƒrms that an expansive gesture such as “sitting with one’s leg over the arm of the chair . . . is said to indicate authority.”40 There is no question in either the Neel or the Degas about who is on top. The anthropologist Gregory Bateson has argued that our iconic language functions differently from our verbal language, conveying matters of relation- ship between self and others.41 But how does the face, that culminating point of the portrait, carry its meaning? How do we know that Benny Andrews re- gards us with a mixture of supercilious indifference and restrained aggressive- ness? Unfortunately, it is here, where the literature on the relationship between facial expression, gesture, and human emotion should be most useful, that it is often most disappointing. In the majority of her portraits, Neel emphasized the importance of the face as a carrier of relationships by exaggerating its size: “the head contains most of the senses. You feel all over, but you hear, see, smell and taste with the head. You also think with the head. It’s the center of the universe, really . . . I don’t put any more emphasis than I think should be there.”42 The face occupies the same proportional importance in her portraits as it does in human communication. For the same reason, the exaggeration of the size of the head is a standard device of caricature. In his well-known chap- ter in Art and Illusion, “The Experiment in Caricature,” Ernst Gombrich ac- knowledged the role that caricature has played in twentieth-century portrai- ture’s search for the “essence” of a sitter’s personality. Without the legacy of From Portraiture to Pictures of People /27 the most brilliant caricaturist of all time, Honoré Daumier, he argued, carica- ture would not have been separated from humor, and Edvard Munch would “never have evolved his intensely tragic, distorted physiognomies, nor could the Belgian Ensor . . . have created his idiom of terrifying masks which so ex- cited the German expressionists.”43 It is to the tradition of caricature that Neel turns when recording physiog- nomy and hand gesture. In Bessie Boris (1940, ƒg. 15), the painter’s egg-shaped head is wedged at a precarious angle between the twin buttresses of her coat’s lapels; from its sleeves spring her prominent hands, whose extended ƒngers are making opposing “points.” The unfocused eyes and half open mouth, “on the other hand,” suggest that she has momentarily forgotten what she had to say. Just how the wide, glassy eyes, furrowed brow, heavy caplike hair and tilted head can suggest someone eager to engage in conversation but unable to ex- press herself is itself difƒcult to articulate, but clearly Neel does not use carica- ture as a reductive tool to isolate one aspect of a personality but rather to create a montage of features and gestures. The drawing is simpliƒed and reduced, but the effect is anything but one-dimensional: she condenses in a single line both the likeness and the exaggeration needed to convey character, creating thereby the indelible impression of a (hesitantly) “speaking likeness.” Like the European expressionists she so admired, Neel shifted caricature from the realm of comedy to that of tragedy. In her moving depiction of old age and death, Last Sickness (1953, ƒg. 16), we do not need Enkman and Frei- sen’s physiognomy studies to tell us that, because the inner ends of her eye- brows are raised and the corners of mouth are turned down, she is sad.44 Chil- dren learn to read and to deliberately assume this expression by the age of two. What is important is that Neel has used caricature’s devices of isolation and ex- aggeration to signal the intense emotions of fear and regret that dominate the last months of the woman’s life. Her plaid bathrobe, in „esh-colored reds and pinks, patterns her sagging body into a falling house of cards; her limp, bone- less hands signal helplessness and lack of resistance. Again, we cannot infer from the image that Neel’s mother was in fact a bitter, fearful woman; rather, she serves, like the symbolic lemons above her, as a double omen of the bitter- ness of both living and dying. In Interaction Ritual, sociologist Erving Goffman argues that face is a social construct, something we assume to signal the way we wish to be treated and the way we intend to treat others. This public face is the mask, that which in Ro- land Barthes’s words makes a face into “the product of a society and of its his- tory.”45 For Barthes, whatever is uniquely individual—the subjective, the per- sonal, the “private life”—“is nothing but that zone of space, of time, where I am not an image...”46 Neel’s task was to create the conventions by which that 28 / The Subjects of the Artist zone could be convincingly imaged. When the emotions to be represented are extreme, she could draw upon those masks familiar from daily experience and culturally reinforced in caricature, theater, ƒlm, and expressionist art. The premises of Neel’s realist-expressionism were ƒrmly rejected by the next generation of ƒgurative artists, who returned to that most enduring of American genres, the portrait. Neel achieves the illusion of a sitter’s presence; as viewers, our empathy is substituted for hers as the sitter’s revealed personal- ity triggers associations with our own emotional experiences and historical memory. The men who revived portraiture in the 1960s—, Chuck Close, Alex Katz, and Andy Warhol—discarded the fundamental tenet of empathy while maintaining the speciƒcs of the era’s dress, pose, and ges- ture. For instance, Pearlstein had decided by the time of the “New Images of Man” exhibition at the in 1959 that expressionism was just “a cheap way of getting a reaction.”47 All four artists use depersonaliz- ing conventions—clinical lighting, mechanical copying, or elimination of de- tail—to insist on tension between the sitter’s psychological absence and his or her physical presence. In comparison Neel’s approach remains retardataire. But if Neel can be considered the last great exemplar of a tradition, by the end of the 1970s, with the emergence of identity politics, the nihilism of a Pearl- stein or Warhol would symbolize to a less established group of artists a denial of a selfhood that was just beginning to be articulated. For feminists and mi- nority artists, Neel’s precedent became increasingly important. 3 Starting Out from Home, 1927–1932

Neel came of age in the 1920s, a decade when women were granted the right to vote and the image of the New Woman was born, who, in her short skirts and bobbed hair, could imagine enjoying professional and recreational activi- ties previously reserved for men. However illusory the image of the New Woman’s freedom may have been in social reality, nonetheless, the number of women writers and visual artists whose work was granted a public forum greatly increased. These artists considered themselves modernists, and yet were aware that the modernist movement was gendered masculine and that the term feminine was a derogatory one. In their novels and essays, women writers such as Virginia Woolf and Rebecca West, whom Neel mentioned with admiration, addressed this problem directly, often using satire to de„ate the pretensions of male genius. Comparing modernist literature unfavorably with classical literature in A Room of One’s Own, Woolf argued that despite the “freedom of mind” and “liberty of person” found in the writings of the con- temporary novelist, “Mr. A.,” a “straight, dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter ‘I’ fell across every page . . .” Commenting on the boredom in- duced by the protagonist’s repetitious and egotistic display of sexual prowess, Woolf concludes that “He does it in protest. He is protesting against the equal- ity of the other sex by asserting his own superiority . . . virility has now become

29 30 / The Subjects of the Artist self-conscious . . .—men, that is to say, are writing with only the male side of their brains.”1 Women artists of Neel’s generation, including Woolf, partici- pated in various modernist movements and learned from the work of their male counterparts, but frequently their work included an implied critique of the themes of “virility and domination” that from their point of view rendered so many canonical modernist works simplistic and one-sided. Neel’s early work, created between 1927 and 1933 during a period of re- peated personal trauma, is important for establishing the themes she would pursue for the rest of her career. In addition, it shows her mastering the stylistic vocabularies of the European and American modernist traditions in order to situate her subject matter within the realm of her family life. Neel’s contribu- tion to American art in the late 1920s resides in her courageous attention to subject matter—dysfunctional families, the death of a child, insanity—that had counterparts in European painting but that had rarely been addressed in modernist painting in the United States. Because there was little precedent for Neel’s subject matter within recent American modernist painting, Neel may have drawn support for her venture from the fertile literary bohemia of New York’s Greenwich Village, just as Munch had done with the Christiania Bohême in Oslo. The years after have been described as a literary Renaissance, and by moving to New York in 1928 and later settling in the Village in 1931, Neel placed herself at the center of a literary milieu characterized by “the directness of their attack on the social order.”2 Among those fundamental social institutions, patriar- chal family life and its constructions of gender were a primary target for writers as diverse as Eugene O’Neill, Djuna Barnes, Susan Glaspell, and Sherwood Anderson. Neel’s portrait gallery, and the seeds of her future political commitments, began at home, or rather, with her return to her parents’ home after living for a year and a half in . Although Neel had enjoyed artistic success in the newly formed Cuban avant-garde, where she gained a perspective on North American culture she would carry throughout her career, she spoke later of her resentment at the restricted role of women in Latino culture as well as of her discomfort at the huge disparity between rich and poor.3 In May of 1927, she returned home to Colwyn with her infant daughter, Santillana. By the fall, Carlos joined her and they moved to West 81st Street in New York. Santillana died of diphtheria in December 1927; their Isabetta was born in November 1928, after which the family moved to Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. On May 1, 1930, Carlos left for Havana with Isabetta, and Neel returned home to Colwyn. In August 1930, she suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospital- ized in the Othopedic Hospital in Philadelphia. In late December, Carlos re- turned for a brief visit, and Neel was released from the hospital, only to attempt Starting Out from Home /31 suicide at home in January. Neel was then placed in the suicidal ward of the Philadelphia General Hospital; in April she was transferred to Dr. Ludlum’s sanitorium outside Philadelphia. She was released in September 1931, a year after her initial breakdown.4 In the work from this period, Neel observed her painful personal life with a combination of bitter satire and profound grief. Few modernist confessionals are so lacking in self-pity or self-indulgence. In this series of autobiographical paintings and , culminating in the oil Symbols (Doll and Apple) (1932), Neel led that most sacred of Ameri- can cows—the family—to the slaughter. For purposes of discussion, these works will be paired thematically: the birth of a child (The Family, 1927; Well- Baby Clinic, 1928), the death of a child, (Requiem, 1928; Futility of Effort, 1930), and the drastic consequences of the emotional con„icts she endured during this period (Suicidal Ward, Philadelphia General Hospital, 1931; Sym- bols [Doll and Apple], 1932). Widely divergent stylistically, the early water- colors and oils reveal an artist experimenting with the means to visualize her subjects during a period when German Expressionism was only just being in- troduced in the United States. The Family (1927, ƒg. 17) represents a clean break from the artistic tradi- tion in which she had been trained, and suggests that for the moment she ex- perimented with the more modernist style of the Stieglitz circle artists. Gone is the legacy of Henri, and the painterly treatment of the anonymous underclass. In its place is the delicate, simpliƒed pencil and wash technique that early modernist American painters such as Charles Demuth and Abraham Wal- kowitz borrowed from Rodin’s late watercolors and Matisse’s drawings. More importantly, Neel has shifted from generic subjects in ethnic guise—the Afro- Cuban populace—to the speciƒc subject of her family relationships, which she deƒnes through contrast. The pairing of the parents—George and Alice— with their namesake children establishes a present/future narrative. Divided into cartoon strip registers, the „oor levels relegate the men to the top and bot- tom—the intellectual brother in the rareƒed realm of the attic, and, in the cel- lar, the bent, colorless drone of a dad mounting the stairs—Sisyphus with a bucket of coal. Occupying center stage, the placid Alice holding an alert in- fant is oblivious to her mother crouching under the dining room table and scrubbing the „oor with the concentrated animal energy of the hysteric. The family hierarchy has been neatly reversed, with the “provider” a browbeaten slave instead of king of the castle, and the mother, the family’s emotional cen- ter, as cornered and helpless as a frightened animal. The house may provide physical shelter, but certainly no emotional support. At present, brother and sister play their expected roles: Alice as contented mother and George as the lofty intellectual, but the future is under the feet of both siblings. Pointedly ab- sent from this scene is a key ƒgure: Neel’s husband. The Family is discon- 32 / The Subjects of the Artist nected, dismembered. As she depicts herself, Neel, ironically, is blind to the reality around her: the visual evidence that neither the father nor the mother fulƒll the roles expected of them. This biting commentary on the myth of the supportive family unit was cur- rent in literature but exceptional in American painting. Accordingly, in 1966 in her review of the exhibition of Neel’s early watercolors at the Graham Gallery, the critic Charlotte Willard described her portraits as “a kind of Winesburg, in paint.”5 The description is apt, for Sherwood Anderson’s 1919 episodic novel of small-town American life has signiƒcant structural and thematic parallels with Neel’s autobiographical series. The occupants of the “New Willard House,” father, mother, and son George, an aspiring writer, are as isolated from each other as the members of Neel’s The Family, and in Neel’s description of her parochial hometown (see chapter 1), one hears echoes of Anderson’s vivid, condensed prose. Each chapter of Winesburg, Ohio is pre- sented as a portrait of an individual citizen who embodies the disjunction be- tween the truth of established ideologies and the falsehood of the roles it forced its subjects to play—“what the world has done to them and their retalia- tion,” as Neel described her sitters. Moreover, Anderson’s literary portraits de- pend for their vitality on vivid descriptions of physiognomy, body language, and dress that parallel Neel’s scrutiny of her sitters. For instance, his character- ization of Wing Biddlebaum’s hands—“The slender expressive ƒngers, forever active, forever striving to conceal themselves in his pockets or behind his back, came forth and became the piston rods of his machinery of expression”6—is equally applicable to Neel’s portrait of the painter Bessie Boris (ƒg. 15). In ad- dition, his sympathy for the tragic role life had imposed on Wing because of his homosexuality also parallels Neel’s stance. Both painter and writer base their portraiture on ƒrst-hand experience, but simplify and distort the sitters to create an assemblage of “grotesques,” as Anderson called them, which they be- lieved would present a composite picture of interpersonal relationships at a speciƒc place and time. Neel’s visual narrative, like Anderson’s literary one, was thus deliberately expressive, but based on observations of family life that were conƒrmed by the contemporary sociological study by Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd, Mid- dletown: A Study in American Culture (1925). As their pioneering research demonstrated, the American family was not the stable force popular culture had made it out to be. For instance, citing statistics on the rise of divorce, they commented:

The way in which these antecedents of divorce are imbedded in the whole com- plex of Middletown’s culture touching the adjustments between a man and his wife is suggested by comparing what Middletown regards as minimum essentials of mar- Starting Out from Home /33

riage with conditions actually existing in many Middletown homes . . . The husband must “support” his family, but, as pointed out above, recurrent “hard times” make support of their families periodically impossible for many workers; the wife must make a home for her husband and care for her children, but she is increasingly spending her days in gainful employment outside the home; husband and wife must cleave to each other in the sex relation, but fear of pregnancy frequently makes this relation a dread for one or both of them; affection between the two is regarded as the basis of marriage, but sometimes in the day-after-day struggles this seems to be a memory rather than a present help.7

Despite the growing acknowledgment of marital unhappiness and failure, neither changing standards of living nor the permissiveness of the roaring twenties did much to weaken the American belief in the mythology of the fam- ily. Nor, according to historian James Patterson, did the 1930s shake the foun- dations of the myth: “The depression years, far from promoting sexual libera- tion or economic feminism, sustained traditional beliefs in the father as head of the household.”8 Platitudes such as “a man’s home is his castle” and “a woman’s place is in the home” were reinforced by the rapidly growing adver- tising industry, which convinced the public that the family ideal could be reached through the purchase of the appropriate consumer products.9 Even if, as the Lynds argued, a happy, supportive family life was never more than a myth sustained through advertising, the ideal has nonetheless been so in- grained in the American mind that negative depictions have been virtually ab- sent in painting. Rejecting the myth of the family as a haven from the pressures of the public realm, Neel devised an artistic counterpart to sociology’s empiri- cal methodology, with its reliance on transcribed interviews and analysis of data gathered ƒrst-hand.10 Her 1969 portrait of Helen Lynd can thus be con- sidered a tribute from one “pioneer” to another (ƒg. 18). If the subject matter of The Family is unusual in American painting, its for- mat, where the „oors of the house are like the various registers of a comic strip, is equally exceptional. Of course, the use of the rectangular canvas to create the appearance of looking into a single room is a standard one in realist paint- ing, particularly in family portraiture. However, the convention of the cut- away house is found only in low art sources: popular lithographs, children’s books, satirical cartoons, and comic strips such as Winsor McCay’s “Little Nemo in Slumberland.” The Family is the ƒrst instance of Neel’s use of popu- lar art in general, and the tradition of satirical caricature in particular, not sim- ply as a device to capture personality, but to signal that the work is a critique.11 The pedigree of the trope of the cut-away house as a metaphor in artistic satire for both family and society can be traced as far back as the nineteenth century, however. An explicit connection between the „oors of a house and so- 34 / The Subjects of the Artist cial status was established by 1845 in prints such as Cross-Section of a Parisian House: 1 January 1845: Five Stages of the Parisian World, from Paris Comique (ƒg. 19), where one ascends from the carefree concierges on the bottom „oor through the bored bourgeois couple on the première étage, to the destitute family and bohemian artist in the garret rooms. By the mid-nineteenth cen- tury, then, class stereotypes that were central to satirical cartoons were in place: bourgeois family stability was equated with boredom, while the work- ing-class caretakers on the bottom „oor were seen as vital, and the neglected artist, of course, was forced to starve. On various “levels,” this stereotype in- forms much of modernist painting, including American modernism. If the family could not support the mother as artist, the artworld was equally incapable of accommodating the artist who is a mother. In The Intellectual (1929, ƒg. 20), Neel addressed this con„ict with the same satirical wit she had demonstrated in The Family. When Alice and Carlos moved to New York in 1927, she found a job in a Greenwich Village bookstore run by Fanya Foss (ƒg. 21), a woman with literary aspirations. In the watercolor, Foss, at right, af- fects a mannered, Pre-Raphaelite pose in an overstuffed chair. At the far left, in contrast to Foss’s contemplative calm, sits a three-armed and three-legged Al- ice trying desperately to participate in the discussion while struggling to keep an energetic toddler in check. Rarely has the hopelessness of maintaining any kind of intellectual life while single-handedly caring for an infant been so vividly imaged. Neel effects her revenge—a kind of female deballing—on her friend for the creative leisure time she enjoys by opening her dress to reveal, not voluptuous breasts, but sagging teats. Her real revenge, of course, is the watercolor itself, which serves as a material rebuke to Foss’s arid dreaming. The style of both The Family and The Intellectual is closely related to Charles Demuth’s watercolor illustrations for novels and short stories (1915 and 1919), which may well have served as a source. A. E. Gallatin’s monograph on De- muth, the ƒrst book on the artist, had been published in 1927, and Neel may well have seen some of these “scandalous” watercolors at the Daniel gallery in New York. The thin, delicate pencil line, the exaggeration of anatomy that leaves the head large and the hands and feet minuscule, and the wet, heavy wash all suggest the in„uence of the early Demuth. The Intellectual recalls in particular his illustrations for Zola’s Nana (1915–1916, ƒg. 22). Even if De- muth was not a major impetus for abandoning the painterly stroke of the Ash- can School for the taut line of early modernism, the shift from a painterly real- ist to a linear modernist style was crucial for her art, based as it was on a precise and subtle gift for caricature. Demuth’s art may have been important as well because of his willingness to base this phase of his art in his personal preoccupations. In Demuth’s case, the theme of sexual corruption that pervades his choice of literature—as varied as Starting Out from Home /35

Emile Zola and Frank Wedekind on the one hand and Henry James and Wal- ter Pater on the other, gave him permission to obliquely address, in artistic terms, his homosexuality. If perhaps these very private works also gave Neel the courage to address her personal life, they may have been important as well as a precedent for gay subject matter, one of Neel’s central concerns. Demuth had all but abandoned his intimate ƒgurative work when Neel began hers, but the parallels between them reveal the shared interests of these two members of the American bohemian avant-garde. Society’s professed concern for the health and welfare of its children is paro- died in Well-Baby Clinic (1928–1929, ƒg. 23), where Neel brought her second child, Isabetta, for free neonatal care.12 Continuing to employ caustic satire, Neel erased the factitious boundary between public and private life, as she would continue to do subsequently. Crudely painted in oil, the revolting dis- play of “sloppy humanity, all ragged at the edges,” as Neel put it, depicts the in- fants as „ayed monkeys and the mothers as demented hysterics. Only the bi- zarrely hatted nurse/madonna at the center of the composition has her infant swaddled and under control; at left a doctor, proffering tranquilizer pills as if they were glasses of champagne, attempts to pacify the screeching mother. There is no natural relation between mother and child here, nor is there a benevolent support system. The impersonal institution cannot accommodate, but only sedate, the human difƒculties it ostensibly has the expertise to allevi- ate. The white tables could belong to either a clinic, a hospital, or a morgue, and the red, writhing bodies pass across them as if on an assembly line at a meat-packing plant. Isolated at the edge of the painting, Neel’s self-portrait seems as oblivious to her surroundings as she was in The Family, perhaps once again indicating her inability to escape from the con„icts of her prescribed maternal role except through denial. The professionals manage and control infant care with a detachment that bears no relation to the psychological space inhabited by the patients, who in this clinic are not so much the babies as the unpaid, untrained mothers, who are assumed to have some sort of natural expertise. Stylistically, Neel has moved beyond the freely drawn caricature of The Family to an extreme painterly expressionism parallelling the most fevered vi- sions of a James Ensor or an Emil Nolde. The crude paint application and hot coloration are conventional signs in expressionist painting for lack of rational control and for the release of subjective emotion. However, Neel could have had only limited knowledge of German expressionist art in 1928. As Susan Noyes Platt has documented, there were few major exhibitions of German art in the United States in the 1920s. The most important was “A Collection of Modern German Art,” which W. R. Valentiner organized for the Anderson Galleries in October 1923.13 It is unlikely that Neel traveled from Philadel- 36 / The Subjects of the Artist phia to New York to see that exhibition, and she would also have missed by a month Max Beckmann’s ƒrst New York exhibition at J. B. Neumann’s New Art Circle gallery in April 1927. However, an important article on German ex- pressionist art by Rom Landau in the July 1928 issue of The Arts argued that the emotional expressionism of Kirschner and Nolde had been replaced re- cently by “The New Reality” of George Grosz and Otto Dix: “once Expres- sionism lost its power, the younger generation began to long for the external realities of life. They tried to be objective instead of subjective.”14 In Well- Baby Clinic, Neel combined what Landau termed the “inharmonious vol- canic eruptions” of the ƒrst phase of expressionism with the searing social commentary of the second. In the late 1920s, Neel’s watercolors display a con- trast of taut line and broad areas of wash to create an ominous mood, similar to those George Grosz created after his arrival in New York in 1932. A few years later, after the 1931 exhibition “Modern German Painting and Sculpture” at the Museum of Modern Art, Neel’s portrait paintings reveal a cold, clinical eye akin to that of Dix, whose portrait of Dr. Mayer-Hermann also entered the permanent collection that year. Whatever her familiarity with German art, Neel’s independently evolved expressionism is again signiƒcant for its gendered content. Although the hospi- tal setting, locus of both illness and insanity, is used as a metaphor in German art for social ills, Grosz, Beckmann, and Nolde tended to load their depictions with religious or moral symbolism. Neel, on the other hand, avoids both mysti- cism and moralism in her critical evaluation of both the maternal instinct and the scientiƒc competence of the medical establishment. Mothers who cannot afford private pediatricians for their children take them to publicly funded hospital clinics for care. Social corruption is less the subject here than the in- competent care offered to the indigent. If the institution of public infant care was scathingly mocked in Well-Baby Clinic, the emotional dimension of family tragedy is addressed in two works executed several years apart. Requiem (1928, ƒg. 24) a watercolor painted after her ƒrst daughter, Santillana, died of diphtheria in December 1927, depicts a heaving ocean of grief next to which lie two prone skeletal ƒgures, one robed in white, the other in black, screaming in pain while two embryo/ƒsh look dis- passionately on. Remarkably similar in means to Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893, ƒg. 25), the pain expressed here is very different from Munch’s para- digm of personal alienation. Neel’s trauma is not isolated but shared. Mourn- ing has locked together the two ƒgures (Alice and Carlos), so that a death in the family becomes the death of the family.15 The sparest and most abstract of the modernist paintings from her ƒrst ma- ture period is in addition her ƒrst overtly socially concerned painting as well, initiating a transition from her early modernist to her social realist art at the on- Starting Out from Home /37 set of the Depression. Futility of Effort (1930, ƒg. 26), a metaphor for the dead- ending of her marriage with the departure of Carlos and Isabetta for Cuba on May 1 of that year, was generated by “a notice in the newspaper about how a child crawled through the end of a bed and got strangled through the bedposts. The mother was ironing in the kitchen.”16 Although the subject of the death of innocent children would be found fairly frequently in left-wing periodicals such as Art Front (the journal of the Artists Union), where this painting was re- produced in 1936, Neel’s early approach to the subject would prove excep- tional. In most social realist art the mother remains the bulwark of the family, clinging to her children no matter how desperate the circumstances. Instead, Neel limns a harsher, less sentimental story with minimal means. The doll- like, lifeless ƒgure hangs from a bedpost suspended in a neutral grey ƒeld, with the sketchy proƒle of the parent to the right, and with the black diamond- shaped aperture of the window on the left marking the point of life’s departure into death. The painting is as distilled as a memory, an image of a moment of negligence branded permanently onto the mind. The title supplied by Art Front—Poverty—underscores the cause of the “accident,” which was depriva- tion as much as individual negligence, but Neel’s own title, Futility of Effort, conveys the hopelessness of lives lived in the grey, dimensionless, uncharted region of indigence. The painted metal bed frame reprises the chair seats in Well-Baby Clinic, thus identifying poverty as an institution into which society conƒnes certain of its members, sentencing them to ongoing family tragedy. Like the body of the child, Neel’s own psychic health had been broken in 1930, and she became a resident of the medical institutions she so effectively parodied in Well-Baby Clinic. Like the earlier oil, the pencil drawing Suicidal Ward, Philadelphia General Hospital (1931, ƒg. 27) documents the disjunc- tion between hospital care and the cure it claims to provide. The lines of ex- amining tables are now rows of beds, equally incapable of soothing their ago- nized occupants. The affable doctor, a wooden, insensitive ƒgurehead in con- trol of himself if nothing else, occupies the center of the medical arena. Drawn from her memory after release from the Philadelphia General Hospi- tal, Suicidal Ward is a document of medical sadism presaging documentary ƒlms such as Richard Leacock’s Titicut Follies. Within modernism, insanity has been generalized into the trope of the suf- fering artist, whose genius necessarily entails antisocial behavior. Neel makes no such romantic connection between creativity and insanity. Rather her in- terest here is in its institutionalization: the restraint and ineffectual treatment of those diagnosed as insane. The authority in control, Dr. Breitenbach, poses as the competent ofƒcial he imagines himself to be. According to Michel Fou- cault’s Madness and Civilization, the physician became “the essential ƒgure of the asylum” during the nineteenth century, converting it “into a medical space”: 38 / The Subjects of the Artist

However, and this is the essential point . . . It is not as a scientist that homo medicus has authority in the asylum, but as a wise man . . . [T]hese powers . . . took root in the madman’s minority status, in the insanity of his person, not of his mind. If the medical personage could isolate madness, it was not because he knew it, but be- cause he mastered it.17

Lacking in any genuine scientiƒc expertise, the doctor’s role is primarily super- visory or regulatory: he is the personiƒcation of paternalism. Whereas in the clinic the doctor’s authority comes from his ability to see and to say—to apply knowledge to empirical observation—in Neel’s rendering, there is no attempt to speak (to diagnose and to cure), but only to appear to be in authority. Under such nonchalant observation, the differences between depression, insanity, and illness are elided, and Neel’s carefully individualized patients suffer in si- lence, unrecognized or acknowledged by the doctor’s distant, unfocused gaze. “See, that shows you’re mentally healthy, when you smile like that,”18 was Neel’s cynical addendum to the caustic commentary her drawing had already provided. Later, she would attribute her recovery not to medical treatment but to her own self-discipline. The reality of the asylum, and the regulation of one class and sex by another explodes the modernist myth of the insane creative genius. Suicidal Ward de- picts women who are mentally or physically ill, not tormented artists. The study of hysteria, a “woman’s af„iction,” has never been considered a compo- nent of female creativity, but merely a natural inclination that served as a use- ful model for male creativity.19 Carolyn Heilbrun has argued that it was not until the generation of women writers born in the 1920s that woman’s insanity and incarceration could be expressed in autobiographical terms. The culmination of the early family depictions is not a narrative work, but rather a still-life. Neel’s ƒrst use of inanimate objects as a vehicle for mourning it carries emotional content through metaphor rather than through expres- sionist exaggeration. Painted after Alice had moved to Greenwich Village and her daughter was living in the care of Carlos’s sisters in Havana, Symbols (Doll and Apple) (1932, ƒg. 28) is an altar on which the doll/martyr of motherhood is sacriƒced. Ostensibly the proud mother in a family snapshot from 1929 (ƒg. 29), by 1932 this image had been thoroughly shattered. Neel explained the stresses that led to her decision to permit Carlos’s sisters to raise Isabetta as follows: “You see, I always had this awful dichotomy. I loved Isabetta, of course I did. But I wanted to paint. Also, a terrible rivalry sprang up between Carlos and me.”20 The devastating consequences of the social construction of motherhood in Western Christian culture are conveyed through the starkly presented object: her life laid before us on the now-familiar examining table, drenched in a Starting Out from Home /39 harsh „uorescent light. The doll, with its painted blue eyes, could be either Alice or Isabetta: that is, both Neel herself (the artist/art) and Isabetta (the child/motherhood) are being sacriƒed on this cruel piece of institutional fur- niture. The apple, normally a symbol of female fertility as well as of knowl- edge, is here obscenely related to Eve’s sin by being shoved rudely into the doll’s crotch, where it serves as a contraceptive to creativity and/or fecundity. The doll is impaled on the irreconcilable con„ict between motherhood and artistic career.21 For lack of a modest amount of ƒnancial or professional sup- port, both her sanity and her child had been lost. In all of her lectures, Neel emphasized that a woman should never give up painting: “If you decide you are going to have children and give up painting during the time you have them, you give it up forever . . . You get divorced from your art.”22 But the in- evitable cost to mother and to child of the marriage of the woman artist to art entails a sacriƒce of biblical dimensions.23 The symbols of the painting’s title—the dummylike doll, the red rubber glove, the fruit, and the harsh, raking light—are motifs found in Giorgio de Chirico’s art and suggest another modernist in„uence on Neel in the early ex- perimental work. Perhaps Neel saw the proto-surrealist’s work at the Kurt Valentine Gallery in New York in the late 1920s. Like de Chirico, Neel has used the irrational juxtaposition of inanimate objects to convey the mind’s ability to form disjunctive images around its pain as an oyster forms a pearl. Only a brief allusion here, surrealism would ƒgure prominently in Neel’s re- newed meditation on the family in 1942, when the European surrealists were in exile in New York. Symbols (Doll and Apple) is speciƒcally an image of a woman’s psychic pain, and in its iconic representation of female martyrdom bears a resem- blance to a work from the same year by Frida Kahlo, Henry Ford Hospital (ƒg. 30). (Neel was familiar with the work of Kahlo’s husband, , who had enjoyed a successful one-person exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art the previous winter, but she could not have known Kahlo’s work, which was not exhibited in New York until 1939.) The traumatic miscarriage that Kahlo suffered in Detroit in July is staged on a metal hospital bed, both artists appar- ently recognizing the ironic connection between the cold, inhuman furniture and the sacriƒcial altar. One unexpected and signiƒcant coincidence in these contemporary works is the fact that both turn to the religious rituals of folk art to speak of their respective inabilities to fulƒll their expected role as mothers. Kahlo’s painting is on tin, a deliberate reference to retablo paintings which in Mexican culture are used as offerings by those who have survived a disaster. Neel’s reference to the private devotional altars that both Carlos’s parents and his unmarried sisters kept in their homes is more oblique, but the scraped paint, suggesting peeling plaster walls, as well as the palm fronds, cross, and sun, un- 40 / The Subjects of the Artist mistakably convey the sacriƒce/conversion of her American-born daughter to Cuban culture in the name of a rigidly delimiting and dehumanizing concept of motherhood. Her child had been returned to the very society whose patriar- chal values she had „ed. Neel’s early work opens up new territory within the history of American modernism by looking at the most intimate of family experiences and connect- ing them with prevailing institutions and ideologies. Her early expressionism, an eclectic synthesis of European and American precedents from Munch and Ensor to Demuth served less as a means to directly express intense emotion than as an objectifying device, a pitiless spotlight to train on the traumatic events of her life, revealing both its tragedy and absurdity. The family, whose fragile bonds were severed by psychic and social forces, was exposed in all its weakness. The works had no audience until the 1960s, and even after they be- came known, were generally considered less important than her later work. In his aforementioned review of Hills’s 1984 biography, Alloway stated: “I see her as a late, very late starter and count the last twenty years of her art far more highly than the ƒrst forty.”24 Moreover, the late starter was considered very conventional stylistically. For instance, even though in 1982 curator and critic Robert Storr would admiringly describe Symbols (Doll and Apple) as “The sparsest of icons to private female hurt . . .,” he nonetheless concluded that her work was in no way innovative: “often the mood of the paintings is es- tablished around subjects that are in themselves . . . downright cliched . . . what commands one’s respect, in fact, is the energy with which she attacks such set pieces.”25 As feminist art historians have pointed out, bias against tra- dition is frequently synonymous with bias against art by women. Even these perceptive and supportive critics failed to adequately appreciate the innovative content of Neel’s early work. Her work thus conƒrms Lucy Lippard’s 1976 hy- pothesis that:

Within the old, “progressive,” or evolutionary context, much women’s art is “not innovative,” or “retrograde.” . . . One of the major questions facing feminist criticism has to be whether stylistic innovation is indeed the only innovation, or whether other aspects of originality have yet to be investigated . . . [P]erhaps women . . . [dif- fer] from the traditional notion of the avant-garde by opposing not styles and forms, but ideologies.26

If this be the case, the painter from a provincial town outside of Philadel- phia with a conventional art school training had been able, during a period of great personal trauma, to isolate from the broad currents of American and Eu- ropean modernism those aspects relevant to her autobiographical concerns and to create a body of work unparalleled in its deconstruction of the ideolo- Starting Out from Home /41 gies of family and motherhood. In contrast to the „ippant tone of her later lec- tures, Neel’s visual autobiography retells the narrative of the marginalization of the modernist artist from a woman’s point of view. For the artist who had children, personal identity was completely subsumed by her role as maternal caretaker; neither family nor social institutions could conceive of a woman needing anything other than her child. This fundamental misapprehension and its tragic consequences are the subject of Neel’s early work.

Part II

Neel’s Social Realist Art: 1933–1981

43

4 Art on the Left in the 1930s

La Vanguardia

Neel’s concept of the function of a socially concerned art as a critique of domi- nant culture was formulated during the year and a half (January 1926–May 1927) she spent in Havana after her marriage to the Cuban painter Carlos En- ríquez de Gomez.1 Neel arrived in Havana at a propitious moment, just in time to join the burgeoning avant-garde movement there. Among the writers she befriended were Nicolas Guillen, Marcelo Pogolotti, and Alejo Carpen- tier. The awareness on the part of these Hispanic writers of the injustices in„icted on Latin American peoples by capitalism and colonialism perma- nently shaped her political attitudes, which Neel expressed in broad terms: “Another thing, this Cuban husband had given me a Latin American mental- ity. I hated everything American. Jose Martí, the Cuban leader exiled in New York, called America, ‘the colossus of the North.’”2 The shock of the gulf be- tween rich and poor in Cuba intensiƒed her outrage. Although her portraits of Afro-Cuban street people were a continuation of the Ashcan School–inspired work that she had begun in Philadelphia, their subjects are a prelude to her Spanish Harlem portraits. According to the art historian Juan Martinez, although the visual arts were

45 46 / Neel’s Social Realist Art moribund when Neel arrived in Havana, Cuban literature and anthropology were thriving. The decade from 1923 to 1933 was also to be a dynamic period of political, educational, and cultural reform, during which the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado (1925–1933) was brought down. According to Martinez: “The most enduring contribution of the Cuban reform movement . . . was cre- ating a strong sense of nationalism or cubanidad.”3 In books published be- tween 1906 and 1913, the anthropologist Fernando Ortiz had deƒned “Lo Cubano,” that which is Cuban, as the mix of Indian, Spanish, and African cul- tures found in ajiaco, a Cuban stew. Spanish Harlem was a different sort of stew, but after 1938 Neel would set herself the task of deƒning its culture, as Ortiz had done for Cuba. Cuban modernism was similarly characterized as a mixture of European modernism on the one hand and the native Indian and African traditions, Criollismo and Afrocubanismo, on the other. Moreover, the emerging avant- garde allied itself with social and political reform. The poet and communist leader Juan Martinello called artists to the cause: “Only art [can] achieve our total liberation.”4 As in the United States, socially conscious art frequently ap- peared in cartoon form in left-wing magazines such as Social (1916–1936) and Carteles (1919–1960), edited by the caricaturist Conrado Massaguer, as well as by Carpentier, Martinello, and the essayist Jose Z. Tallet. Both magazines decried the lack of state support for the arts, and their efforts helped to pave the way for the establishment of public art education and mural projects in 1937. Throughout the decade, artists used their skills “as weapons to criticize the Zayas and Machado regimes.” Among the most widely published of these ef- forts were Enríquez’s illustrations for El Terror de Cuba, published in 1933 in both Spain and France by the Comité de Jovenes Revolucionarios Cubanos.5 Carteles and Social were the counterparts to the Masses and the Liberator in the United States, and their use of art as a weapon anticipated Neel’s sub- sequent afƒliation with American social realism, speciƒcally her Masses & Mainstream illustrations from the 1940s. The one radical journal devoted exclusively to the arts was Revista de Avance, which between 1927 and 1930 called for and deƒned the vanguard movement. Its ƒrst editorial, by Jorge Manach in the March 15, 1927, issue, was entitled “Vanguardismo: La ƒsonomia de las Epocas.” In May 1927, Re- vista de Avance sponsored the ƒrst exhibition of Cuban avant-garde art, the “Exposicion de Arte Nuevo,” which marked the beginning of a new direction, as the journal proudly proclaimed in its April 15 issue, brandishing such terms as “militant,” “new,” and “avant-garde.” As Martinez points out, the nine artists’ works were at most “mild versions of European modernist styles,” but they were radical by Cuban standards at the time. In his autobiography Of Art on the Left in the 1930s /47

Clay and Voices, Marcelo Pogolotti described the work of the exhibitors as follows:

Gattorno presented . . . typical cubist objects . . . and Victor Manuel a portrait and a rainy cityscape of Paris, more or less postimpressionist. Carlos Enriquez exhibited a young blonde en plein air, seated on some grass, who would later be his wife, Alice Neel, a painter of talent, whose stay in Havana, although brief, left good and lasting memories . . . This exhibition of art was endowed with a certain importance be- cause it brought out the ƒrst signs of disquiet and longing for renewal.6

This milestone in the history of Cuban art was also Neel’s ƒrst group exhibi- tion, and it is signiƒcant that, as the only North American in the exhibit, she was singled out by the journal to exemplify the new avant-garde. Both the April 15 and the April 30 issues contained photographic insets that juxtaposed the works of Neel and her husband, Enríquez. Whereas the ƒrst inset also in- cluded a landscape by Ramon Loy, the second contained only the works of Neel and her husband, labeled “Neel-Enríquez.” Clearly, they were consid- ered the cutting edge of the avant-garde, as the text suggests. The May 15 issue, published after the opening, contained other examples of Arte Nuevo: Anto- nio Gattorno, Luis Lopez Mendez, Marcelo Pogolotti, L. Romero Arciaga, and two nudes “De un Realismo Exagerado” by Carlos Enríquez. There were no examples of Neel’s work, perhaps because the editors wanted to emphasize the Cuban character of the exhibition, or perhaps because Neel was no longer in Havana. The very month that the Cuban artistic vanguard came into its own, Neel left the country, „eeing a strained relationship with Enríquez’s con- servative, upper-class family. Hers was only the ƒrst of many subsequent depar- tures, however. The writer Carpentier, whose depictions of Spanish imperi- alism in books such as The Harp and the Shadow so closely paralleled Neel’s own attitudes about American imperialism, left for Paris that same year. En- ríquez followed his friend there in 1930, and Gattorno, Guillen, and Pogolotti would all move to New York after 1935. Like Neel, the Cuban expatriots aligned themselves with left-wing causes after their arrival. Guillen, for in- stance, would write for Masses & Mainstream during the years Neel was pub- lishing her illustrations in the magazine. In 1969, after Pogolotti had moved to Mexico, Neel made a point of seeing him when she traveled there with Richard. On that same visit, she also met David Alfaro Siquieros for the ƒrst time, who showed her the murals he was then painting.7 The pairing of Neel and Enríquez in Revista de Avance is indicative of their shared social and artistic concerns. Their studies of Afro-Cubans was a subject found in the art of Aristides Fernandez, Antonio Gattorno, and Eduardo Abela, 48 / Neel’s Social Realist Art although the latter concentrated on the rural rather than the urban poor.8 Af- ter they separated in 1930, however, their artistic concerns diverged, and Neel’s later unblinking social realism appears completely removed from the roman- tic, mythologized Cuban landscapes that established Enríquez as one of Cuba’s most prominent modern artists. To the extent that their very different oeuvres meet, it is on the common ground of the nude body. For both artists, sexuality was a continual preoccupa- tion. Both depicted the nude with a frankness and lack of idealization that was evidence of their Philadelphia training, and both had their nudes removed from exhibitions because of indecency. Enríquez’s paintings of Alice from 1926–1927, of which two were published in Revista de Avance in 1927, are un- abashed in depicting folds of „esh and (depilated) pubic areas (ƒg. 31); none- theless, they seem modest in comparison with Neel’s nudes from 1930 on. The distance between their sensibilities is clearest in their 1934 portraits of their six-year-old daughter, Isabetta, with whom neither had had contact since she was an infant. Painted after his return from Paris to Havana, Enríquez’s Is- abetta is doll-like and stiff, with generalized features that convey innocence but little sense of individual character (ƒg. 32). On one of Isabetta’s visits to New York that year, Neel, with remarkable boldness, painted her daughter as a full-length nude (ƒg. 33). Neel’s Isabetta strides forward, arms akimbo, body like a young sapling, ƒlled with the energy of growth, as indicated by the exu- berant, luxurious hair that erupts from her head. Here the Freudian vision of childhood sexuality is translated as unself-conscious pleasure in one’s own body. Her cylindrical limbs and torso recall Gauguin’s Tahitian natives, as well as the depictions of Cuban peasants Antonio Gattorno had made in the late 1920s under the French artist’s in„uence. Planted on her “primitive” rug, Isa- betta thus becomes Neel’s interpretation of Cubanidad, a primal being who is only incidentally Neel’s daughter. Coincidentally, the previous year, John Dos Passos had created a literary portrait in The Big Money (1933), that was a double for the “Cuban” Neel. The vignette, entitled “Margo Dowling,” follows the fortunes of a beautiful young woman—“a knockout”—who marries a Cuban, moves to Havana, suf- fers under the culture’s restrictive attitudes toward women, and endures sev- eral days of painful labor in delivering a daughter who dies shortly thereafter. Margo then escapes home to New York City, telling her mother: “...it was pretty bad. His people are pretty well off and prominent and all that but it’s hard to get on to their ways. Tony’s a bum and I hate him more than anything in the world. But after all it was quite an experience . . . I wouldn’t have missed it.”9 Cuba was a source of interest to many American artists in the 1930s, from Dos Passos and Hemingway to . Dos Passos’s understanding of the clash of North and South American cultures was used to create a literary Art on the Left in the 1930s /49 trope that happened to have encapsulated Neel’s personal experience.10 Al- though the social realist movement in the United States was in„uenced pri- marily by the Mexican mural movement, the connections with the Cuban avant-garde were also signiƒcant.11

Social Realism, 1930–1940

Thus, when Neel moved to Greenwich Village in 1931, she found herself at another artistic center committed to social and political change. The Depres- sion had precipitated the emergence of social realism, which gathered mo- mentum between 1932 and 1935 and was characterized by the use of overtly political subject matter, emphasizing the plight of the destitute worker.12 Al- though the product of a speciƒc set of historical conditions during the 1930s, social realism, examined in broad terms, can also be seen as part of a consistent stream of socially concerned art that threads throughout the twentieth century. Although rarely explicitly sectarian, nonetheless American social realism, as a trend rather than a movement, maintained a belief that an oppositional art whose subject matter addressed sociopolitical problems could serve as a pow- erful impetus to social reform. Neel is thus a social realist in the narrow sense that her paintings after 1930 are part of that emerging movement, and a social realist in the broader sense of a politically concerned, reformist art. Neel and her more prominent social realist colleagues, such as Ben Shahn, , Phillip Evergood, and Jack Levine, continued throughout their ca- reers to make art that critiqued the varying historical circumstances of a given era from a left perspective. Although Neel’s contribution to the revolutionary tableaux characteristic of the social realist movement of the 1930s is relatively minor, her invention of the proletarian portrait gallery is a genuine contribu- tion, important not only for its alternative vision of social realism during the Depression, but also for its contribution to a larger trend of socially concerned art in America. Neel’s work provides one signiƒcant example of the way in which politically engaged artists adjusted the expression of their left-wing ide- als in the face of changing historical circumstances. However, her continuing association with the Communist Party makes charting the political content of her work a particularly challenging task. The years between the onset of the Depression in 1929 and the end of World War II in 1945 were so tumultuous that terms such as revolutionary art, prole- tarian art, and social realist art are still buffeted by its winds, as are its loosely re- lated communist terms: proletcult art, Zhdanovism, socialist realism. If the communist system, as exempliƒed by the U.S.S.R., provided the most deƒni- tive economic alternative to the collapse of capitalism in 1929, it nonetheless 50 / Neel’s Social Realist Art was as unstable a model as capitalism itself. After Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, it appeared to be the political alternative to fascism, but its authority was un- dermined as early as 1934 by Stalin’s purges of dissidents; by the end of the decade, the Nazi-Soviet Pact in August 1939 and the Russian invasion of Fin- land in November 1939 destroyed for many fellow travelers their faith in the Soviet system. Given the course of international politics, it is hardly surprising that the Communist Party USA was fraught with internal dissension, and that Marxist literary and artistic theorists in the United States could not provide a translation of changing Soviet policies appropriate to the vernacular of the American milieu. The nature of Neel’s contribution to social realism is also difƒcult to chart because she did not occupy a leadership position either artistically or organiza- tionally. Neel joined several of the artists’ organizations, such as the Artists Union and its successor, United American Artists, and in addition participated in Union-sponsored exhibits and protests. However, she left no paper trail of her activities that can elucidate her stance on any of the issues of the decade. Nor was she singled out by galleries or museums to be shown in national exhi- bitions, such as the American Artists’ Congress Exhibition at the ACA galleries in 1935 or the “America Today” exhibit in 1936. Finally, she was uninterested in the monumentally scaled public mural commissions that might have helped to establish her reputation, but concentrated instead on the medium of por- traiture, a genre considered irrelevant to a collective art. Just as Neel’s presence in the landmark artistic events of the decade is ghostly, so the connections between her Marxist-in„uenced aesthetics, her po- litical beliefs, and her art are elusive. A lifelong supporter of the ideals if not the practice of communism, her participation in communist politics was er- ratic.13 Nonetheless, she was familiar with the aesthetic ideas of some of the most controversial communist writers in this country, among them Mike Gold, journalist and author of Jews Without Money (1930), and V. J. Jerome, author of Culture in a Changing World (1947). In addition, she read many of the central texts of communist theory, which she purchased through Alexan- der Trachtenberg’s International Publishers in New York.14 Neither an intel- lectual dilettante nor a political naif, Neel was conversant with the principles of Marxism and of International Communism. Although the exact dates and status of her Party membership cannot be established, she remained at the least a fellow traveler when it was dangerous to do so (during the 1940s and 1950s), and as Party stalwart even when, with the emergence of the New Left, she formed new alliances. Although Neel never severed her ties with the Com- munist Party USA, her continued alliegance to its politics and philosophy may have had less to do with a commitment to the goal of establishing a communist state than with her outrage at the gross inequalities perpetuated by capitalism Art on the Left in the 1930s /51 and her desire to maintain an oppositional stance to the American political system. Similarly, Marxist theory provided only the broadest framework for the content of her painting. According to Annette T. Rubenstein, commu- nism, and speciƒcally the model provided by the Soviet Union, “was a tre- mendously important factor in our lives, but it was most important in rather intangible ways . . . it gave us a feeling of worldwide comradeship and a sense of participating directly in world history.”15 Neel might best be described as a populist in the tradition of , William Jennings Bryan, and one of her intellectual mentors, Mike Gold. Her communal art was forged within the context of America’s cultural traditions and its changing political climate. Despite Neel’s skepticism about theories, one, the call for a social realist art published by Mike Gold the year Neel entered art school, can stand as a statement of her sympathies, even if she did not read it until years later. In a February 1921 essay in the Liberator, “Towards Proletarian Art,” written only two years after the Communist Party was established in the United States, Gold (nee Itzhok [Irwin] Granich) issued a passionate call to arms for an art of, by, and for the laboring poor, one that would be pure and direct and would avoid the weaknesses of modernism:

What is art? Art is the tenement pouring out its soul through us, its most sensitive and articulate sons and daughters. What is Life? Life for us has been the tenement that bore and moulded us through years of meaningful pain . . . The art ideals of the capitalistic world isolated each artist as in a solitary cell . . . The masses are still primitive and clean, and artists must turn to them for strength again . . . It is Life at its fullest and noblest . . . The Revolution, in its secular manifestations of strike, boycott, mass-meeting, imprisonment, sacriƒce, agitation, martyrdom, organization, is thereby worthy of the religious devotion of the artist.16

Published two years before Henri’s The Art Spirit, Gold’s manifesto shares the Ashcan School artist’s passionate identiƒcation with the laboring poor, but moves far beyond Henri in seeing the revolutionary implications of an art of the masses. Gold’s messianic faith that an art forged from life could help foster the revolution, which in turn would usher in a new society, exempliƒed the ro- mantic zeal of the early converts to communism. Neel’s earliest social realist painting, the spare pictogram Futility of Effort (1930, ƒg. 26), can be considered a quite literal response to Gold’s call for an art of the tenement. Yet, it was Ben Shahn’s more monumental The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (1931–1932, ƒg. 34) that crystalized the form and content of the new movement. The Italian immigrant workers, symbols of political persecution to a generation of left-wing artists and activists, are depicted as martyred saints. In presenting the story, Shahn combines information from 52 / Neel’s Social Realist Art documentary photographs with the graphic caricature characteristic of the illustrations to create a posterlike object. Thus its address is to a mass audience, for whom its incisive characterizations would serve as a stimu- lus—to outrage or to action. A highly sophisticated condensation of sources into a clear ideogram, Shahn’s painting exempliƒes the “” of much early social realist art. Neel’s painting, in contrast, remains a personal cry of sympathy rather than a public statement, and thus despite its emotional power vis-à-vis the Shahn, it could not serve as a model for the new movement. During the Popular Front period, Neel modiƒed her revolutionary ap- proach, as did most left-wing artists who were employed by the WPA. The ma- jority of social realist artists now traveled on two tracks: the works they pro- duced under government auspices would depict the agarian or industrial worker as capable and gainfully employed;17 the works produced for private consumption or publication in radical journals would reveal the social and economic devastation—the strikes, lynchings, and bread lines in these years— and continue to provide a critique of the system. An example of this double- tracking is Neel’s Snow on Cornelia Street (1933, ƒg. 35), a Hopper-like city- scape that she painted the day she was accepted onto the Public Works of Art Project, and Uneeda Biscuit Strike (1936, ƒg. 36), a cry of protest as overt as William Gropper’s Youngstown Strike from 1937. Although I will argue that the former is the more radical conception of so- cial realism, the latter better ƒts the term as deƒned in Louis Lozowick’s “To- wards a Revolutionary Art,” published in Art Front in 1936: “the worker as vic- tim, as striker, as hero.” However, Lozowick’s artistic Popular Front went so far as to sanction the bourgeois subjects of still life and landscape exempliƒed by Neel’s Snow on Cornelia Street: “The formation of a revolutionary art is not the task to be achieved by one work or even by one artist. It is the labor of a move- ment; whether one member or another occasionally paints a still life or a land- scape, is, viewed in the large perspective, of little consequence.”18 Lozowick’s manifesto is thus an attempt to gather under one social realist umbrella the di- verse approaches to socially concerned art in 1936, whose con„icts the found- ing of the American Artists Congress had brought to a head. Signiƒcantly, he omitted mention of portraiture. With the broadening of its stylistic base, social realism could again embrace modernism, which Shahn had rejected only a few years earlier. In 1936–1937, articles in Art Front by Fernand Leger and Louis Aragon voiced the opinions of the European moderns themselves about the proper garb for social content. The van Gogh exhibit at the Modern in 1936 also brought the question of ex- pressionism to the fore, and its adherents would gather strength over the next few years.19 Between 1938 and 1940, Neel’s star would rise, ever so brie„y, with the alliance between social realism and expressionism. Art on the Left in the 1930s /53

If she were to make her mark, however, it would be with the dramatic tableau, the staging of revolutionary scenes that formed the staple of social re- alist subject matter. Yet only a handful Neel’s tableaux from 1933 to 1936 are explicitly political. Her most militant social realist tableau, Nazis Murder Jews (1936, ƒg. 37), depicting a communist torchlight parade,20 creates an antifas- cist protest by documenting one. As with Futility of Effort, it can be considered a response to the period’s manifestoes, in this case Stuart Davis’s insistence that the American Artists’ Congress was to “be a strengthening element to the whole ƒeld of progressive organization against War and Fascism.”21 As with her contemporary Uneeda Biscuit Strike, Neel documents actual events, in this instance the demonstrations that characterized the Popular Front period. As in the documentary photography of the period, Neel uses signage in order to underscore the work’s message. By afƒxing her sign to the front plane of the canvas, Neel visually arrests the pictorial momentum and demands attention to the cause of the march. As in any good propaganda art, the work’s message is forceful and devoid of ambiguity. However, when shown in a group exhibit of honorable mention recipients of “The First Annual Competitive Exhibition” for American Artists Congress members at Herman Baron’s ACA galleries, it was found lacking in formal terms. In the September 12, 1936, New York World Telegram, Emily Genauer wrote:

Alice Neel brandishes aloft the torch which she and members of the Artists’ Union along with her hope will eventually lead to enlightenment and destruction of Fas- cism. One, depicting a workers’ parade, would be an excellent picture from the point of view of color, design, and emotional signiƒcance if the big, bold black-and- white sign carried by one of the marchers at the head of the parade, denouncing Hitler, didn’t throw the rest of the composition out of gear by serving to tear a vi- sual hole in the canvas.22

Neel countered appropriately: “But if they had noticed that sign, thousands of Jews might have been saved.”23 An important contribution to social realism, Neel’s painting is one of the earliest in American painting to speciƒcally protest the Nazi persecutions of Jews.24 As Neel’s painting indicates, the notion of a public art directed to the prole- tarian, which had guided the artistic stance of Gold and of the New Masses, was now redirected toward the threat of fascism; the comparable situation in politics was the CPUSA’s support of Roosevelt’s 1936 campaign. The addi- tional con„icts involved in being a revolutionary artist employed by the U.S. Government were exposed in a review of an exhibition of WPA art at the Whit- ney Museum. In “The Public Use of Art,” published in the November 1936 issue of Art Front, raised the question not of the style or con- 54 / Neel’s Social Realist Art tent of socially concerned art but of its audience. To create a genuinely public art, Schapiro argued, the artist “had to undergo a change as a human being and as an artist; he must become realistic in his perceptions . . . and free him- self from the illusions of isolation, superiority and the absoluteness of his for- mal problems.”25 This meant working directly with the proletariat to deter- mine its needs. Schapiro not only recognized that the gap between the bourgeois artist and the working class had to be bridged before a public art could emerge, but con- cluded that beyond an art accessible to the masses, “the people [must] control the means of production and attain a standard of living and a level of culture such that the enjoyment of art of a high quality becomes an important part of their life.”26 As Patricia Hills has pointed out, this essay “calls for nothing short of revolution...”27 Mike Gold could hardly let such radical criticism of social realism stand, and disparaged Schapiro’s writings as merely “wonderful victories on paper” penned by “a little group of Phi Beta Kappa Trotskyites in New York . . .”28 During the Popular Front years, in sum, the Communist Party deliberately muzzled all talk of world revolution, whereas Trotskyite Marxists such as Schapiro continued to speak of its necessity. Hills concludes: “Hence the Party sacriƒced a sharp cultural critique of capitalism to political expediency. At the same time, independent intellectuals like Schapiro in their writings called for ‘revolution’ for artists and cultural workers, but remained aloof from collective action and the struggles in the streets.”29 Neel’s move to Spanish Harlem in 1939 was a political statement to the extent that she considered it a move away from the rariƒed world of Schapiro and the Greenwich Village intelligentsia to the “real” world of the underclass. In essence resolving the contradiction be- tween thought and action, Neel decided that her art would be made from and addressed to that audience. The path the socially concerned artist was to follow became even less dis- tinct with the coming of World War II. The acrimonious debate over the Rus- sian invasion of Finland within the American Artists Congress in the spring of 1940 caused the public defection of its most prestigious members, including Meyer Schapiro, George Biddle, and Stuart Davis, after which the Congress slowly declined.30 During the 1940s and 1950s, the word revolution disap- peared from the literature, as the Smith Act of 1940 had made its advocation a crime. When the Supreme Court upheld the act in 1951, the door was opened for McCarthyism. During these years, radical artists’ writings became reassuringly centrist and their art ambiguously allegorical. ’s 1943 article, “Sure, I’m a Social Painter,” written the year that WPA’s easel program was dissolved, set the tone for postwar social realism: Art on the Left in the 1930s /55

My only aim is to paint a good picture—a work of art—and, on this level plain, to say what I want about life. As a matter of pure fact all good art throughout the ages has been social art. And because good art of the past has portrayed human beings and their habits, it has constituted the most pleasing record of the past that exists.31

Socially concerned art, according to this apology, had nothing to do with radi- cal politics. And frequently in this decade, Evergood’s art was so burdened with allegory that its political message was muf„ed. As the political subject matter of social realism became more oblique, the message was obviously ever less accessible to the masses. The most important of her later social realist works, marking the transition from group afƒliation to an independently-evolved art of social concern, T. B. Harlem (1940; ƒg. 38) might initially be interpreted as an allegorical reference to the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), as the wounded male is Hispanic.32 However, the painting’s title dispels the possibility of misidentiƒcation. At the moment when the movement’s social agenda had been abruptly diverted, Neel insistently calls attention to the ongoing “massacre of the innocents” not by fascism’s war ma- chine but by the economics of capitalism. His “uniform” is a body broken through the effects of tenement living, like the infant cipher in Futility of Ef- fort. His even stare cannot be de„ected or avoided; we must acknowledge his situation and our possible complicity in it. Neel’s social realist paintings thus on occasion served as an intervention into the course of the movement: T. B. Harlem redirects the emphasis on inter- national politics during toward a domestic agenda.33 Signiƒcantly, it is a portrait.

The Proletarian Portrait Gallery

Neel’s contribution to American Social realism lies not in her tableaux but in her portraits, or what I have chosen to call her proletarian portrait gallery. If Neel’s social realist art was conceived in Havana from 1926 to 1927, it was nur- tured in the equally vital milieu of Greenwich Village from 1930 to 1939. In both locales, the concentration of artists, writers, and political radicals pro- vided a fulcrum for her own work. If her Cuban portraits presaged her Spanish Harlem series after World War II, so her portraits of the Greenwich Village in- telligentsia initiated her “Proletarian Portrait Gallery” in the 1930s, which she extended to include her portraits of aging communist leaders in the 1950s. Neel’s portrait gallery represents an alternative to the prevailing concept of social realism as history painting in the form of social critique. By concentrat- 56 / Neel’s Social Realist Art ing on the single portrait rather than on multiƒgured narratives, Neel’s art ap- peared heretical. The future editors of , Philip Rahv and Will- iam Phillips, for instance, were unable to comprehend the portrait’s relevance to a collective, communist art, despite the clarity of Neel’s own social realist declaration:

I started doing revolutionary paintings when I lived on Cornelia Street in 1933. Philip Rahv and his sidekick, Lionel [sic] Phelps, both radicals, came to my place. Rahv and Phelps said: “The easel picture is ƒnished. And: “Why paint just one per- son?” And I said, “Don’t you know that is the microcosm, because one plus one is a crowd.” But still they said: “Siqueiros paints with duco on walls.” But I said, “We’re not up to that, duco on walls.”34

No doubt these radicals thought that Neel was simply ignorant of the recent developments in socially concerned painting. Although it is not hard to under- stand why two recent converts to proletarian art and literature would have found Neel’s portraits anachronistic in 1933, the accusation of the fundamen- tal incompatibility of the genres of social realism and portraiture continued to dog her throughout her career. In 1981, Gus Hall, the leader of the CPUSA, refused to let his portrait be exhibited in Moscow, lest it betray an interest in the “cult of personality.” Yet it was precisely the cult of personality that Neel’s proletarian portrait gallery was designed to avoid. Collectively, Neel’s portraits serve an historical function comparable in a very broad sense to a National Portrait Gallery. But the state-sponsored museum valorizes an era’s “movers and shakers.” A secular pantheon, the portrait gallery links the material events of history together through individual leaders, creating a heroic mythology. The purpose of Neel’s proletarian portrait gallery, on the other hand, was antimythological and radically egalitarian; instead of the apotheosis of the great leader, she rep- resented the average citizen: not George Washington astride his horse, but her father, George Washington Neel, “lying in state” in his cofƒn. If a portrait gallery serves to embalm a nation’s view of its history, Neel’s portrait gallery serves to restore history’s „ux through the „otsam its forces bring to the surface. The museum of the people, the proletarian portrait gallery, presents citi- zens rather than heads of state, a “human comedy” rather than a solemn litany. Visual art and literature conceived in this way are not historical documents or artifacts but historical accounts that privilege the imaginative recreation of cultural beliefs and attitudes over the analysis of the causes and effects of events. In the presence of Neel’s “ancestor ƒgures,” her anonymous immor- tals, one comes to understand that the past is never closed but is instead passed on. The expatriate Cuban poet G. Cabrera Infante, whom Neel may have Art on the Left in the 1930s /57 read, expressed a similar concept of artistic truth in “A View of Dawn in the Tropics.” The poem recounts an incident involving a sugar plantation owner who commemorated the signing of a generous contract with his workers with a photograph; when the black cloth was lifted the “camera” was revealed to be a machine gun, which the owner used to execute the assembled work force. The authorial voice concludes: “The story could be true or false, but the times made it believable.” The ƒrst entrants into the gallery, then, are drawn from her literary milieu in the 1930s, many of whom she met through her lover at the time, Kenneth Doolittle. According to the Belchers:

Doolittle seemed to know everyone in the Village. Through him, Alice met such Village ƒxtures as the poet Christopher Lazar and the writer Philip Rahv, the Com- munist longshoreman Paddy Whalen, and the left-wing activist Sam Putnam. The poet Kenneth Fearing smoked opium with Doolittle; Putnam slept for a while on a sofa in their apartment. Within a year of her arrival in the Village, Alice was actively involved with and had been accepted by the political-intellectual community.35

Greenwich Village at the end of the roaring twenties and the beginning of the Depression had a persona Neel adopted in 1932 by “elective afƒnity.” It was there that she ƒrst joined the New York art network by exhibiting in the Greenwich Village outdoor art festival in Washington Square during the sum- mer of 1932. In the next booth was the painter Joseph Solman, who would be helpful to her in the early years36; impressed with her work, he included it in a small show he organized at the International Book and Art Shop on West Eighth Street in January 1933, Neel’s ƒrst New York exhibit. The district re- mained a Village in which the bohemian residents all knew one another. Caroline Ware’s Greenwich Village, 1920–30, written in 1935, character- ized bohemia’s attitudes with the same dispassionate observation used by Robert and Helen Lynd to study middle-America’s mores. In her opening chapter, “The Village in American Culture,” Ware describes the character of the “Villagers”: “In the War and post-War years, Greenwich Village became a symbol of the repudiation of traditional values. Here congregated those for whom the traditional pattern in which they grew up had become so empty or distorted that they could no longer continue a part of it and submit to the social controls which it imposed.”37 The neighborhood was one that attracted intelligent people and stressed social tolerance.38 A diverse population ethni- cally, the “Villagers” viewed “art and sex as avenues of escape,” and “carried on those activities, especially artistic, which had little or no place in a civiliza- tion dominated by either the remains of the Calvinist ethic or by the purely ac- quisitive impulse . . . It was to art as a way of life that all turned, either as a 58 / Neel’s Social Realist Art means of satisfying themselves or for giving themselves status in a society in which art was the one recognized form of divergence.”39 Clearly, art was an antibourgeois stance for Neel, a divergent position from which other kinds of “deviance”—political, social, ethnic—could be granted recognition. Ware concluded that “the social factors dominating this community were those which led toward social disorganization and cultural confusion,” and she ended her study with the questions: “What new patterns may develop to re- place the rampant individualism which ƒnds few outlets in the urban life of twentieth-century America except in predatory action or escape? Whence may come organizing forces which will canalize individual energies and give them social form?”40 By the time Ware asked these questions in 1935, the Villagers had found their own antidote to the rampant individualism of the 1920s, with its distance from the social concerns of even its closest neighbors, the Italian immigrant populace. The answer, for the near term anyway, was radical poli- tics and the vision of a communist utopia. For Neel, as for so many Village in- tellectuals, communism offered an alternative to the social structure she had abandoned. In literature, this transition from art-for-art’s-sake individualism to an art of social concern is exempliƒed by the shift from the Lost Generation of a Hem- ingway or a Scott Fitzgerald to the social critiques of a John Dos Passos or a Mike Gold.41 The earliest recruits to Neel’s alternative portrait gallery (c. 1933–1935) were all drawn from this white, male, literary elite, a seemingly in- congruous beginning. All were representatives of the transitional literary gen- eration, bohemian Villagers in the process of adopting a cause: Sam Putnam, Max White, Kenneth Fearing, and the well-known Greenwich Village ƒxture Joe Gould. All except Gould were “New York Intellectuals,” in Alan Wald’s term,42 who were communists during the Depression, but who moved toward the center after the war. All except White were members of the WPA’s Federal Writer’s Project, the counterpart to the that supported Neel until 1943. A prominent translator, novelist, and critic, the historical Samuel Putnam assumes the character of the quintessential bohemian in Neel’s portrait (Sam Putnam, ƒg. 39), painted in 1933, the year he returned from France. Once back in New York, Putnam joined the Communist Party, wrote a literary col- umn for the Daily Worker, contributed to Art Front, and was an associate edi- tor of the New Masses. In 1944, he quit the Party, citing “misguided humility.” By the time of his death in 1950, he had translated some ƒfty French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Russian works, including the deƒnitive version of Don Quixote (1949).43 Painted in the spare expressionist style of her work of the late 1920s, the por- Art on the Left in the 1930s /59 trait pictures a gaunt, glassy-eyed man staring upward as if possessed. Putnam had a long, irregular scar on his forehead (photograph, ƒg. 40), which Neel chose to exaggerate to create a metaphor for psychic disturbance. Only two spots of color enliven the dark surface: the matching reds of the wine in his glass and the lips surrounding the black hole of his mouth. Almost as if he were a proƒle out of his 1947 book Paris Was Our Mistress: Memoirs of a Lost and Found Generation, Putnam personiƒes the writer of the 1920s, disturbed, heavy drinking, absorbed in his own world. The fact that he had recently con- verted to communism and that by the mid-1930s his writing held tenaciously to the Party line had no bearing on Neel’s vision.44 Neel chose not to paint this newly-committed Marxist in a social realist style, but to cast him instead in his previous incarnation as an expatriate writer. In a bracing contrast, the representative of the new group of proletarian writers, Max White (1935, ƒg. 41) implacably confronts the viewer. Neel lessens the „at stylizations of the Putnam portrait and adopts a more naturalistic style that endows White with the projecting volume of a sculptural relief. His rect- angular body a wall, his cylindrical head a bollard, White is planted before us as 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 mind but, looming before the viewer, the “real,” material world, where he is a force to be reckoned with, the new ideal of the worker-writer, who has come down to ƒght in the streets for the revolution. Yet, according to his literary biography, Charles Edmund “Max” White (b. 1906) was a cosmopolitan who lived in France and Italy and was the author of a gourmet cookbook for which Neel de- signed the cover. The protagonists of his novels are misunderstood artistic ge- niuses: 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.46 The oddest character in the literary lineup, Joe Gould (1933, ƒg. 42), is also seated 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 bo- hemia in decline. Although he counted among his friends the writer Malcolm Cowley, the photographer Aaron Siskind, the poet e.e. cummings, and the painter Joseph Stella, who made a beautiful proƒle drawing of Gould, Neel’s depiction accords him little respect. With his unkempt hair, watery eyes, and broad 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 he was in a spectacular, full-length portrait nude (1933, ƒg. 43). An excerpt from Joseph Mitchell’s Joe Gould’s Secret (1965) tells his story: 60 / Neel’s Social Realist Art

Joe Gould is a blithe and emaciated little man who has been a notable in the cafete- rias, diners, barrooms, and dumps of Greenwich Village for a quarter of a century . . . Every day, even when he has a bad hangover, he spends at least a couple of hours working on a formless, rather mysterious book that he calls “An Oral History of Our Time.” . . . He estimates that the manuscript contains 9,000,000 words, all in longhand . . . Gould puts into the Oral History only things he has seen or heard. “What we used to think was history [Gould says]—kings and queens, treaties, in- ventions, big battles . . . is only formal history and largely false. I’ll put down the infor- mal history of the shirt-sleeved multitude . . . or I’ll perish in the attempt.”47

Gould’s oral, proletarian history was not unique in its time: in the mid- 1930s, the Federal Writers’ Project of the WPA initiated a ƒrst-person narrative project that collected thousands of interviews with people in marginalized pro- fessions. Indeed, Ralph Ellison, one of the Project writers who conducted these interviews, developed speciƒc methods to transcribe their vernacular speech that he subsequently would put to use in his in„uential The Invisible Man.48 Indeed, Gould’s own description of his Oral History’s contents (as tran- scribed by Mitchell) could read as a prospectus for the Writers’ Project as well as a précis of Village life.49 Unfortunately, his voluminous notebooks turned out to be empty. Yet, although his project was a sham, his concept of history as contingent and relative, to be assembled bit by bit through the recording of in- terviews with the broadest possible segments of the populace, was perfectly ap- plicable to Neel’s portrait gallery. By representing Gould as a fraud, she by im- plication authenticated her version. In posing Gould for a second, nude portrait,50 Neel violated the decorum of portraiture so violently that it was censored. The scrawny, pathetic physique was so transgressive of the tradition of the heroic male nude that the portrait could not be “hung,” so to speak, before a viewing audience until 1973.51 Why is Gould so threatening? The little goblin is hardly a convincing embodiment of evil. The mephistophelian aura of the pointed beard and the infernal glow of the ground only play up the utter powerlessness of his musculature. In his misplaced pride in his physique, he is as pathetic as Daumier’s The Handsome Narcissus. Instead of the “imposing male apparatus” Freud found so impres- sive, the male genitals are presented as they appear to women. Turning the tables on Freud, Neel suggests that if anatomy is destiny, Joe Gould is doomed. Magniƒcently endowed, spectacularly unerotic, Gould’s unwarranted append- ages are grotesque because Neel has multiplied that which is always assumed to be single and intact: male sexual identity. Her pictorial repetition is the equiv- alent of the gleeful taunt of the sexually curious child. Mocking rather than fetishistic, the excessive penises effectively desexualize ; as the viewer mentally removes one set of extra genitals, they all become expendable. One Art on the Left in the 1930s /61 recalls that Freud saw the Medusa’s Head as “a conƒrmation of the technical rule according to which a multiplication of penis symbols signiƒes castra- tion.”52 The univocal male voice that normally and normatively accompanies the intact member is as silent as the pile of empty notebooks that Gould left at his death. According to Peter Brooks’s gloss of Lacan, “ is the basis of knowledge and power, and [because] the gaze is phallic . . . to display the penis is to turn subject into object, a twist or per-version.”53 Neel’s twist uncaps, Pan- dora-like, the female gaze, a gaze that undermines certain fundamental as- sumptions of patriarchal culture. Recognizing its landmark importance, Neel inscribed the painting’s date between Gould’s legs. Neel’s con„ation of the genres of portraiture and the nude, like her con„ation of history painting, portraiture, and literature, simul- taneously de-constructs existing conventions and substitutes new ones in their place. Her gallery of New York intellectuals, the creative male elite, is perhaps not as potent as its own self-image, since its “members” can be added to or deleted without signiƒcant alteration.54 Yet the fact that until World War II Neel’s proletarian portrait gallery omitted women artists and activists indicates that despite her protofeminist criticism of patriarchal culture, she retained its biases. 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 1933 and 1935, whereas her 1935 portraits of Kenneth Fearing and Pat Whalen unite intelligentsia and worker to visualize the period’s proletarian ideal. In an exception to Neel’s customary practice of isolating her sitters against a plain ground, in Kenneth Fearing (ƒg. 44) the poet and his “literary setting” are united. Seated with shirtsleeves rolled up beneath the bare bulb of “inspira- tion,” the gaunt, angular artist—with his hair bristling, his ƒsts clenched, and his ears tuned to the city’s sounds—projects contained energy. The device of surrounding an author with his cast of characters is unusual in American painting, although it is found in popular sources such as magazine illustra- tion.55 Neel’s allusion may refer to the style of Fearing’s writings, which are part of the tradition of hard-boiled, or pulp ƒction.56 Fearing’s pose, three-quarter view, seated facing left, with resolute stare and clenched ƒst, so closely matches that of the maritime union activist Pat Whalen (1935, ƒg. 45) that the two contemporary portraits seem designed to hang together. So paired, they present the ideal rather than the reality of the era, that of intellectuals and blue-collar workers sharing a vision of a new com- munist society and working side by side for the revolution. With his unwaver- ing stare, ƒrm-set jaw, and clenched ƒsts, Whalen is a cliché of the proletarian hero found throughout socially concerned art of this period. From the Daily Worker headline beneath his ƒsts, “Steel, Coal Strikes Set for June 16,”57 one 62 / Neel’s Social Realist Art would assume Whalen to be a mill or mine worker, but Whalen was a mar- itime worker, a seaman stationed in Baltimore, the ƒrst of several important union leaders Neel recorded. Why then no newspaper reference to the great West Coast maritime strike that had erupted in May 1934? Perhaps Neel chose instead to refer to the inter-union con„ict that would lead in October of that year to the creation of the left-leaning industrial union, the CIO, by John L. Lewis, head of the United Mine Workers. Whalen’s Marine Workers Indus- trial Union had dissolved in 1935, and so the future of the union movement, and the communists’ position within it, was unstable. Whalen’s two clenched ƒsts, planted on the Daily Worker, may indicate the double front on which communist union leaders were then forced to ƒght. Neel’s 1983 remembrance of Whalen, like all good oral (anecdotal) history, encapsulates more scholarly written histories, such as Bruce Nelson’s Workers on the Waterfront (1988):

Patty Whalen was the organizer on the waterfront . . . He was just an ordinary Irish- man except for one thing: He was absolutely convinced of Communism, and he could convince other longshoremen . . . I painted another painting of him pulling down the swastika „ag from the Bremen, but I painted over it . . . A liberty ship was named for him after the war, but during the McCarthy era they changed the name of the ship . . . George Myers told us a great story about when Patty Whalen was head of the port of Baltimore, a very important job. Patty Whalen would go into a bar. He would demand a drink for a black man who was with him. They’d say: “We do not serve Negroes here.” So Patty Whalen would take his heavy glass of beer and smash the mirror . . . And ƒnally the owners of the bar were so intimidated that they would sell to Negroes.”58

Neel’s verbal picture of a communist union activist conƒrms Nelson’s the- sis that the maritime unions in the 1930s, motivated by “a powerful determi- nation to transform the world of work,” made major gains during the Depres- sion59 and were not paralyzed by the social inertia of the working class.60 Although Whalen is not mentioned in Nelson’s discussion of the Marine Worker’s Industrial Union in Baltimore, he characterizes the leaders there as particularly hard-working and self-sacriƒcing.61 During the Popular Front era, their most conspicuous and dramatic acts involved pulling down the swastikas from German ships in Olympia, Washington, San Francisco, and New York. Whalen, with his unshakable resolve, has all of the attributes of the leaders in these years, as well as the record of Communist proselytizing, and of ƒghting against particularism, racial discrimination, and fascism that characterized the union’s heroes.62 Neel’s portrait is a record of communist idealism in the Art on the Left in the 1930s /63

1930s, as personiƒed by a fearless defender of the faith who was also a specƒc individual. In the postwar era, when that faith, like Whalen’s name on the lib- erty ship, was effaced, Neel would have to rethink her image of the communist worker-hero. Neel’s budding proletarian portrait gallery provides a montage of the emer- gence of socially concerned art from 1933 to 1935, when the term proletarian included both the intelligentsia and the worker. The absence of the promi- nent visual artists of these years may seem curious, but there is logic to that de- cision: the gallery was her contribution to social realism, and she may not have wanted to either valorize or criticize her fellow artists. The writers would serve to personify the various artistic positions within the decade. But the expression- ist-realism of the paintings and their occasional artistic references also require the same reconstruction of historical context demanded by the sitters them- selves. Her painting was representative of the socially concerned expression- ism championed by the critics of the Art Front. During the 1930s, as German Expressionism became more widely known, it was admired as an art of social concern.63 The earliest critical champion of Expressionism was painter-critic Charmion von Weigand, wife of the commu- nist writer Joseph Freeman. In “Expressionism and Social Change” (Art Front, November 1936), von Wiegand argued that after seven years of economic “stagnation” America was now ready for a truly revolutionary, expressionist art, one that could provide “the destructive action necessary to the new future.” German Expressionist art, she argued, had lost its force after it abandoned so- cial criticism. At present, its young American converts embodied the true spirit of expressionism, one that visualizes the “social struggle of our time as it as- sumes ever more dramatic and violent form in the United States.”64 She then listed the U.S. practitioners: Helen West Heller, David Burliuk, , Benjamin Kopman, Milton Avery, Herbert Kruckman, Alice Neel, and John Vavak. In the following issue, painter-critic Jacob Kainen, who in 1934 had criti- cized the club exhibitions for being insufƒciently insurrectionary, took up the expressionist banner, uttering “harsh words” about the 1936 Whit- ney painting annual, which he accurately described as boring and repetitious. Sweeping both urban and social realist painters aside with a single stroke— “the fact remains that painters like Speicher, Kroll, McFee, Karƒol, Brook, Klitgaard, Lucioni, Curry, Miller, Mattson, Hopper, Kuhn, Lawson, and sev- eral others look pretty old fashioned”—he bestowed his critical “best of show” award to William Gropper’s “The Senate,” 1936, a work dependent on the precedent of Grosz. He also lauded Nahum Tschacbasov’s Deportation (1936, ƒg. 46), whose “moderated use of the Expressionist outlook should give ideas to those who are looking for new approaches.”65 Tschacbasov’s expressionist 64 / Neel’s Social Realist Art painting of huddled Jewish refugees, like Neel’s Nazis Murder Jews, explicitly refers to Nazi political persecution. A few months later, in an Art Front article entitled “Our Expressionists” (February 1937), Kainen described the new “movement” as if it were an estab- lished fact. Again singling out Tschacbasov as an artist who has “made Expres- sionism the vehicle for a militant proletarianism,” Kainen listed twenty-three painters who exempliƒed the new expressionism, but Neel was no longer among them. In a melodramatic conclusion, Kainen summarized his deƒni- tion of an updated revolutionary art, one no longer based on proletarian sub- ject matter but on the artist’s ability to visualize the “social passions” of an era:

The old, literal naturalism is failing to register esthetically in the face of vast social passions and portents of doom and regeneration. In proportion to the awakening of artists to the fate which awaits the world, will painting take on a more Expres- sionist form.66

Kainen’s article appeared just months before the July 1937 opening of the Degenerate Art exhibition in Berlin. The Nazi condemnation of German Ex- pressionist artists could only add to the ideological import of the style. Kainen’s manifesto proved an accurate prediction of the course of art during the war years, for the ƒgurative expressionism of Hyman Bloom and the early Jackson Pollock, if not of the lesser-known artists cited in his article, was predominant in the 1940s. But it is indicative of the aesthetic volatility of the times that the two early champions of ƒgurative expressionism, von Weigand and Kainen, would themselves turn to abstract painting after the war.67 At a time when two con„icting political systems occupied common ground against a third, no single aesthetic system could claim to have an exclusive pur- chase on social reality. The staged dramas of most social realist tableaux, with their coherent plots, could not visualize a reality that was fragmented and con- tradictory. For this brief moment, expressionism appeared to be the most promising option for a renewed social realism. It was not the only option, how- ever, and early in 1937, in a review of the “Fantastic Art, and Surrealism” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, von Wiegand argued that surreal- ism’s techniques for reaching the unconscious mind could be useful to the de- velopment of a new social art as well.68 The immediate result of Art Front’s expressionist manifestoes was the for- mation of the New York Group. Founded in 1938 by Jacob Kainen, the New York Group was characteristic of the short-lived alliances of artists at the end of the decade. “Our Expressionists” had been in part a review of an exhibit at the Montross Gallery of The Ten, and their association may have inspired Kainen to form his own group.69 Kainen chose Jules Halfant, Herb Kruckman, Louis Art on the Left in the 1930s /65

Nisonoff, Herman Rose, Max Schnitzler, and Joseph Vogel, with Neel as the sole woman.70 In contrast to The Ten, which had declared itself opposed to the political use of art,71 the New York Group remained committed to art’s po- litical function. Yet in these turbulent years their solidarity could not last: the group dissolved after its second exhibition. Its joint statement, printed in the brochure of the ƒrst of its two exhibits at the ACA gallery, situates the New York Group squarely at the center of Popular Front concerns: the reconcili- ation of social realism with modernism, of local with international politics:

The New York Group is interested in those aspects of contemporary life which re„ect the deepest feelings of the people . . . However . . . [t]here must be no talk- ing down to the people; we number ourselves among them . . . The New York Group, while it wishes most of all to maintain its local and national character, at the same time wishes most of all to avail itself of the best international traditions. In short, we wish to be artistically and socially progressive.72

The political position of these artists was clear: they continued the basic tenet of social realism that the artist was to ƒnd his subject in and through labor, to consider himself a laborer, for if labor was seen less and less as the source of revolution, it was nonetheless the “bedrock” of life experience. The titles of the works in the exhibition conƒrm their continuing social re- alist concerns: Jules Halfant exhibited The Eviction, Herb Kruckman Railroad Workers, Louis Nisonoff, On the El, and Max Schnitzler, WPA Lunch Hour. Neel submitted two early works. The ƒrst, Poverty (Futility of Effort), was a log- ical choice, as it had been published two years earlier in Art Front, but the Ensor-like (Well) Baby Clinic,73 had been made ten years earlier and would not have appeared particularly germane in its subject, although it surely would have been the most radical example of expressionism. Although Art News, quoting Kainen’s statement directly, reviewed the 1938 exhibition favorably, it concluded on an equivocal note: “With underlying unity in their philosophy toward art and variety in their particular styles, one looks forward to more of their work.”74 The New York exhibition schedule also appeared to afƒrm the direction these artists were taking: the May 14, 1938, issue of Art News enthusi- astically reviewed three concurrent gallery exhibits of the German Expression- ist artist Kathe Kollwitz.75 Kollwitz’s reputation as the prototypical Social Real- ist did not reconcile the New York Group to its one woman member, however. Neel summarized the majority attitude in the New York Group quite directly: “They were so embarrassed because I was a woman, but I didn’t feel any differ- ent from them. They didn’t understand.”76 By the time of the second and last exhibition of the New York Group, February 1–18, 1939, the membership had been whittled down from eight to 66 / Neel’s Social Realist Art six: Halfant, Kainen, Kruckman, Neel, Schnitzler, and Vogel.77 It was perhaps portentous that despite the ARTnews critic’s anticipation, this second exhibit was not reviewed. The group’s expressionist-realism was a compromise style, social realist subject matter clothed in moderately expressionist form. Lacking a clear direction that would have given it critical visibility, its two exhibitions would have been indistinguishable from others mounted at Baron’s gallery. Their cautious, centrist position was inadvertently exposed at a symposium held at the ACA gallery during the 1939 exhibition, titled “Social Painting and the Modern Tradition.” The three panelists were Philip Evergood, John Gra- ham, and Kainen. Straining to elucidate his idea of an art for laborers, Kainen asserted that the artist’s job was to teach the masses, who have been “misedu- cated by magazine covers . . . and other pictorial commodities,” but who are “willing to learn.”78 The conduit between the artist and his (educable) public would be the Federal Art Project: “We should ƒght to maintain and extend the projects.”79 John Graham then threw a monkey wrench into the proceedings by “denouncing ‘proletarian art’ and saying that the real revolutionary art was abstraction.”80 The center could not hold, not in 1939.81 If Neel’s reputation was to be made it would have been at the ACA, but she would not exhibit there again until 1951, at the urging of Joseph Solman.82 The years of solidarity were at an end, and Neel’s exile was beginning. But so was a new phase of her social realist art. 5 The Cold War Battles: 1940–1980

The war years were both artistically and politically bleak for Neel, as social re- alism declined, the WPA was terminated, and Neel was increasingly isolated from mainstream postwar art. Her task in the Cold War years was to maintain her allegiance to the principles of a social realist art, which she did by produc- ing illustrations for Masses & Mainstream, by continuing the political com- mentary of her social realist tableaux, by extending her proletarian portrait gallery to include communist leaders, and, ƒnally, by creating a wing of her gallery devoted to the residents of Spanish Harlem. Her illustrations and tab- leaux continue her activities from the 1930s; her portraits, her most radical contribution, will be the subject of the following chapter. During the war, left-wing arts organizations suffered the same vicissitudes as those of the Communist Party. After the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, fellow travelers were pressed to support a policy of “Peace” and nonintervention, but after the Nazi invasion of in 1941, they abandoned domestic agendas to support the war effort to “save the fatherland.” When, in 1943, Stalin dissolved the Comintern as a gesture of appeasement to the West, Earl Browder hailed it as a step toward “new and favorable conditions for the integration of the CPUSA into our own American democratic way of life...”1 Such optimism, expressed while Party membership was at its historic height, was short-lived.

67 68 / Neel’s Social Realist Art

During these early war years, Neel joined United American Artists (founded in 1939), the left-wing organization that had evolved from the Artists Union and, like the Union, worked “to protect and expand the art project and to ulti- mately create a Government Bureau of Fine Arts.”2 In 1942, the group reorga- nized as the Artists League of America. Chaired by Lynd Ward, the UAA was ofƒcially a union—local 60 of the Union of Ofƒce and Professional Workers of America (UOPWA), a CIO afƒliate. Rockwell Kent was the UAA’s nominal president and provided the group’s clearest statement of purpose: “The United American Artists is a labor union. Its membership is composed of men and women who as workers in the ƒne arts hold themselves with some pride to be members of that working class . . .”3 In other words, it extended the principles of the American Artists Congress and the Artists Union, as well as of the short- lived New 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 principles of the American Artists Congress and the Artists Union by organizing two am- bitious exhibitions in May-June of 1940. The ƒrst, a juried selection of 39 artists held jointly at the ACA and Hudson D. Walker galleries, was fulsomely praised by the critic Elizabeth McCausland.4 At the same time, the ƒrst (and last) annual UAA exhibit was held at the Associated Press Building at 50 Rock- efeller Plaza. Clearly the second tier, there was no jury for the exhibition and any member “in good standing” paying $2 could be included. Alice Neel was one of the 295 artists who elected to do so, selecting for exhibition one of her more radical recent works, Childbirth or, Maternity (1939, ƒg. 47). Neel had commemorated the birth of her son Richard in September 1939 with a portrait of her hospital roommate Goldie Goldwasser writhing on her bed in the throes of an agonizing labor. Although the subject might seem to lack political implications, the issue of women’s health care had been an im- portant CP issue in the 1930s. The historian Robert Shaffer has argued that “A recurrent theme in the CP Press was the danger to women in the United States of childbirth itself. Many articles claimed that the Soviet Union, because of its socialized medical system and maternity insurance for women workers, had a lower mortality rate in childbirth.”5 The distorted ƒgure recalls the suffering women in Picasso’s Guernica (1937), which during the Popular Front epito- mized a work of art that was both modernist and antifascist; Neel no doubt saw it when it was exhibited at the Valentine Gallery in New York in 1938. As with her submission of Well-Baby Clinic to the New York Group exhibit the previ- ous year, perhaps Neel might have wanted the communist-leaning UAA to provide recognition of this speciƒc form of women’s work.6 By 1943, as far as her friends knew, Neel had become one of many promis- ing artists who seemed to drop through the cracks of history as the Old Left The Cold War Battles /69 became increasingly fragmented and the hegemony of abstract expression- ism was established critically and institutionally. Writing to Jacob Kainen in September of that year, Joseph Solman listed the whereabouts of the now- scattered members of the New York Group, adding “Someone informs me Alice Neel is doing portrait commissions for a living. Sounds unbelievable, but anything is possible with her.”7 That same month, the ƒnal prop for her career gave way with the termination of the WPA. Neel’s art would all but dis- appear from the galleries between 1940 and 1950. Her exhibit at Rose Fried’s Pinacotheca gallery in 1944 was reviewed unfavorably,8 and when in 1951 she was given an exhibition at the ACA gallery for the ƒrst time since 1939, the Art Digest reviewer mistakenly but understandably called it “her ƒrst one-man show.” Ironically, the demise of the WPA provided Neel with a quite unwelcome form of publicity.9 On April 17, 1944, Life magazine announced the WPA’s end with the sneering headline “Canvases Which Cost the Government $35,000,000 Are Sold for Junk” (ƒg. 48). Stored in a government warehouse in Flushing and subsequently sold to a Long Island junk dealer for four cents a pound, 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 paint- ings, “New York Factory Buildings,” was reproduced in the Life article, the only painting of hers to be reproduced in this decade. Like Joseph Solman, who had initially located the abandoned artwork, Neel had sufƒcient respect for her art, despite Life’s verdict, to buy back as many paintings as she could locate. Perhaps as a result of this article, Neel became the symbol of the WPA’s sorry end for her old Greenwich Village friend, Kenneth Fearing. In his 1946 hard-boiled mystery, The Big Clock, a central character is the eccentric but ex- ceptional painter Louise Patterson, who lives in a studio loft that is “a paradise for rats and termites,” and whose former lover had been proud to “destroy something new and creative” by displaying the “pile of scraps and ashes and charred fragments, all that was left of ƒve years’ work, heaped up in the ƒre- place.” The plot hinges on Patterson’s ability to identify the protagonist, George Stroud, as a murderer, which she declines to do because “I haven’t got so many admirers I can afford to let any of them go to the electric chair.”10 Fearing’s creation of Louise Patterson, layering parody of her unconventional behavior with admiration for her creativity, is the most extended literary portrait we have of Neel. The plot begins when Strout/Fearing outbids Patterson/Neel—an “over- weight” 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 her appearance, Fearing’s portrait is in the end an affectionate one, from an ad- 70 / Neel’s Social Realist Art mirer who believes in the continuing importance of her work. As he has George recount upon winning the bidding match: “although Patterson hadn’t exhibited for years . . . it did not seem possible her work had passed into com- plete eclipse. The things I had picked up for a few hundred had been bargains when I bought them...”12 Now a commercial success, Fearing used his art to remind the New York artworld of a signiƒcant artist who years before, when he was unknown, had recognized his talent. Such oblique support made little practical difference, of course. As the tide turned against a politically engaged art, social realists like Neel found them- selves branded as caricature artists. According to Evergood in his previously cited 1943 apology: “Either the social realist is a ‘lousy Red,’ or he must be an illustrator, a caricaturist, and a clumsy proletarian who is insensitive to the es- thetics of line, form and quality.”13 The Art News review of Neel’s 1944 exhibit is indicative of this general attitude. Acknowledging that it was “plainly seri- ous, thoughtful work,” nonetheless the reviewer criticized such paintings as Woman in Pink Velvet Hat for a “deliberate hideousness which makes them hard to take even for persons who admire her creative independence . . . Nor does the intentional gaucherie of her ƒgures lend them added expression.”14 Since every social realist was tarred with the same brush, it is curious that her fellow artists were insufƒciently “gentlemanly” to rally to her defense.

Masses & Mainstream: Social Realism in the 1950s

During the late 1940s and early 1950s when both modernism and realism jos- tled to gain the support of the “vital center,” Neel chose not to align herself with social realists like Raphael Soyer, who now adopted a “humanist” stance in opposition to ; instead, she remained on the sidelines with the communists, who had a competing deƒnition of humanism that de- emphasized individualism. Neel’s aesthetic stance was thus colored by her continued Communist Party afƒliation, which was in turn propelled by a re- fusal to participate in the jingoistic rhetoric of the 1950s. America’s victory and status as a world leader had not precipitated any fundamental changes in Neel’s “Cuban” heart. As the persecution of communists as subversives in- creased under McCarthyism, the Party responded by claiming that the real threat to the United States was not the external one of an imperialist U.S.S.R., but a homegrown fascism that was threatening democratic liberties from within.15 For many artists, this threat was real. But unlike a Ben Shahn, William Gropper, or Rockwell Kent, Neel was not called to testify at any of the anticommunist hearings during the early 1950s, and so her career was not jeopardized as theirs were.16 Even though the FBI did not close their ƒle on her until 1959, she was not targeted as a subversive, probably because her The Cold War Battles /71 drawings did not “advocate revolution” and her paintings had no audience.17 Anonymity had its advantages, for Neel did not have to go underground; she was already there. The Cold War froze communist aesthetics into an equally unbending dogma. The „exibility of the Popular Front years yielded in 1946 to the sec- retary of the Central Committee Andrei Zhdanov’s renunciation of all ex- perimentation and a call for a socialist realism that “was the Party,” marked by what Maxim Gorky had called “the humanism of the revolutionary pro- letariat...”18 Reality for the socialist realist artist was the reality of what the proletariat would become, not what it was. The rigid deƒnition of socialist re- alism under Zhdanov restricted its artistic production to idealized pictures of Party leaders and workers capable of overcoming any obstacle. This lament- able ideological position was given its American voice in June 1947 by V. J. Jerome, head the cultural commission of the Communist Party USA.19 In his address to the Marxist Cultural Conference in New York City (subsequently published as Culture in a Changing World) Jerome ƒrst criticized the imperi- alist policies of the United Nations and the Truman doctrine. But he reserved his most virulent language for the Trotskyite intellectuals who had „ed the Party during the war, whom he accused of “literary lynching.”20 To American Marxists he posed a familiar task: “the development of the cultural capacities of the working class, for whom culture is a matter of strug- gle, a matter of heroism.”21 Although her expressed sympathies for Jerome had to do with his imprisonment under the Smith Act,22 Neel, who had attended his lectures at the Jefferson School, was in general agreement with his call for working-class communist heroes. This Party line was reiterated, without seri- ous debate, in Masses & Mainstream, to which Neel contributed throughout the Cold War. A result of the merger in 1948 of Joseph North’s New Masses and Samuel Sillen’s Mainstream, Masses & Mainstream was edited by Sillen, with the authority on Negro history Herbert Aptheker, the black novelist and poet Lloyd Brown, and the former Art Front critic Charles Humboldt (a.k.a. Clarence Weinstock) serving as the associate editors. During the run of its publication, from 1948 to 1956 (after which it continued for another six years as Mainstream), the magazine published drawings by the regulars from the New Masses, including William Gropper, Robert Gwathmey, Ben-Zion, Ben Shahn, and Antonio Frasconi. Although its contribution to American cultural history is hardly as signiƒcant as the New Masses had been, it merits more seri- ous discussion than it has received to date.23 Masses & Mainstream is the voice of a defensive and embattled Party, strug- gling under systematic governmental persecution during the Cold War. The Smith Act of 1940 was further strengthened by the Internal Security Act of 1950, which required communists to register with the attorney general. How- 72 / Neel’s Social Realist Art ever simplistic its argumentation, the magazine courageously refused to ac- cept without protest governmental censorship and denial of rights, the “red- baiting” of the McCarthy era. Its stated aim was to

re-enter the arena in deƒance of those who would outlaw dissent and chain the American people to a program of fascism and war . . . Our speciƒc intention is to ƒght on the cultural front, in the battle of ideas. Our editorial viewpoint—though not necessarily the viewpoint of every contributor—is Marxist.24

By Marxist Sillen meant Zhdanovist.25 Several years later, in a two-part article “Communists in Novels,” Charles Humboldt centered the concept of forward progress in the new communist hero: “He must, ƒrst of all, be able to master the forces that overcome others, to resist oppression instead of being crushed by it...”26 Yet the small cadre of communist writers and artists in New York at the time were well aware of the weaknesses of Zhdanovism, de- spite what they said in print, and throughout the 1950s its members argued ac- tively about alternative deƒnitions of a Marxist art. For instance, Neel occa- sionally participated in the Writers and Critics group that met monthly at the Upper West Side apartment of Annette T. Rubinstein, a literary historian and teacher at the New York Marxist School. Neel was invited to join by Charles Humboldt, and the Masses & Mainstream crowd attended regularly. Signiƒ- cantly, V. J. Jerome was not invited, as he was considered too dogmatic.27 The group wrestled with the relationship of literature to Marxist theory by reading and discussing the advocates for opposing viewpoints, such as Brecht and Lukacs.28 According to Rubinstein, within the CP literati, “there was no em- brace of anything like Zhdanov’s debased and fraudulent ‘socialist realism.’”29 Although Neel did more listening than speaking, she was made aware of the contradictions within Marxist cultural theory, and of the need to ƒnd her own resolution to them. In a 1955 letter to the editor of Masses & Mainstream, Neel articulated her own alternative to Zhdanovist heroism. Her friend Phillip Bonosky, in review- ing Lars Lawrence’s Morning, Noon and Night, had taken the author to task for an overly idealized depiction of the working class. In his ensuing editorial argument with Albert Maltz, Neel sided with Bonosky, who

stands up for something to my mind much more important and ethical in the deep- est sense: the relation of art to life and the responsibility of the writer to re„ect in the most advanced and humanistic way any part of the life of his day . . . I think we have all realized for many years now that the “hero” lives and has lived . . . [L]itera- ture, unless it re„ects truly, becomes only a pale and falsiƒed re„ection of life.30 The Cold War Battles /73

Neel’s letter, with its elliptical phrasing and inclusion of the required code word “hero,” requests little more than the injection of nuanced reality into the rigid formulas of socialist realism, but it is nonetheless a genuine, if belated, critique of the Party line. By the mid-1950s criticism of socialist realism from within the Party had become overt, particularly after Khrushchev’s revelations of Stalin’s atrocities at the 20th Party Congress in 1956.31 Thereafter, the mag- azine could no longer sustain its aesthetic stance any more than it could advo- cate its political positions. Masses & Mainstream would report on the Party’s ever-shrinking cadre, whether it be the resignation of Howard Fast or the sui- cide of the socialist realist novelist Alesander A. Fadeyev in 1956, with increas- ingly thin rationalizations. Neel’s professional association with Masses & Mainstream was a means of maintaining her oppositional stance politically and artistically. But her afƒli- ation was a tenuous one. Although Humboldt was impressed by her work, Sil- len found it too expressionistic and frequently rejected it for publication.32 During the early 1950s, the magazine concentrated increasingly on fore- grounding the work of black and Hispanic artists such as Jacob Lawrence, Elizabeth Catlett, and Leopoldo Mendez, as well as the writers Lloyd Brown, Pablo Neruda, and Jesus Colón; by the mid-1950s it featured the black artist Charles White, an outstanding draftsman whose idealized portraits could be reconciled without difƒculty with the Zhdanovist party line. The increasing aesthetic conservatism of the magazine until after 1956 would hardly have served Neel’s cause well. Her work for Masses & Mainstream and other communist publications con- sists of story illustrations and courtroom drawings; these drawings mark her ƒrst contribution to the public art of illustration and caricature, which had been integral to social realist production in the 1930s. Yet apart from the court- room documents, the drawings are primarily literary rather than directly politi- cal in content. They are important as comments on proletarian literature rather than as additions to the tradition of political cartooning to which Sloan, Shahn, Gropper, and others continued to make such important contributions. Five of Neel’s ink drawings from 1949 to 1952 illustrated stories by the pro- letarian writer Phillip Bonosky, whom she met in 1948 when Bonosky came to New York to join the staff of the Daily Worker.33 A proliƒc writer, his Burning Valley (1952) remains an important work of American proletarian literature; like most of the stories Neel illustrated, it is set in the mills and factories of Pennsylvania. The Neel-Bonosky collaboration is signiƒcant as a new venue for Neel’s social realism. Bonosky’s stories were not epic but anecdotal and of- fered the opportunity to depict focused dramatic incidents in the lives of the lower class. 74 / Neel’s Social Realist Art

Perhaps predictably, Neel’s two ƒnest story illustrations were rejected,34 and went unpublished until an anthology of Bonosky’s writings, A Bird in Her Hair, and Other Stories, was produced by International Publishers in 1987. One story, “A Quiet Summer’s Day” (1948, ƒg. 49), recounts a child’s death by drowning in the polluted waters near a factory, a victim theme repeated in pro- letarian literature from the time of Gold’s description of his sister Esther being run over by an Adams Express Truck in his 1927 “Poverty is a Trap.”35 The theme was equally common in the visual arts. In the drawing for the anthology’s title story, “A Bird in Her Hair” (ƒg. 50), Neel uses the same stage set, the generic factory town, but brings to it all of the strengths of her portrait skills. The protagonist, Ellie, is a poor young woman whose tangled bush of hair was the subject of repeated taunts by the townspeo- ple. As visualized by Neel, the barefoot woman’s stance and facial expression embody the anger and deƒance of the poor outcast who has responded to in- terclass cruelty with an act of eccentric creativity—permitting a bird to nest in her hair. Ellie is less the proletarian heroine than a woman who reacts to op- pression with an individual act at once so outrageous and so creative that it forces respect and silences her critics. Like Louise Patterson, Ellie is Alice. Because they are portraits, Neel’s Masses & Mainstream drawings of the trials of Communist Party activists are equally strong. Along with the artist Charles Keller, Neel was assigned to cover the notorious “Trial of the Twelve,” actually eleven members of the National Board of the Communist Party, who in July of 1948 had been accused under the Smith Act of belonging to a group of persons who “teach and advocate” the overthrow of the U.S. Government by force.36 Keller’s two trial drawings illustrated Joseph North’s report, “Jus- tice, Inc.,” in the April 1949 edition of Masses & Mainstream, whereas Neel’s drawing of Judge Harold R. Medina was relegated to Charles Humboldt’s re- view of George Marion’s book on the subject, Trial by Stoolpigeon, in the De- cember issue. Humboldt’s review credited Marion with exposing “the nature of this system and how it makes a mockery of justice.”37 In contrast to Keller’s bland sketches, Neel unleashes the full force of her caricature skills to build on North’s vivid characterization of the urbane judge:

The judge’s face is a mask. Behind it operates the complex psyche of a bourgeois in- tellectual . . . His mop of hair is iron gray and his mustache droops; His eyebrows arch frequently . . . He strives for a homey, yet classic, colloquialism, assaying the role of a gentle Francis of Assisi, endlessly patient, low-toned, an understanding uncle.38

Neel’s ink drawing of Judge Medina (ƒg. 51) uses his arched brows to sug- gest his superciliousness and the hypocrisy of his self-assumed role of “The The Cold War Battles /75

Martyr.” Sadly, Neel’s other caricature, of the stoolpigeon Angela Calomaris (ƒg. 52), was not published, for Marion’s descriptions of the “stools, foxes, frames and hookers” who testiƒed against the communists convinces the reader of the illegitimacy of the legal process. Neel’s dirty bird, with its splayed feathers, is modeled on the recurrent “criminal type” established in nineteenth- century physiognomy studies, but Neel has upped the ante by making Calo- maris look like an unshaven man in drag. One can imagine that the editors of Masses & Mainstream might have considered this grotesquerie unpublishable, but the image provides a particularly apt description of much of the “incrimi- nating” testimony during the McCarthy era. By rejecting it, Masses & Main- stream diluted its own polemic. Three of Neel’s social realist paintings from the 1950s, the now discredited genre she continued throughout the decade, provide even stronger evidence of her support for the CPUSA than permitted by the restrictive editorial poli- cies of Masses & Mainstream. In 1951, Neel attended the funeral of one of the Party’s long-time leaders, Ella Reeve “Mother” Bloor (1862–1951). Joining the “Nights of Labor” in the mid-1880s, Bloor had been active in organizing union labor until World War II. A delegate to the ƒrst and second congresses of the Red International of Labor Unions and to the ƒrst international meeting of communist women, Bloor traveled as a guest in 1937 to the Soviet Union for the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. Her death notice in the September 1951 Masses & Mainstream eulogized this important leader.39 In her funeral portrait, The Death of Mother Bloor (1951, ƒg. 53), painted from memory, Neel reprises Ben Shahn’s The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, and her own Dead Father, honoring at once not only one of communism’s founding ƒgures but also the founding of American Social Realism. In so doing, Neel belatedly acknowledged the importance of women’s contributions to the CPUSA. In her 1940 autobiography, Bloor had gently chided the Party for its failure to give women “full equal responsibility with men.”40 If, in A Bird in Her Hair, Neel visualized a ƒctional proletarian hero, here she eulogizes an historical one. Neel’s most ambitious pictorial commentary on McCarthyism, Eisenhower, McCarthy, Dulles (1953, ƒg. 54), is one of a handful of American critiques of Cold War foreign policy found in the medium of painting. Linking perse- cution at home with militarism abroad, Neel transforms Dulles into a skeletal eagle with bloody talons, McCarthy into an ass brandishing a jail cell, and Ike into the angel of death presiding over the Western hemisphere. The bright red explosion in Central America is no doubt a reference to the recent CIA- backed overthrow of President Jacopo Arbenz Guzman in Guatemala. In 1957, Paul Baron’s Political Economy of Growth, a communist analysis of post- war American imperialism, argued that the historical advance of capitalism 76 / Neel’s Social Realist Art had led to a programmed backwardness for Third World nations.41 While Mc- Carthy was busy scaring out subversives at home, Neel made explicit the United States’ illegal subversion of Latin American governments, the sort of imperialist expansionism justiƒed by what to Neel was a spurious anti- communism.42 If Eisenhower, McCarthy, Dulles is Neel’s comment on the Cold War, Save Willie McGee (c. 1958, detail, ƒg. 55) represents her stand on the other major communist issue of the 1950s, Negro civil rights. From the 1920s on, the Com- munist Party, under directives from Moscow, had identiƒed the black struggle as part of its larger revolutionary struggle. During and after World War II, it re- mained a major focus of Party activities. By 1938, shortly before Neel moved to Spanish Harlem, the CPUSA reached the height of its in„uence in the black community. However, the hierarchical organization of the Party worked to its disadvantage, breeding resentment on the part of blacks who felt dictated to by a predominantly foreign-born group of Jewish intellectuals. Yet, if the CP’s role in encouraging Negro art and culture was equivocal, its role in building and defending the was crucial. Just as it had aided in the defense of the Scottsboro Boys in the 1930s, so in the 1940s and 1950s the Party rallied to the defense of many persecuted blacks in the South, among them Willie McGee, “a black truck driver whose white lover accused him of rape after her husband discovered their affair.”43 According to the Encylopedia of the , McGee’s case became the cause célèbre of the Civil Rights Congress (1946–1956), called the “most successful ‘Communist Front’ of all time.”44 The July 1950 “Political Prison- ers” issue of Masses & Mainstream listed Willie and Rosalee McGee with the recently convicted “trial of the twelve” leaders Eugene Dennis, Howard Fast, and W. H. Lawson. The same issue carried Rosalee McGee’s remarks at a Civil Rights Congress dinner held in New York on May 22, 1950, illustrated with a woodcut by Stanley Edelson. Throughout 1950 and 1951, Masses & Mainstream reported on the status of McGee’s appeals. The execution of the Martinsville Seven in Richmond in February 1951 drew justiƒable charges of “mass murder” from Sillen in the March issue, charges that were formalized in the stunning petition published in the May issue: “Mass Murder of Ne- groes: We Charge Genocide!”45 Because the Communist Party expended such energy on the McGee case, Neel no doubt painted Save Willie McGee (1952) as a belated gesture of soli- darity after the demise of the CRC. The historical connection between thirties activism and the continuing concerns of the 1950s is seen in Neel’s inclusion of William Zorach’s sculpture Benjamin Franklin (1935–1937), a work com- missioned in 1936 by the Treasury Department for the newly completed U.S. Post Ofƒce building. Reproduced in the November 1951 Art Digest, a second The Cold War Battles /77 version of the Franklin sculpture stood in Union Square, where Neel attended a vigil for McGee. Zorach’s Franklin may have stood in Neel’s mind for the principles of American civil liberties and also for a public art supported by the people and for the people, a cause now lost. In its depiction of the peaceful protest, the painting provides evidence that in her own mind communism was not incompatible with democracy, despite Cold War rhetoric.

The Proletarian Portrait Gallery

In addition to her illustrations and tableaux, Neel continued to add portraits of communist writers and activists to her expanding gallery. Because the commu- nist leaders she painted had been active since the 1930s and were now well past middle age, the series consists not of young idealists like Fearing and Whalen but of the stalwart, unrepentant old guard. This “Forefathers of Amer- ican Communism” series spans the early 1950s to the late 1970s and includes: Mike Gold (1952), Art Shields (c. 1952), Bill McKie (1953), and, later, David Gordon (1973), and Gus Hall (1980). All are representatives of postwar com- munism, tethered to the U.S.S.R. while surrounded by hostile forces at home. The series, unique in American art, must have presented a particular chal- lenge for Neel, for portraiture had now become the predominant genre in So- cialist Realism, despite the fact that, according to communist ideology, the portrait was a particularly virulent example of the bourgeois gloriƒcation of the individual. By the time of Lenin’s death, the U.S.S.R., yielding to the power of the human face to create a totalitarian propaganda art, had replaced its reli- gious icons with ubiquitous in„ated images of its leaders. Such portraiture offers clear evidence of the distance of socialist realism from Russian social re- ality.46 The romanticism of the portraits of Lenin in the 1930s had hardened by the 1950s into the immobility of the portraits of Stalin characteristic of the Cold War (e.g., Shurpin’s The Morning of Our Fatherland, 1948, ƒg. 56). Be- cause Neel’s oeuvre was created in opposition to ofƒcialdom, and because Soviet portraiture was if anything even more ofƒcious than that of American political leaders, Neel was caught on the horns of a dilemma when depicting the leaders of the CPUSA. Her “solution” to this dilemma was to continue the approach she had adopted in 1933: the leaders she painted were also her friends, part of her intellectual-political community, and it was as intimates embodying all the human contradictions of the public-private person that these leaders were painted. Her Forefathers of American Communism series thus includes her lovers Jose (1935–1939; see ch. 6) and Sam Brody (1940–1958). Of all of her lovers, Sam Brody would have provided Neel with the strongest, most con- 78 / Neel’s Social Realist Art sistent support for her social realist art. The two met in 1940, and her early por- trait depicts a handsome, if tense, individual (Sam, 1940, ƒg. 57). The very im- age of an intellectual, he holds one hand poised above the other as if to hold an idea in his mind. A founder of the Worker’s Film and Photo League (a section of the Worker’s International Relief, sponsored by the Communist International) in the winter of 1930–1931, Brody had been a ƒlm critic for the New Theatre Magazine, Ex- perimental Cinema, Filmfront, and the Daily Worker. He was the most knowl- edgeable writer in America in the 1930s about the Russian revolutionary ƒlm- makers Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Dovjenko, and was the ƒrst to translate the Paris lectures of Dziga Vertov into English in the January 1935 Filmfront 2 and 3. Consciously emulating Vertov’s concept of the Kino-Eye, which he ƒrst encountered in Henri Barbusse’s publication Le Monde in Paris in 1921– 1922, Brody described WFPL’s ƒlms as “reality recorded on ƒlm strips and . . . built up into wholes embodying our revolutionary interpretation of events.”47 With Leo Seltzer, Lester Balog, Robert Del Duca, and others, he made among the earliest social documentary ƒlms of the Depression, including hunger 1932: The National Hunger March to Washington (1932–1933), Bonus March (1932), and America Today (1933).48 Unlike Social Realist painting, these ƒlms were shown in union halls where they could reach the working class di- rectly. According to Brody, “The Workers Film and Photo League carried on the struggle on two fronts: (1) by making ƒlms aimed to bring to proletarian message of class stuggle to the working class audiences and (2) to expose and combat the Hollywood lies that ƒll the American screens.”49 By the time Neel met Brody he was no longer the active and innovative artist he had been. Nonetheless, his beliefs had not changed. Even as late as his Jump Cut interview in 1977, Brody confessed that as a member of the So- cialist Media Group in Santa Monica he was “still trying.”50 Throughout his career as a critic and ƒlmmaker, his approach to art paralleled Neel’s: “I am not a disinterested art-for-art’s saker. The most ‘escapist’ art is, by that very fact, sterile at best and reactionary at worst . . . What is art if it is not to ‘engage’ . . . and ‘enrage’ too.”51 In 1946, well after the dissolution of the League, Brody founded Horizon Films “to combat the alarming increase in racial and reli- gious tension in our country—using the double barreled weapon of truth and 16mm ƒlm.”52 Like all of Neel’s “proletarian” portraits from these years, her many portraits of Sam from the 1940s and 1950s relate the left-wing “hero” to his era. The sensitive intellectual from 1940 becomes by 1958 (ƒg. 58) the still handsome, ever resolute proletarian with a black t-shirt and crossed arms, de- fensively “wearing his politics on his sleeve.” In contrast, Neel’s portrait of another of her intellectual mentors, Mike The Cold War Battles /79

Gold (1952, ƒg. 59), appears much more establishment. After the New Masses ceased publication in 1948, Gold had moved to Paris, where he served as a correspondent for Masses & Mainstream and the Daily World, returning to the States in 1951. Neel’s 1952 portrait of Gold was painted when his reputation and that of proletarian literature in general was in decline. Her painting was one contribution to an effort to rehabilitate the writer’s importance; another was the publication of The Mike Gold Reader in 1954, compiled by the editor of Masses & Mainstream, Samuel Sillen. For her “rehab,” Neel depicts Gold as the eminence grise of his profession, in appearance quite different from his revolutionary youth. Like Neel, Gold had crafted a persona that was calculated to present an “oppositional” image to middle-class propriety in the 1930s. According to Joseph Freeman, Gold “af- fected dirty shirts, a big black, uncleaned stetson with the brim of a sombrero, smoked stinking, twisted Italian three-cent cigars, and spat frequently and vig- orously on the „oor...”53 Neel would have understood the signiƒcance of these props, and if the tobacco-spitting revolutionary is now nowhere in evi- dence, it was because a new persona was required by the times. Seated before us is a handsome, well-groomed man in sport coat, tie, and vest, seated at his desk with his publications. Neel thus represents him as the very image of the Ivy League academic intellectual Gold spent a lifetime railing against.54 The products of his intellectual work, the New Masses, with its red cover, and the Daily Worker, open to his column “Change the World!” are fully in evidence as testimony to his place in American communist literature. As in the Fearing portrait, Neel links her work to his in the background, where she reprises the composition of her cityscapes from the 1940s to create a reference to Gold’s art of the tenement. The portrait thus legitimates Gold’s proletarian literature as part of the American intellectual tradition. Gold had done the same for Neel the previous year by arranging to have her work shown at the New Playwright’s Theatre, which was founded in the mid- 1920s by Gold, John Dos Passos, and John Howard Lawson to present “mass plays done for workers at prices that workers can afford.”55 From April 23 to May 23, 1951, Neel exhibited twenty-four paintings at the theater; in addition, a small brochure was published for which Gold supplied the introduction:

Alice has for years lived with her children in a Harlem tenement. Her studio is the kitchen and her models the neighbors and the streets. She comes from an old Philadelphia family dating back to the Revolution. But her paintings reveal that here is her true family. In solitude and poverty, Alice has . . . become . . . the ƒrst clear and beautiful voice of Spanish Harlem. She reveals not only its desperate poverty, but its rich and generous soul . . . ALICE NEEL is a pioneer of socialist realism in American 80 / Neel’s Social Realist Art

painting. For this reason, the New Playwrights Theatre, dedicated to the same cause, presents her paintings to its audiences, who will know how to understand, appreciate and encourage one of their own.56

In describing her as “a pioneer of socialist realism in American painting,” Gold annointed Neel his counterpart in the visual arts, pointedly using the Russian term to acknowledge her political afƒliation. In her portrait, Neel has referenced socialist realism by using one of its tropes, the wise teacher, who, like Stalin in Shurpin’s portrait, embodies a vision of the future. Neel skirts the level of Shurpin’s empty platitude, however, by granting her sitter a human complexity utterly lacking in the Russian work. Gold is both an American bourgeois intellectual and a communist: the personiƒcation of the contradic- tion that was the CPUSA.57 Until the 1970s Neel’s work, like Gold’s, was often criticized as a sort of vi- sual journalism, lacking in formal strength. In the October 24, 1970, New York Times, Hilton Kramer praised her ability to render the faces of her sitters with an “uncommon intensity,” but faulted the “formal structure” of the paintings, which failed because she was a “hostage to [her sitter’s] immediate feelings.” Just as literary critics such as James Bloom and Morris Dickstein have recently revised the negative assessment of Gold, so by 1983, Ted Castle found in Neel’s portraits not a short, quickly dissipated burst of intensity, but a broad so- cial critique: “She has done the work of a whole generation of artists who were afraid for their lives as artists if they were to portray the actual conditions of so- ciety...”58 Both artists’ reputations suffered in part because of their commu- nist politics; when the Cold War had thawed sufƒciently, their merits—and the importance of their contribution to the tradition of socially concerned art in the United States—could be acknowledged. Although with the end of the Cold War it is possible to appreciate the strengths of their work, both artists do fall into the trap of sentimentally attrib- uting human virtues such as courage and endurance to the lower classes, and vices such as greed and moral turpitude to the upper. Gold’s verbal portraits of communist heroes consistently in„ate them to Bunyanesque proportions and cast them as characters out of American mythology. For instance, in his essay “John Reed and the Real Thing” (1927), Gold describes the revolutionary as “a cowboy out of the West, six feet high, steady eyes, boyish face; a brave, gay, open-handed young giant.”59 In her portraits of communist leaders in the 1950s, Neel also draws on stereotypes from American popular culture. Painted in 1950, the sixty-two-year old journalist Art (Thomas Arthur) Shields (ƒg. 60) is made to resemble a Gary Cooper-like cowboy with his thumb placed in his pants pocket like a gun in a holster; our aging hero is still capable of a ƒght. The Cold War Battles /81

Like Gold, Shields was an old hand at proletarian journalism, ƒrst coming to prominence with his account of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, They Are Doomed (1921). This taciturn paragon of integrity echoes not only Gold’s he-man por- traits but Shields’s own prose.60 Like both of these American communists, Neel turned to the American cowboy mythology of rugged individualism for her left-wing, collective art. On the other hand, Ford Union organizer Bill McKie (ƒg. 61), with his arthritic ƒngers, can barely hold his pipe, much less a gun. So Neel substitutes another heroic type from American popular culture: the mild-mannered citi- zen goaded into action by injustice, more Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) than Gary Cooper in High Noon (1952). In 1953, when Neel painted McKie’s portrait, Phillip Bonosky published a biography of the Scottish labor organizer, Brother Bill McKie. Following Bonosky’s description, Neel presents a “lean long-faced man with mild blue eyes, a foreign cut to his dark suit.” Indeed, he looks more like management than a former member of the CIO who between 1927 and 1941 helped to found the UAW and to orga- nize a major strike.61 Neel’s proletarian portraits of the 1950s thus merge the two con„icting “hu- manisms” of capitalist individualism and socialist realism. Wishing to rein- terpret social realism without falling into the trap of socialist realism, Neel skillfully incorporated into her portraits the very contradictions her sitters were forced to live. Her proletarian portraits from the 1950s make explicit the dis- junctions between the heroes of American popular culture and those of the Soviet worker’s paradise, between the class of the proletarian writer and the union activist, between artistic freedom and ideological commitment. The proletarian writer (Gold) as college professor, the union organizer (McKie) as debonair sophisticate, the aging journalist (Shields) as cowboy: either these men are not what they seem, or they are something different from what they once were. In either event, they are anomalies, the period’s pariahs. Rather than embodying the “essential driving forces” of society, they are “men as they live their own history,” that is, their own history in all of its contradictions. Neel’s closest associates in the Party were male, and there are few compara- ble portraits of women communist writers from the 1950s, despite their impor- tant literary contributions.62 Despite Mother Bloor’s commentary, the attitude of the Party leadership toward its female members remained less than progres- sive.63 Nonetheless, from the 1940s on, female Marxist critics had provided an ongoing critique of the depiction of women in American literature, ƒlm, and advertising, quite apart from their important contributions to left-wing litera- ture. Articles by Joy Davidson, for instance, on the image of women in Holly- wood ƒlm presage feminist criticism of the late 1970s.64 As her “feminist” 82 / Neel’s Social Realist Art interpretations of social realist themes attest, Neel was certainly not insensitive to these issues, even if she believed that in general society’s inequities were attributable to economic status rather than to gender. Neel’s most important portrait of a left-wing woman artist in the 1950s was that of the black playwright and actress Alice Childress (c. 1950, ƒg. 62). One of Neel’s rare proƒle portraits, the actress directs her gaze out the window to the street. Dressed in a formal, strapless dress, with a prominent gold medal- lion hanging from her neck that makes her look a bit like Queen Elizabeth, Childress appears to be in costume, quite oblivious to the eccentric impres- sion the clothing creates “offstage.” Whatever else she may be—and her race is indeterminate—Childress occupies a world of her own creation. In all probability, Neel met Childress at the Amercan Negro Theatre in Harlem, where she was an actress and director in the 1950s. Childress also published articles regularly in Masses & Mainstream, and in 1949 she starred in her loosely autobiographical one-act play Florence. Published in Masses & Mainstream in 1950, Florence is a poignant defense of the black voice in the arts.65 Just beginning to be known at the time of Neel’s painting, Childress’s reputation is now secure.66 Neel’s afƒliation with Masses & Mainstream and the intellectual left positioned her to recognize this artist’s importance.67 After the mid-1950s, Neel ceases painting Party literati and concentrates her efforts on the residents of Spanish Harlem. When she returns to her series of leaders a decade later, it is to record a Party suffering decline. The transition from the late 1950s to the late 1960s, when the series resumes, is charted in several letters from 1958 between Neel and Gold. Gold was to spend the last decade of his life in San Francisco, where he began but never completed his autobiography. Their letters reveal that Neel was a vital link to his old life. In one letter, Gold encouraged her to think of her slide presentations in terms of proletarian theater: “I think you could get up a good act there—write out an interesting human series of notes on each painting...”68 This encouragement arrived at a key moment, when Neel had decided that the time had come for her to get “off the shelf.” Gold then described the “beatnik” population, which he compared to “our own New York village—thirty years later.” Complimenting her on the draw- ings she had published in the 1958 Mainstream,69 he confessed that “I did not like it when those snoot young intellectuals cut my name off the list of edi- tors.”70 Clearly the editors no longer felt that “writers of his mold [were] ur- gently needed,” as Sillen had declared in 1952. Neel, on the other hand, was at last granted a portfolio: four full-page ink drawings, of Georgie Arce, Sam, a young woman, and a tree at Spring Lake—not a socialist realist hero in sight. Gold further complained that, despite his intentions, he was not able to stick to writing his book, and again contrasted his own lack of recent achievement The Cold War Battles /83 with Alice’s continuing productivity. The 1958 date of the letter indicates a line of demarcation between the old and the new left in politics, literature, and in Neel’s career as well. Gold recognized that San Francisco was the center of a new movement with the creative energy of the old Village, but he was not able to join it. Neel, on the other hand, would not only paint Allen Ginsberg’s portrait (c. 1966, ƒg. 63), but, the year following Gold’s letter, was a member of the cast in the classic Beat ƒlm Pull My Daisy (1959). For Neel, Beat literature would have represented another viable opposi- tional stance to mainstream culture in the 1950s, one that had strong echoes of Gold’s proletarian literature from the 1930s.71 Yet despite his debt to proletar- ian literature, Ginsberg would hardly have ended “Howl” with words like Gold: “Lenin! / I see the bloody birth you will bring.” And for his part, Gold would not have been caught dead chanting mantras in a Yoga position in a Greenwich Village coffee house. Neel’s portrait of Ginsberg as a drugged out mystic, painted in the mid-1960s, could not be more different from the stolid portrait of Gold from 1952. For Neel, admiring and recording them both, it was all part of the changing Zeitgeist from the ƒfties to the sixties.72 In 1967, when Gold died, Neel pulled her portrait of him off the shelf and painted his memorial, not in terms of socialist realism but in her own “per- sonal rhetoric,” (Mike Gold, In Memoriam (1893–1967), ƒg. 64). Propping the painting on a dresser, draping it with black cloth, and placing a skull and pitcher of lilacs (the „ower of mourning) on a low stool, she created a private shrine—the very opposite of a socialist realist icon—to the now-neglected au- thor. The homemade, heartfelt altar was an appropriate “funeral,” because for Gold communism was a religion, a faith he maintained until his death. Al- though homemade altars with portraits of deceased relatives are common in homes throughout Latin America, as Neel well knew, they look unfamiliar— strange—in the North American context. Neel created an unorthodox memo- rial to an orthodox communist whose thinking, within the American context, was subversive. So, too, Neel’s memorial subverts the clichés of socialist realist monuments and brings us back to the historical reality of place and time: Gold exited stage right in 1967, at the moment of the ascendency of the New Left, and shortly before the student protests would erupt at , a few blocks from Neel’s apartment. The continuing in„uence of proletarian literature and of Gold’s work in particular can be found throughout Neel’s career, surfacing in her choice and description of her subjects. For instance, in her slide lectures Neel described Fuller Brush Man (1965, ƒg. 10) in a way that suggests how thoroughly she had absorbed the subject matter and content of proletarian literature: “He was Jew- ish and he had been in Dachau. Those things in his pocket are prizes for buy- ing some of his brushes . . . He said he had to make twenty-ƒve sales a day for 84 / Neel’s Social Realist Art

Fuller Brush or lose his job. But he was so happy to be in America.”73 This per- fect proletarian antihero, whom Neel described as a ƒxture in her neighbor- hood, also happened to be a character in one of Gold’s poems, “The Happy Corpse” (Masses & Mainstream, July 1952).

Doggedly all day he climbs up and down the steep apartment houses a gray little Chaplin refugee escaped from the Hitler furnaces to become a Fuller Brush salesman here now he is 100 per cent American . . . Hitler’s victim now believes in the Chase National Bank . . .”74

A brilliant visualization of Gold’s poem and of the “Death of a Salesman” liter- ary conceit in general, the painting exempliƒes the close correspondence be- tween Neel’s revived social realism and Gold’s writings. By this time, however, Neel’s portraits had taken a new direction: her focus was on the New York art network and the extended family. The last commu- nist forefathers in Neel’s proletarian portrait gallery, two of whom will be dis- cussed here, constitute a coda, a memento mori for a political party that had been born in the same decade as the men themselves. They were painted in the changed political climate of the 1960s and 1970s, during the period of in- creased international exchange, when the Party’s hard-line rhetoric had be- come increasingly empty. Now that these men could no longer conceivably be regarded as a threat to the U.S. government, they are presented as citizens wor- thy of respect. As with Mike Gold, Neel painted David Gordon in both ƒgurative and still- life form. Gordon, who replaced Bonosky as cultural page editor for the Daily World, had written a poem titled “America” in 1927 at age eighteen that led to his imprisonment on trumped up charges of obscenity.75 A Party activist and art critic thereafter, Gordon died of cancer in June 1973. In that year, Neel painted two portraits of Gordon: the ƒrst in the “aging radical” mode, the sec- ond a private memorial. In the ƒrst (ƒg. 65) Gordon is all soft curves in a light blue sweatsuit and dark blue beret. Gentleness, wistfulness, and fatigue now characterize the former revolutionary poet.76 Initially, David Gordon seems to resemble Neel’s portrait of the composer Virgil Thomson (1971, ƒg. 66) with his collar-length hair, slight paunch, and tired eyes; in other words, he is typed as an accomplished artist and critic at the end of his career, rather than as a communist. Unlike Gordon, however, whose kind eyes address the viewer directly, Thomson, a paunchy, tight-lipped, pale male, personiƒes the self- important academic. During this period, then, Neel’s “Forefathers of Ameri- The Cold War Battles /85 can Communism” series intervenes in high or elite culture so as to broaden its spectrum and provide an opportunity to compare the later careers of 1930s radicals. Revising establishment decisions about which people should be granted historical importance, the series contrasts the successful with the un- successful artist, casting each in new roles. In the 1930s, Thomson had been a left-wing sympathizer, and one of his early successes came with his score for Pare Lorenz’s documentary The River (1937), which helped propagandize the programs of the TVA. But according to his biographer, his position as art critic for the New York Herald Tribune, after 1940, provided him with a platform from which to promote his own ca- reer.77 As a writer for an establishment paper, Thomson’s criticism and music gained an authority that Gordon’s writings could not; Neel paints a lumbering elephant burdened under the weight of careerism. Jar from Samarkand (ƒg. 67), the second of Neel’s portraits of Gordon, indi- cates how closely Neel’s politics by the 1970s were intertwined with personal friendships, and her proletarian portrait gallery a memento mori. As at Gold’s death six years earlier, Neel marked Gordon’s passing with a still life, a nature morte, but one with even less public meaning than Gold’s “altar.” Neel had de- livered a talk at Gordon’s funeral in October 1973, as had Allen Ginsberg, and, the public amenities dispensed with, Neel could address her own feelings of loss in the painting. The critic Lawrence Alloway has argued that by the 1970s the shift from ab- straction to realism “had a special signiƒcance for feminist art . . . In general, the new realism is rich in the iconography of relationships . . . [S]till lifes of the ’70s are personalized, with their images of objects redolent of artists’ lives.”78 In the Gordon memorial, Neel contrasts the pregnant globes of bright fruit with the small, dark pottery vase Gordon had purchased for her in Soviet Asia and that his wife, Lottie, delivered to Neel after his death.79 Solemn, motion- less, the jar is like a funeral urn. Despite its small size, its emotional weight tips the table top up like a seesaw, life freighted toward death. In 1936, Lozowick had argued that one could paint a “revolutionary” still life; in 1973 Neel painted a still life that memorialized the death of revolutionary hopes through her per- sonal feelings of loss. One plus one was becoming one minus one. Similarly, when Neel’s social realist colleagues at last enter the portrait gallery in these years, they are depicted as historical relics. Stylistically, The Soyer Brothers (1973, ƒg. 68) returns us to the Depression era, and quite point- edly to the art of the Soyers themselves. The aged twins, one year older than Neel, sit huddled on the daybed like two timid mice. Their looks of quiet resig- nation and their slumped bodies immediately bring to mind their paintings of unemployed men from the 1930s. Neel has even reduced her palette to the neutrals grey and brown, the colors of so much 1930s art.80 86 / Neel’s Social Realist Art

Dressed in their drab business suits, they look more like shopkeepers than artists, perhaps a reference to their academic roles as teachers. Raphael (on the left) described himself simply as a “representational painter,” which, he com- mented, was synonymous with a “social painter,” because it expressed “the spirit of the time.”81 In his 1981 interview with Milton Brown for the Archives of American Art, he was at pains to emphasize that “I never painted a picture of people in a factory. I never painted a picture of people beating up strikers.”82 Yet apart from the differences their in attitudes toward the relationship of art to politics, Neel and Raphael Soyer in particular could be said to share twin ca- reers. Soyer painted primarily portraits of relatives, friends, and fellow artists, including Neel. Both painted the female nude, including the pregnant nude, frankly and with lack of idealization, although Soyer de-emphasized the body’s eroticism by conƒning the nude to the studio.83 The two contemporaries thus occupied the same place on the spectrum of American postwar art, that of the “old-fashioned” realist who believed that the human ƒgure, well drawn, was the basis of art. To Soyer, Neel belonged to that tradition. “I know,” he said, “that I have great feelings for someone like Alice Neel. I think she’s a very strong painter, a very strong representatonal painter.”84 For her part, even though she never explicitly praised his work, Neel valued Soyer’s advice, as the photograph of the two of them at her 1968 Graham gallery exhibit reveals (ƒg. 69). Certainly Neel recognized the struggle involved in maintaining a place for representational art in the postwar New York artworld. That place, anachro- nistic but still viable, is the subject of the portrait. The last entry in the communist wing of the portrait gallery personiƒes the Party’s increasing ossiƒcation. In 1980, when Neel painted a portrait of the Chairman of the Communist Party USA, Gus Hall (ƒg. 70), she hoped it would be shown in her upcoming Moscow exhibition. Without doubt, Neel wished to create a socialist realist portrait along Soviet lines by picturing a ruggedly handsome man of the people in a Russian fur hat. However, Hall re- fused to let the portrait travel, much to Neel’s displeasure. When she asked for an explanation, he responded, “I am always uncomfortable about anything that tends to give the impression of immodesty, egocentrism, individualism and that any way feeds a tendence [sic] toward a cult of the personality.”85 No doubt he simply disliked looking hidebound, but his expression of dog- matism nonetheless epitomizes the rhetoric of the Party, which from the 1960s on refused to respond to calls from within its ranks for reform. His tenacity is suggested by his bulldog-like face, suggestive of the apparatchik rather than a visionary. After the fall of the communist state, Hall was interviewed in the September 1991 issue of Time magazine, where he was described in patroniz- ing terms as the “80-year old party patriarch”—“the last of the Red-Hot believ- ers—,” who refused to recognize that “the party is ƒnally over.”86 Neel pre- The Cold War Battles /87 sents a ƒgurehead, wooden but tenacious, who represents the state both of the Party and of socialist realist art. Neel’s proletarian portrait gallery spans the history of American commu- nism from the 1930s to the 1980s, and insists that these leaders will not be writ- ten out of American history—or into it—simply as enemies or crackpots. Cen- tral to Neel’s cultural, if not her political life, the CPUSA did provide her with her link to history, as well as the intellectual framework for her social realist work, and an ongoing underground network of moral support. In return Neel celebrated the idealism of individuals who, like herself, had maintained the courage of their convictions. And if those convictions became increasingly narrow-minded, as in the case of Gus Hall, she would record that part of his- tory as well. He was still a “hero” even if he was ƒghting a losing battle in creak- ing armor. As the Old Left gave way to the New, Neel occasionally lent her name and/ or art to the growing ƒeld of protest art. However, there are no counterparts to Nazis Murder Jews to protest the war in Vietnam. Her “protest” came in the form of portraits of young men fated to ƒght in it. Only in her occasional illus- trations did she continue to use art as a vehicle for overt political protest. In 1971, the artists Rudolf Baranik and Benny Andrews compiled The Attica Book. A joint effort of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition and Artists and Writers Protest Against the War in Vietnam, The Attica Book served as “a battle cry and lament—the Guernica of America’s dispossessed”87 for the brutal sup- pression of the riots at the upstate New York prison. That statement could have been written in the 1930s, and the artists who contributed to the book did in- clude some of the well-known Left artists of the previous generation: Jacob Lawrence, Romare Beardon, and Antonio Frasconi. But the generation of artists reared in the 1930s and 1940s was also included: , , Duane Hanson, and May Stevens. In this context, Neel’s untitled draw- ing of protesters with raised ƒsts looked as if it had wandered accidentally out of Masses & Mainstream, deƒnitely out of the mainstream in this context. Of greater historical interest than Neel’s speciƒc artistic contribution to The Attica Book is the support that Neel began to receive at this time from the artists-activists of the New Left. Rudolf Baranik and his wife, May Stevens, who ƒrst met Neel through Phillip Bonosky in about 1954, were especially support- ive. Both teachers as well as activists, Baranik and Stevens invited Neel to lec- ture to their classes at the and Queens College. These served as important “trial runs” for her later lecture-performances. Active in the women’s movement after 1970, Stevens wrote an important article on Neel’s nonpor- trait work for Women’s Studies in 1978.88 Stevens’s link to the women’s move- ment was crucial for Neel’s later career, despite the fact that she never fully ac- cepted the idea of a collective art, whether communist or feminist.89 88 / Neel’s Social Realist Art

In the 1980s, with Neel’s reputation established, she was included in im- portant exhibitions of 1930s art.90 As the ƒrst evidence of a thaw in the Cold War appeared in the early 1960s, the United States and Soviet Union began to permit cultural exchange as an ostensibly neutral ground on which the oppos- ing systems could meet. As Khrushchev permitted greater latitude for the vi- sual arts in Russia, even permitting some to be shown, if not praised, the Iron Curtain was raised to permit American artists with the proper credentials to exhibit there as well. Neel no doubt considered participation in such exchanges as important as any of her “New Left” activities, and her corre- spondence with Mike Gold and Phillip Bonosky attests to her ongoing inquiries about the possibilities of exhibiting in Russia. Her ƒrst opportunity came in 1960, with the U.S.-U.S.S.R. Gift Exhibition, initiated by Rockwell Kent for the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship.91 This earliest of the “revivals” of social realist art was unquestionably one of its most compre- hensive. During the late 1950s, Bonosky helped Neel keep the faith with positive re- ports of life behind the Iron Curtain.92 His letter from August 1960 assured Neel that he would work on a solo exhibition at the Moscow Artists Union but could not do so until after the “joint exhibition of American realism,” the Friendship exhibition. Twenty years later, in July 1981, an exhibition of eighty- ƒve paintings by Alice Neel opened at the exhibition hall of the Union of Artists of the U.S.S.R. on Gorky Street. Bonosky played an important role in its organization, but Neel herself paid for the price of shipping and for her fam- ily’s travel costs. Bonosky authored the catalog essay, which predictably touted her communist credentials. The text then departs from “Old Left” rhetoric to brie„y summarize the arguments of American scholars on the in„uence of Cold War politics on the critical reception of abstract expressionism:

[A]rt had been taken over rather aggressively by abstract and other non-ƒgurative forms. And to the degree that their emergence in time coincided with the politics of McCarthyism in the 1950s they were also politically sanctioned . . . Only the left listened to her. As for the attitude of the bourgeoisie which now makes such a fuss about her name, well, at that time Alice Neel had simply ceased to exist . . . [In America] the ofƒcial press . . . has distorted the meaning of the creative work . . . [H]er participation in the struggle for peace is not simply rage at a “stormy life.”93

Bonosky was right about the distortion of the meaning of Neel’s work in the American critical press, but he failed to acknowledge Neel’s complicity in it. In Russia she geared her press statements to the Soviet audience, praising a sys- tem where “the government owes you everything.”94 When Neel arrived in Moscow, the ediƒce of the communist state was crumbling, taking with it the ofƒcial art of socialist realism. Yet, publicly at least, the Party line was rigidly The Cold War Battles /89 maintained.95 With the Zhdanovist façade still ƒrmly intact but increasingly under stress from the guerilla attacks of the artistic underground, it is hard to gauge who the audience for her work might have been and what interpreta- tions it may have elicited.96 In spite of the interest in the exhibit on the part of the general public, one can speculate that in Moscow in the period of late communism, American so- cial realism appeared to be the naive, well-meaning sibling of its cynical, of- ƒcial “negative twin,” socialist realism. Even though Brezhnev was still in power, and Gorbachev’s glasnost would not be instituted until 1986, nonethe- less, unofƒcial art, even art overtly critical of the government, was widely toler- ated and respected, whereas exhibits of socialist realism were ignored. Among the more prominent artists of the 1970s and early 1980s were the Sots artists, among them Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid. According to the art his- torian Margarita Tupitsyn, the Sots artists “proposed to view socialist realism and propaganda imagery not as mere kitsch or simply a vehicle for bureau- cratic manipulation, but as a rich ƒeld of stereotypes and myths which they could transform into a new language, one able to deconstruct ofƒcial myths on their own terms.”97 To Russian artists familiar with the profound cynicism of paintings such as Komar & Melamid’s portrait of Stalin as a narcissist praying to his own image (Stalin in Front of a Mirror, 1982–1983, ƒg. 71), viewing Neel’s portrait of Mike Gold (Mike Gold, In Memoriam, 1967), an altarpiece expressive of genuine faith in the ideals of communism, must have created a strong conceptual dissonance. Whereas Neel memorialized the passing of an era with continuing respect for its intellectual elite, Komar & Melamid force the viewer to look at a shoeless tyrant in the process of creating a false public face for ubiquitous distribution. With the end of the Cold War, the half-century artistic communication gap between East and West was bridged with remarkable symmetry, affording Ko- mar & Melamid comfortable artistic passage to the United States. However, this postmodern, postcommunist art also marked the beginning of an era to which Alice Neel’s humanistically based social realism no longer belonged. In 1984, the year of Neel’s death, Lucy Lippard articulated the premises of a new art of social concern: “It is understood by now that all art is ideological and all art is used politically by the right or the left, with the conscious and uncon- scious assent of the artist. There is no neutral zone.”98 However obvious such a statement would have seemed to Neel, the means for critiquing the system had profoundly changed. With the disintegration of the totalitarian Russian state that was communist in name only, a new, postcommunist social realism, less self-righteous, less convinced of the existence of unassailable truth, began to emerge, and with it the outlines of a transnational oppositional art that began to rewrite yet again the agendas of both social and socialist realism. 6 El Barrio: Portrait of Spanish Harlem

I love you Harlem your life your pregnant women, your relief lines outside the bank, full of women who no dress in Saks 5th ave would ƒt, teeth miss- ing, weary, out of shape, little black arms around their necks clinging to their skirts all the wear and worry of struggle on their faces. what a treasure of goodness and life shambles thru the streets, abandoned, despised, charged the most, given the worst / I love you for electing Marcantonio, and him for being what he is And for the rich deep vein of human feeling buried under your ƒre engines your poverty and your loves Alice Neel, unpublished notes, Neel Arts, New York City

In 1938, pregnant with a son by her lover José Santiago, Neel moved from Greenwich Village to Spanish Harlem to be close to José’s relatives. She marked the move with a small painting that caricatures the two of them walking up- town through , her belly echoing the shape of his guitar. She titled the painting The Flight Into Egypt, and in contrast with the vital artistic and intellectual milieu she had enjoyed for the previous six years in Greenwich Village, she must have felt as if she were entering exile in the desert. Yet Neel chose to make this important time of transition, in her life and in the history of left-wing art generally, into an opportunity to initiate a new social realist

90 El Barrio /91 project, a collective portrait of the residents of Spanish Harlem. During the 1940s, when Negro civil rights became a major issue for the CPUSA, Neel staked out a new center of activity, quite different from the territory to the north claimed by Party activists. There, by calling into question current deƒni- tions—political, anthopological, and artistic—of “race,” Neel crossed bound- aries that had been created by the artiƒcial partitioning of our society along a black-white axis. The community is depicted through two genres; ƒrst, the posed portraits of the residents, and second, the physical environment, the social container or body. The two genres are related compositionally: frontal and imperturbable, each is both face and façade. These face-ades present themselves for viewing but cannot be penetrated. Her project is to make visible a culture through its peoples and its dwellings, but not to categorize. Instead, the two “fronts” on which she approaches the subject represent two potential avenues for know- ing, rather than assembled bodies of knowledge. The strength of Neel’s project lies in its very limitations. For the most part, her sitters sit in her space, their bodies and faces revealing their response to the presence of an unfamiliar white woman. They frequently remain unnamed, or acknowledge the strangeness of their names by anglicizing them: Call me Joe (1958, ƒg. 72). She does not speak for them; rather, she makes them visible, as individuals, family members, and as part of an ethnic group. Although she does not “interpret” them or visualize their habitats and their activities for our interpretive gaze, she gives them citi- zenship by welcoming them into her space. Neel not only uses two genres but also frequently uses compositional dou- bling to underscore the question of sameness/difference. The children in Two Black Girls (ƒg. 7) appear African American, but their Hispanic names (Anto- nia and Carmen Encarnacion), parenthesized in the title, establish dual Black/Hispanic “racial” identities, just as their contrasting poses and facial ex- pressions suggest different personality types. Doubling can also be used to con- „ate distinctions and cross boundaries; for instance, the tenement façades in Fire Escape (1948, ƒg. 73), uniform in their repeated patterns of blank win- dows, set into question that sameness by doubling it against the „at pattern of , so that differences between substance and image, inside and outside, become indistinguishable. Neel’s project is not an art of the studio addressed to an educated public of potential purchasers, but an art of the neighborhood that permitted a class largely invisible to the middle-class culture to view itself. The process of painting was thus an honoriƒc one with a communal purpose, rather than the means to an end of museum exhibition or private ownership. Although the predominance of children in Neel’s portraits from the 1940s and 1950s can be explained by the fact that her primary energies were directed toward the raising of her two boys, her focus on children also re„ects the fact 92 / Neel’s Social Realist Art that during the Cold War years, when women were pressured to return to the home, America became a child-centered society. According to the sociologist Elaine Tyler May, mothers were now informed that they were “the architects of peace,” and that “The new philosophy of child guidance makes of parent- hood not a dull, monotonous routine job, but an absorbing creative profes- sion.”1 May’s Homeward Bound argues that “The powerful political consensus that supported cold war policies abroad and anticommunism at home fueled conformity to the suburban family ideal.”2 One indicator of the importance of the child in the postwar family was the custom of commissioning their por- traits, which would then adorn the living room wall. Whether paintings or photographs, these images confronted children with their idealized selves as the focus of their world. The children Neel painted, on the other hand, did not come from homes where their own faces were likely to occupy the center of the family space. In convincing the children of Spanish Harlem to participate in this ritual, Neel temporarily erased class differences. During the 1940s and 1950s, when the middle class migrated to the sub- urbs, Neel painted what the sociologist would call in 1962 “,” “an America of poverty . . . hidden today in a way that it never was before. Its millions are socially invisible to us...”3 Ten years earlier, the publication of Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man had articulated the effect of that social invisibility on the “emotional experience” of non- whites. As he wrote in the ƒrst and last paragraphs of his Prologue: I am an invisible man . . . I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me . . . When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or ƒgments of their imagination—indeed, everything or anything except me . . . I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my in- visibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me? Responsibility rests upon recognition, and recognition is a form of agreement.4 Both sociologist and novelist isolate the key strategy by which inequitable class relations are maintained: a willed social myopia. Neel’s Spanish Harlem project achieves a pictorial recognition between classes by having her sitters address her—that is, address the whiteness that was equally invisible because normative. East Harlem, the area between and the East River, which, bounded by 125th and 96th streets on the north and south, was at the turn of the century an ethnic slum housing a populace mostly of Russian Jewish, Ital- ian, and Irish origin. After World War I, Puerto Ricans, as well as smaller groups of Cubans and Dominicans, moved into the area in large numbers, providing El Barrio /93 the area with its description, “Spanish” (Hispanic) Harlem. By 1958, a total of 600,000 ƒrst- or second-generation Puerto Ricans lived in New York City, and although after 1950 the greatest concentration was found in the South Bronx, East Harlem remained identiƒed with the Puerto Rican community.5 Called “El Barrio” (the neighborhood), its character was quite different from Black Harlem to the north and west. Perhaps the most signiƒcant differ- ence resided in the way “race” was deƒned. Black Harlem had been settled by migrants from the American South, long victims of American racism. The res- idents’ lives were shaped by the North American concept of a Negro race, at the time so rigidly deƒned that the ludicrous “one-drop” rule (one drop of Negro blood categorizing one as Negro) went unchallenged. The immigrants from the Caribbean came from a culture where the mixing of “races” was an accepted fact, rather than an illegal act of miscegenation. Although skin color and associated characteristics of hair texture and facial features frequently served as an indicator of class (that is, the more upper-class, the whiter the pop- ulation tended to be), variations were so subtly differentiated that black/white distinctions simply could not be applied. Whereas in the United States, Puerto Ricans would be categorized by the census as either Negro or White, their own range of classiƒcations included “brown” and “colored.” Darker-skinned Puerto Ricans were described simply as “de color” on the Island, but when set- tling in the United States they were faced with an inappropriate either/or cen- sus designation.6 Inevitably, this led to con„ict, including gang violence, be- tween the two marginalized groups. The understanding Neel gained in Cuba of the differing concepts of race in North and Latin America permitted her to question the North’s monolithic racial categories. She thus exempliƒes the arguments made by her friend from the Cuban years, Nicolas Guillen, in his essay “Havana to New York” in the June 1949 Masses & Mainstream, which acknowledged that although white and Cuban cultures may be inclined to overgeneralization and simpliƒcation when writing about one another, such crosscultural analysis could just as frequently result in insight.7 A master „esh painter, Neel represented every nuance of skin shade within her family groups, as if to ask, “Where does black end and white begin? What does “race” mean in a “mixed” culture? How do visual differences matter?” Several years before Neel began her Spanish Harlem series in 1938–1939, Meyer Schapiro had published an essay, “Race, Nationality and Art,” in Art Front (March 1936), that ƒrst questioned the notion of “race” within art criti- cism. An eloquent refutation of Nazi ideology, Schapiro’s essay had chal- lenged the accepted notion that there are identiƒable racial or national char- acteristics in art, reminding the reader that 94 / Neel’s Social Realist Art

Such distictions in art have been a large element in the propaganda for war and fas- cism and in the pretense of peoples that they are eternally different from and supe- rior to others and are, therefore, justiƒed in oppressing them . . . The idea of a pure race is a myth scorned by honest anthropologists.8

Both Schapiro’s essay and Neel’s project anticipate the most controversial disquisition on race at the time, “The Races of Man,” written by two Colum- bia University anthropologists, Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltƒsh. Presaging postwar centrist discourse, it argued that “The Bible story of Adam and Eve . . . told centuries ago the same truth that science has shown today: that all the peoples of the earth are a single family and have a common origin.”9 Although Neel never articulated her opinion about current anthropological theories of race, she would have sympathized with the authors’ argument that racism had an economic base. “In any country every legal decision that upholds equal cit- izenship rights without regard to race or color, every labor decision that lessens the terror of being ‘laid-off ’ . . . can free people from fear. They need not look for scapegoats.”10 However, Neel’s Save Willie McGee suggests that she would have found naive at best the anthropologists’ efforts to conƒned the political problems of race relations solely to the arena of poverty. Moreover, in rejecting the idea of ƒxed racial characteristics, Neel distanced herself from the “African” premises on which much of the art of the Harlem Renaissance had been based. A decade before Schapiro’s essay was published, Alain Locke, in his 1925 introductory essay to the anthology The New Negro, had urged the artists of the Harlem Renaissance to deƒne Negro culture in terms of difference from the dominant white culture, and to look to African art as the basis for their own cultural expression. But the institution of slavery had all but eliminated those traditions. As Michael Leja observed with reference to primitivism in American art of the 1940s, “Laying such claim to African visual traditions would have required wresting these forms away from the dominant culture . . . What made such a move impossible, however, was the fact that African arts were only available to the Harlem artist through modernism . . . and its misreadings.”11 Whatever the weaknesses of its premises, Locke’s call had led to an unprecedented „owering of literature, art, theater, and music that remains the outstanding achievement of American art between the wars. Although a comparable development in music and literature would slowly take root in Spanish Harlem, there was no counterpart in the visual arts to a Palmer Hayden, a William H. Johnson, or a Jacob Lawrence. Nor did docu- mentary photographers of the Photo League, who were also creating impor- tant studies of Harlem life, include Spanish Harlem. The role of making a cre- ative document fell to Neel, who had adopted Hispanic culture. Neel’s art only rarely intersects with the artists of the Harlem Renaissance, for not only El Barrio /95 did she abandon “primitivism” by the early 1940s, Neel had no interest in the cycles of black history, religion, and mythology found in those artists’ works. She was not creating a separate cultural history, but a multicultural one. As a white woman with a nonwhite daughter and son, she would have understood from ƒrsthand experience the spurious and oppressive uses to which the con- cept of “race” had been put. Although Neel’s Spanish Harlem series was precipitated by her long-stand- ing political commitments, Spanish Harlem was not a site of intense Party activism. Indeed, Spanish Harlem’s diversity makes generalizations about its political base difƒcult. According to New Left historian Gerald Meyer, “El Barrio grew within Jewish East Harlem, a great center of Socialist Party poli- tics,”12 and as a result its newer residents also became radicalized. From 1934 to 1950 the district was represented in the U.S. Congress by the Italian Ameri- can member of the American Labor Party Vito Marcantonio, who served as a voice for Puerto Rican interests. In 1948, the CP candidate, Henry Wallace, carried the district, and in 1950 the American Labor Party candidate for Sen- ate, W. E. B. DuBois (shortly to join the Communist Party), received approxi- mately 45 percent of the vote in El Barrio.13 The problem with drawing con- clusions from this summary is that it assumes that the Hispanic immigrants were as politically active as their Jewish predecessors had been, when in fact less than 50 percent of the population voted in the 1960 elections.14 Mitigating the radical political legacy of Jewish East Harlem was the nature of poverty within the Puerto Rican community. According to sociologist Oscar Lewis’s study of an extended Puerto Rican family, La Vida (1965), the slow as- similation of Puerto Rican immigrants meant that many retained their conser- vative views and customs. Moreover, the culture of poverty itself moved with them from the island to the mainland, preventing the growth of active political organizations. Lewis characterized the culture of poverty by the lack of partici- pation of the poor in the larger institutions of society, and on the local level by a minimum of organization beyond the level of the nuclear or extended fam- ily.15 “The culture of poverty is both an adaptation and a reaction of the poor to their marginal position in a class-stratiƒed, highly individuated, capitalist soci- ety.”16 The very distinction Lewis makes between the (temporary) condition of poverty and the (stagnant) culture of poverty is based on the existence of local power bases, which were found throughout Black Harlem, but which Spanish Harlem lacked. As the social worker Patricia Cayo Sexton noted, the residents of Spanish Harlem appeared to have merely traded the green poverty of Puerto Rico for the grey poverty of New York.17 Neel’s apprenticeship for her Spanish Harlem portraits was served from 1935 to 1939, in the extensive series of paintings, watercolors, pastel, and pen- cil drawings she made of José Santiago, a musician (guitarist), whom Neel met 96 / Neel’s Social Realist Art when he was playing at a nightclub, La Casita, in the Village, and who would become an English teacher in Mexico later in life. The portraits, whether José is sleeping, reading, or playing the guitar, are almost all bust-length, and are, if anything, even more impenetrable than her subsequent Spanish Harlem work. Even when she paints him as a menacing demon against a ƒery ground (ƒg. 74), José’s handsome, square-jawed features are impassive. In her extended portraits, such as those of her daughter-in-law Nancy, she establishes a „exible, changing dynamic between herself and the sitter, choosing to emphasize one aspect or another of their personality type as she sees it changing over time. With José, however, there are few cues to personality, no expression on the face, and no motion in the body. There are occasional clues to his nationalist politics: in one watercolor (1936, ƒg. 75) his sheet music is titled “Puerto Rico Libre!” so that one can assume he supported Congressman Marcantonio’s bill, submitted that year, calling for “genuine independence [for Puerto Rico and for the declaration of] responsibility of the United States for the disastrous state of the economy of Puerto Rico...”18 Yet whatever his politics, José is in and of another world; his features and guitar signify “Latinness” but little more. He remains remote and foreign; whether awake or asleep, his eyes are always downcast, and he is absorbed in his own thoughts, dreams, or music. Together in bed, their two bodies form one contour on two different planes (Alice and José, c. 1938, ƒg. 76), which, despite their compositional union, is without physical contact or intimacy. Ex- pressing difference through the oppositions of light/dark, awake/asleep, full face/proƒle, Neel avoids the cliché of exoticism while acknowledging that his person is ultimately unfathomable. José’s one identifying attribute, his guitar, remains an abstract sign, a broad generalization for Latin music (José and Guitar, 1935, ƒg. 77). Neel’s interest in Latin music was fostered while she was living in Havana, and her interpreta- tion parallels instead that of the Puerto Rican writer Jesus Colón, whose col- lection of Daily Worker columns, A Puerto Rican in New York, was published in 1961. Writing in the tradition of Gold and Bonosky, Colón’s essays are ver- bal portraits of his neigbors. One of these, “José,” is about a self-taught guitarist who wrote songs based on music he heard as a child in Puerto Rico, and who also mastered Cuban, Argentinian, and Mexican music. José plays for family and friends at home, leading Colon to wonder “how many Josés are lost in the basements and top „oors of New York City, with nobody telling them they have talent...”19 Neel’s painting is a monument to this as yet unheralded tra- dition, a signiƒcant “proletarian” art that remained an important part of her life in Spanish Harlem. Like his literary counterpart, José sits in a cultural limbo. After Richard was born, Neel found herself abandoned once again, as José El Barrio /97 dropped precipitously out of her life. During her Spanish Harlem years, when she was raising ƒrst Richard and then Hartley outside of the conventional bonds of marriage, it is hardly surprising that she would return to the subject of the family, which had preoccupied her during the years she bore her daughters. Neel’s situation, atypical for the white middle class, was the norm in her milieu. Many Hispanic families were matrifocal because that conƒguration provided mother and child with greater security. According to Oscar Lewis,

Women felt that consensual union gives them a better break; it gives them some of the freedom and „exibility that men have. By not giving the fathers of their children legal status as husbands, the women have a stronger claim on their children if they decide to leave their men . . . [M]atrifocality, a high incidence of consensual unions and a high percentage of households headed by women, which have been thought to be distinctive of Caribbean family organization or of Negro family life in the U.S.A., turn out to be traits of the culture of poverty . . .20

In her 1938 portrait of José’s brother Carlos’s wife Margarita, and their son Carlitos, Neel presents the matrifocal family in terms of another period cliché: the tenement or peasant madonna, exempliƒed by Winhold Reiss’s The Brown Madonna, published in Locke’s New Negro (1925). Puerto Rican Mother and Child (Margarita and Carlitos) (1938, ƒg. 78) references that trope and the as- sociations of sentimentalized spirituality that serves to silence the social reality of raising children in poverty. As „attened as a Byzantine icon, Margarita has the tragic mien of the Virgin of Sorrows, but her distinctly undigniƒed crossed legs, which form a hammock to support the child, suggest that she is very young and quite awkward in her role. Once the false façade of idealization is cracked, its opposite can emerge. Does this woman-child, with her sexualized infant, refer instead to a dominant trope of Harlem Renaissance literature, that of the tragic mulatta who is the silent bearer of racial impurity?21 Neel digs to the roots of period clichés and ƒnds fear of difference. Five years later, in The Spanish Family (1943, ƒg. 79), Margarita, now with three children, is the stabilizing force for the infant on her lap and the jittery children at her side. Showing the family wedged together in front of the “Spanish” grillwork, a symbol of the “green poverty” they left behind, the com- position brings to mind Dorothea Lange’s FSA photograph Migrant Mother (1936), the most frequently reproduced image from the Depression era. In the year of the WPA’s demise, Neel repaints the subject in terms of ongoing urban poverty, which, with the war effort, was in danger of being ignored. Neel’s 1940 portrait of Margarita’s husband in T. B. Harlem serves as an accompani- ment here: he is absent as a result of poverty-induced illness. However, the theme of poverty is secondary to the stability provided by the centralized verti- 98 / Neel’s Social Realist Art cal of the now mature mother. In this painting, the matriarchal family, while vulnerable, is presented as an alternative ideal to the dominant model. Yet, how fragile and unstable this family appears in constrast to the patriar- chal family of the 1950s. Even though in the middle-class family the bread- winner/father was absent for the better part of each day, he was always front and center when the time came for a commissioned family portrait. The ideal of the American postwar nuclear family is pictured, and punctured, in Dan Weiner’s hilarious Morris Levinson, The President of Rival Dog Food and His Family Outside Their Home in Scarsdale (1955, ƒg. 80), where the husband and wife are buttressed by their possessions, a son and a daughter at the front and the façade of a palatial home to their rear. This is the façade, indeed, of the American Dream as it was then conƒgured, one that required this adaptive Jewish family to masquerade in a Protestant colonial costume in selecting their domicile. The very stiffness of their poses betrays their game, but few viewers at the time would have noticed that the façade depicted by Weiner was a false one. Black Spanish-American Family (1950, ƒg. 81), a woman and her daughters, dressed in proper middle-class attire, attempts the same masquerade with less success. The contrast of dark-skinned mother and light-skinned children dem- onstrates the complex racial mixture that constitutes Hispanic culture. This mixture appears odd initially, at least when the facial features are compared with the handsome regularity of the mother’s and children’s features in The Spanish Family. In 1929, Neel had written a short story, “The Dark Picture of the Kallikaks,” that parodied current eugenic theories by casting the decadent “Nona” in the same role as Zola’s Nana—the corrupter of upper-class blood- lines. When Neel began her Spanish Harlem series, the theories of biologist Cyril Burt enjoyed wide support. In The Backward Child (1937), Burt’s “sci- entiƒc” studies of the inherited intellectual inferiority of slum children led him so far as to connect IQ with physiognomy; the faces of slum children, he wrote, “are marked by developmental defects—by the round receding fore- head, the protruding muzzle, the short and upturned nose, the thickened lips, which combine to give to the slum child’s proƒle a negroid or almost simian outline . . . ‘Apes that are hardly anthropoid’ was the comment of one head- master...”22 Nazism had caused a precipitous decline in the prestige of the theories of Sir Cyril and an acceptance of the liberal humanist anthropology of Benedict. Yet, the belief in the inherited nature of intelligence and thus the intrinsic in- feriority of certain races continued to provide the “scientiƒc” rationale for seg- regation and denial of equal rights throughout the 1950s, just as such wide- spread assumptions of inferiority colored the representations of “races” in mass culture. Neel presents the viewer with Burt’s “simian” types in Black Spanish Family, yet their composure and deportment forestall any racist conclusions El Barrio /99 one might draw, following Burt, from their features. In playing with rather than into racial stereotypes, Neel disrupts ideas of biological inheritance based on spurious concepts of racial purity. Is this matriarchal family of indetermi- nate race—(“Most people in the world are in-betweens,” wrote Benedict and Weltƒsh)—in fact a more accurate representation of the norm, the vital cen- ter, in a heterogeneous nation? Neel’s repeated pairing of children in her Spanish Harlem portraits led Neel not only to question dominant conceptions of class and race but to exam- ine the nature of childhood friendship in terms of the subtle power relation- ships based on age, size, and personality type. In Richard and Hartley (1950, ƒg. 82), Hartley’s hand, placed protectively on his brother’s shoulder, suggests affection and concern; dependence on his elder brother is indicated by Hart- ley’s placement slightly behind Richard. Similarly, in Two Puerto Rican Boys (1956, ƒg. 83), the dominant-dependent relationship is explicitly cast in male- female terms: the doe-eyed boy sits deferentially behind his assertive, cow- licked friend. And ƒnally, the more complex relations of teenagers who form incongruous and ultimately incompatible cliques is presented in the widely varying physiognomies of Three Puerto Rican Girls (1955, ƒg. 84), three young women from the same roots who will branch off in different directions. Chil- dren bond by sex, girls with girls, boys with boys, and race is not a factor in de- termining either familial relations or friendships, at least as far as we can un- derstand from these portraits. Her portrait of James Farmer’s Children (Tami and Abbey Farmer, 1965, ƒg. 85) makes a more explicit political point: integra- tion is accomplished through intermarriage as well as through Farmer’s activ- ism, and the result is neither the freakishness nor the homogenization feared in turns at the time: each retains his or her unique “color” and personality. Neither innocent nor cute, Neel’s children are individuals as various as the shades of skin she records with such virtuosity, as polyglot as the community of which they are a part. But Neel’s message is not the simplistic one of assimila- tion and inclusiveness—“The Family of Man” notion of the 1950s. If the white’s concept of selfhood is constructed in opposition to others who are dif- ferent, then the grounds of identity are undercut when the other is “in-between” rather than within racial boundaries. Hence their power to disturb. White viewers cannot look at the children and maintain the myth of racial purity. The minority response to the willed social myopia of whites, the “irreponsi- bility” claimed by Ellison, is found in Neel’s extended portrait of Georgie Arce, whom she painted between 1950 and 1959 as frequently as she painted her own children. Arce thus becomes the paradigm of a Spanish Harlem child- hood. Different characteristics dominate in each image, but Arce’s expression, with its combination of innocence and duplicity, remains constant despite the changes in his appearance. In an early drawing from 1952 (ƒg. 86), Arce is 100 / Neel’s Social Realist Art tense and guarded, while in others he appears playful and relaxed. In a paint- ing done at the same time, Arce smiles, but all playfulness is gone (ƒg. 87). Set against a pink ground, Arce’s skin takes on a sickly yellow pallor, and his knit- ted brow and sad eyes reduce the smile to the ingratiating gesture of someone trying to please. In a second painting from 1955 (ƒg. 88), the penknife with which he had cut a piece of wood or fruit in the early drawing has grown into a carving knife, and although it is only rubber, he is no longer playing but adopt- ing the model of the gang member. However one may interpret his expressions throughout this series, in the context of Neel’s portraits of children, Arce liter- ally stands apart, for he is always alone. His consistent isolation deƒnes him just as the other children’s friendships deƒne them: he is antisocial. Arce’s threat may be no more than a charade, but the white viewer is likely to read it as real. As Ruth Frankenberg has noted, this perceived threat inverts the institutional- ized relations of racism, wherein minorites “actually have more to fear from white people than vice versa.”23 Neel’s painting makes us aware that this fear is socially constructed, as are the studied postures of aggressive self-conƒdence Arce adopts as a pitiful defense against institutionalized white power.24 Even if we do not know Georgie’s life story, we can with some conƒdence locate its literary counterpart in Piri Thomas’s autobiography of growing up in Spanish Harlem, Down These Mean Streets (1967), which he wrote with the encouragement of the documentary ƒlmmaker Richard Leacock and the painter Elaine de Kooning. Thomas’s vivid portrayal of a horriƒc childhood of gang ƒghts, drugs, and thievery, leading inexorably to jail, is only hinted at in Neel’s portraits of Arce by the inclusion of the knives, but both boys are charac- terized by anger and pain, disguised by bravado, which is their reponse to their slum environment. Thomas’s use of vernacular speech captures in its rhythm and intonation the struggles with identity faced by the black Puerto Rican whose mother is white and whose siblings are light-skinned. At his brother José’s insistence that “We’re Puerto Ricans, an’ we’re white,” Piri replies: “Say, José, didn’t you know the Negro made the scene in Puerto Rico way back? And when the Spanish spics ran outta Indian coolies, they brought them big blacks from you know where. Poppa’s got moyeto blood . . . It’s a played-out lie about me—us—being white.”25 The Spanish Harlem portraits provide a picture of a vulnerable minority populace of women and children. However, during the late 1950s, when Neel was painting the decline of the Party through its aging leaders, she also paral- leled her Spanish Harlem series with the emerging new radicals, the leaders of black culture. Whereas her earlier portrait of Alice Childress had exempliƒed the alliance between communism and Negro civil rights, these later portraits included authors who had defected from communism in order to assert an in- dependent black voice. The historian Mark Naison has argued that during and El Barrio / 101 shortly after the Depression the Party’s contributions to Negro theater and his- tory made the CPUSA “a major force in American society promoting system- atic cultural interchange between whites and blacks and encouraging whites to recognize the black contribution to the nation’s cultural heritage.”26 In ad- dition to her portrait of Childress, Neel’s portraits of a lithe, elegant, but name- less ballet dancer (Ballet Dancer, 1950, ƒg. 89) and the young communist writers Hubert Satterfield and Harold Cruse (c. 1950, ƒg. 90) are presented as pensive dreamers, involved with the creative life rather than the world of ac- tivism. By 1961, however, Cruse had become disaffected from communism and in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, a text that anticipated much of the sepa- ratist language of the Black Power movement, accused the CP of bad faith: “In the late 1940s and 1950s, the white political leftwing ran to Harlem in order to establish a political hegemony over Negro art and artists—for the purposes of distorting and wielding both into programatic weapons.”27 As a member of the Committee for the Negro in the Arts (CNA), he formed a dissident group in the late forties called the Harlem Writers Club, which protested the CP’s “unity theme” (Black and White Unite and Fight) and its “enforced interra- cialism.”28 Nothing in Neel’s portrait suggests the outrage behind Cruse’s shrill call for separatism, for it was not until the early 1960s that the civil rights movement had entered its new phase. By then, not only had “Negroes” as- sumed full leadership of the movement, but the concept of Black Power, sub- stituting black nationalism for integration, had begun to be formulated in the writings of Malcolm X and Stokeley Carmichael.29 This seminal cultural moment is recorded in Neel’s portraits of James Farmer (1964, ƒg. 91) and Abdul Rahman (1964, ƒg. 92). Farmer, a founder of the Congress of Racial Equality, was program director of the NAACP at the time of this sitting. Dressed in a business suit, he personiƒes the integrationist civil rights leader of the 1950s, who, for all the suppressed anger and the re- solve indicated by his pose, seeks equality through the existing legal system rather than revolution. Rahman, bemused by his new identity as a Black Mus- lim, complete with hat and military jacket, seems pleased that his masquerade may cause others to be “frightened by these resplendent and angry new blacks, by turns hard edged and remorseless or smoothly self-delighting, all rage and assertion in public but sometimes twinkling with affability, even self-irony in private.”30 Neel was forthright about her own reaction. “He is a different Negro. I have studies of the Negro people, like those little girls, being overpowered. This man is not frightened. He is a nationalist, a black nationalist, even though there’s a certain hysteria about him...”31 Neel’s portraits of blacks from the late 1950s and early 1960s are vivid indi- cators of social change, and of the important contribution of black writers and 102 / Neel’s Social Realist Art artists to that change. Whereas Neel’s Spanish Harlem series serves to make visible a marginalized group of predominantly Hispanic women and children, her portraits of black activists assert a confrontational presence. These are the new revolutionaries, whose identity is no longer in question.

Home-Based: Spanish Harlem as Domicile

Social realist tableaux, no matter how wrenching the subject, can suffer from formulaic renderings of the downtrodden that elicit indifference rather than sympathy. One way out of this impasse was to empty the stage of its stock char- acters and to use the city’s buildings as a metaphor for the life lived within them. To do this Neel appropriated the motif of the tenement, which predom- inated in Depression-era art, and transformed it from a stage to a metaphor for city life. Throughout modern art, the city has served as a metaphor for alienation, and Neel’s task was to ƒnd the means to restate that theme in terms of the expe- rience of tenement life in Spanish Harlem. When she began her career, the theme of urban alienation in American art was “owned” by Edward Hopper, who forged a major career with his ƒnely tuned evocations of urban isolation, metamorphosing the period’s economic depression into a psychological state. Gaining from his study with Robert Henri an admiration for Manet and De- gas, Hopper translated the French aristocratic, detached observation of urban life into the loneliness of the small-town boy in the big city. Neel especially admired Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning (1930, ƒg. 93), which was exhibited both in the Whitney Museum’s Annual and at Hopper’s one-person exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1933. As in many of his cityscapes, Hopper chose a long, horizontal canvas for this painting and stretched the architectural façades across its full breadth. The impenetrable wall with its repeated rectangular windows effectively squeezes out human ac- cess, for which the barber’s pole and ƒre hydrant substitute. Hopper’s use of abstract architectural elements to convey the absence of human contact in the city constitutes one of the more signiƒcant formal inventions in North Ameri- can art between the wars, one that Neel adopted and reformulated. In 1933, the year Hopper’s work reached prominence, Neel was accepted to the Public Works of Art Program and went to the Whitney Museum to regis- ter. When she returned to her apartment in Greenwich village, she painted Snow on Cornelia Street (ƒg. 35), the ƒrst of her views from her apartment win- dow. Initially, it looks like a pastiche of Hopper’s painting: here, too, the city is vacant and mute, its human voice sti„ed under blankets of snow, as well as by the geometry of the blank windows with half-drawn shades. Yet, Neel has com- El Barrio / 103 pletely rethought Hopper’s pictorial structure. Hopper’s elongated horizontal format erects a barrier that closes the viewer off from the city. Neel’s format, on the contrary, is vertical, suggesting in its standing orientation a space one can step into. Moreover, Neel’s bleak courtyard is organized by manageable transi- tions between levels, multiple landing platforms of rooftops, ledges, and ƒre escapes that permit the viewer to mentally traverse the constricted spaces. In- stead of denying access, Neel creates a safe, if stark, enclosure, with an accessi- ble, if narrow, way out. Hopper’s point of view is that of the „âneur, one who strolls city spaces without connecting to them. By framing the scene as a view from her window, she creates a space that is lived in rather than passed through. Thus, in the year she aligned herself with the new revolutionary painting, Neel translated Hopper’s personal vision into a budding social realist one. As Andrew Hemingway has demonstrated, Hopper’s art enjoyed its success because it lent itself to institutional and critical discourses of the period, which

deƒned the virtues of painting in terms of individuality, honesty and direct engage- ment with reality . . . Not only could Hopper’s work function as a sign of securely masculinized art, but it could also function as a sign of a dominant white ethnicity . . . [the critics] found in the work of Hopper and the so-called “American tradition” conƒrmation of a particular American identity which effectively excluded Native Americans, African and Asian Americans and recent immigrants.32

Perhaps the most blatant example of this attempt to identify Hopper with a white, male, Anglo-Saxon tradition is in Guy Pène du Bois’s 1931 monograph on the artist, in which he claimed that Hopper “will be shown . . . without pa- tience for trivialities . . . a male, if you like; certainly an anglo-Saxon.”33 Apart from du Bois, Hopper’s strongest champion was at the Whit- ney Museum, an institution that, in the 1930s, favored a realist art that “was understood as the American Renaissance . . . [I]ts exhibitions stood primarily for the conservative American Scene.”34 For the Left, struggling with the issue of creating a proletarian art, Hopper’s work and “his avowed aim ‘to personal- ize the drainpipe,’ . . . must have seemed singularly escapist . . . a rather nostal- gic vision, which appealed to a particular bourgeois liberal faction...”35 For Meyer Schapiro, in particular, du Bois’s essay would have provided an exam- ple of the proponents for the “American Scene,” who advocate “that the great national art can issue only from those who really belong to the nation, more speciƒcally, to the Anglo-Saxon blood . . . [W]e must denounce appeals for an American art which identify the American with a speciƒc blood group or race...”36 Even after the war, Hopper’s insistence on painting as a record of his emotions without political content positioned his art as one of the few ac- ceptable realist alternatives to abstract expressionism during the 1950s as well; 104 / Neel’s Social Realist Art unlike the social realists, Hopper’s art did not decline but rather grew in repu- tation in the postwar years. In opposition to Hopper, Neel’s social realist cityscapes present a commu- nal rather than a personal (male, Anglo-Saxon) vision. Hopper’s paintings in- scribe his private feelings of alienation through the metaphor of the empty building; Neel’s buildings stand for the experience of the poor urban populace generally. Until 1962, Neel’s residences were the ƒve-to-six-story apartment blocks that were built at the turn of the century to accommodate the city’s swelling population. The view out her window re„ected her economic status: the constricted view corresponding to straightened economic circumstances. For Neel, as for Mike Gold in his 1919 manifesto, these conditions were the seed from which her proletarian art would grow: “When I hope it is the tene- ment hoping. I am not an individual; I am all that the tenement group poured into me during those early years of my spiritual travail.”37 By isolating the tene- ment as emblematic of urban experience, Neel mapped out a unique territory within the varied terrain of the urban scene. Despite the intense fascination New York City has held for twentieth-century American artists, only Neel so consistently pictured the experience of living in tenement housing, the city as domicile. Neel’s unique point of view, her insistence on looking out through the eyes of the poor rather than looking in at them, resulted not only from the way in which her work was exhibited, but from her working conditions, for she never had the luxury of a studio separate from her home. For women, the domestic arena has been a place of unpaid work; in Engel’s terms, domestic slavery. If one’s studio is also one’s home, then the two roles—artist and domestic laborer —most at con„ict in any woman’s life must confront each other in any depic- tion of that space. Fire Escape (1946, ƒg. 94) visualizes that con„ict. Here, the repeated black lines, each with its taut stripe of snow, bring to mind the prison of poverty that metaphorically bars one from exiting. Yet, as in Snow on Cor- nelia Street, the measurable steps between different spatial registers provide a way down/out, and, since they are covered with snow, an assured refuge from ƒre. The compression of the spatial coordinates—inside/outside, up/down— onto the painting’s surface creates a visual demand for a doubled reading, both literal and metaphorical. The metaphorical: “this is a prison”; the literal: “this is a (ƒre) escape.” The tightly framed spaces are at once restrictive and protec- tive, claustrophic and intimate, conƒning and liberating. The loneliness and isolation characteristic of Hopper’s cityscapes are given greater complexity in Neel’s reinterpretation, the freedom within strict conƒnes that is the experi- ence of the home-based woman artist. The view out the window characteristic of all of Neel’s cityscapes under- scores the inhabitants’ limited mobility by obscuring both ground and sky, El Barrio / 105 both the building’s base (feet) and its cornice (head). The view through the window restricts the vista to the trunk of the building opposite, its torso. Again, the restriction that this motionless, delimited section suggests is at variance with the work of other urban scene artists. For instance, most precisionist paint- ing and photography has the same bird’s-eye, free-ranging, panoramic view- point found in the commercial advertising of the day (ƒg. 95). In Advertising and the American Dream, Roland Marchand singles out the view from the ofƒce window as a central fantasy of capitalist realism:

No advertising tableaux of the 1920s assumed so stereotyped a pattern as those of the typical man—Mr. Consumer—at work . . . As the “master of all he surveys,” that epitome of the American Man, the business executive, commanded an unob- structed view . . . in the advertising tableau, women never gained the opportunity to look down with that magisterial sense of domain, control, and prospects for the fu- ture that the “typical” man obtained from his ofƒce window.38

The sociologist Raymond Ledrut, in his essay “Speech and the Silence of the City” has argued that this “magisterial sense of domain” is the ideal point of view of capitalism itself:

The great capital or the State reveal themselves in glass and steel, verticality and right angles adapted to the spirit of the ofƒce, the world of business or administra- tion, which asserts itself thus as a power transcending the life of the citizens. Histor- ical action eludes cities and their inhabitants. It is concentrated in high places, in a sphere of social space supreme and detached from local life.39

If the phallic skyscraper is the domain of the powerful male (either artist or ex- ecutive), the tenement, as represented by Neel, is the realm of the powerless. Neel’s torso/façades, although “female” in their constriction, are not obvious sexual symbols; nonetheless, the metaphor of the house as a female body has a wider currency than simple Freudian symbolism. Neel defantasizes the female body/house by making it erect. In her masterpiece, Rag in Window (1959, ƒg. 96), the skin of the building is stained and spotted, its surface, like Carlos’s bro- ken body, a visual record of the indignities it has suffered. The gray, torn, wind- blown rag, the tenement’s “hair,” was for Neel a metaphor for the twentieth century and speaks of suffering and vulnerability rather than eroticism. Not the male child’s fantasies, but the process of aging in the female adult, and the marks left by the struggle to survive, are inscribed for public view. In its social commentary, Neel’s Rag in Window parallels the opening pho- tograph of Robert Frank’s The Americans (1959), the in„uential work of per- sonal documentary that was published the year the two worked together on 106 / Neel’s Social Realist Art

Pull My Daisy. As in Neel’s Fire Escape, the image and the title of Frank’s Pa- rade, Hoboken, New Jersey (1955–1956, ƒg. 97) are contradictory. A parade is a “formal, public procession,” but the image shows two female torsos impris- oned within the windows in the apartment’s brick wall. In both artists’ works, the analogy between the cropped, featureless façade and the constricted, iso- lated lives of its occupants provides a critique of our culture’s ideology of free- dom and social mobility, asking: “freedom for whom?” Because in a capitalist society the space of the home is walled off from the workings of the economy, poverty and women frequently occupy the same location. Neel’s cityscapes imply what Frank’s make explicit by con„ating the boundaries of income line, gender, and social status into one line of vision. Given any one of these posi- tions, this is what you see. Rather than providing a document of the changing face of New York City during the twentieth century, Neel demonstrated that for speciƒc groups the living conditions of the city remained unchanged: cramped, deteriorating quar- ters serving as shelter and little more. Neel’s railroad apartment in Harlem, a product of urban planning in the 1880s, may have given way to the urban re- newal high rises, those Corbusian nightmares of the 1950s, and the bound- aries of slum districts may have shifted, but from the point of view of poverty the perspective of New York was unvarying. Neel refused to acknowledge the space of power, the space of precisionist and advertising art. Concentrating in- stead on the social body symbolized by the tenement torso and immobilized beneath “the great capital,” she mapped the mental geography of tenement life. Neel’s strategy, then, was to take the tradition of American realist painting, and in particular contemporary American Scene painting, and to redeƒne it in Marxist terms. Despite the conscious effort of left-wing artists in the 1930s to follow Moscow’s directives, Neel did not attempt to import a revolutionary style but to revolutionize the style of the status quo. This was the only reason- able course, as Charmion von Wiegand discovered when she was Moscow cor- respondent for the New Masses. The Soviet authorities there criticized her city- scapes because they were unwilling to entertain the notion that socialist real- ism could omit the human ƒgure.40 Fire Escape and Rag in Window were painted from apartments on East 107th and 108th Streets respectively in Spanish Harlem. The static spaces of cultural poverty these paintings represent are not unrelieved by joy, however. The “hu- man warmth” Neel admired there colors the façades in Sunset in Spanish Harlem (1958, ƒg. 98), in which the red and coral of the evening sky are si- phoned off to give a cosmetic lift to the greyed faces of the tenements. Shifted to a diagonal rather than a frontal position, the building on the right provides an opening that leads the eye to the vista of the sky. In 1958, Neel’s own posi- El Barrio / 107 tion was shifting, and she began to move artistically from the community of Spanish Harlem to the New York art network. In 1962, Neel moved to a more middle-class neighborhood on West 107th Street and Broadway near Columbia University. Her view out the window now permitted a wider vista, and her cityscapes began to include the street life that she had until then treated as a separate subject. In the Death and Life of the Great American Cities (1961), the sociologist Jane Jacobs observed that at this time the neighborhood around Neel’s apartment on the Upper West Side was a prime example of the kind of diversity of architectural functions and popula- tions she argued were essential to civic health.

People’s love of watching activity and other people is constantly evident in cities everywhere. This trait reaches an almost ludicrous extreme on upper Broadway in New York, where the street is divided by a narrow central mall, right in the middle of trafƒc . . . [O]n any day when the weather is even barely tolerable these benches are ƒlled with people for block after block . . . Eventually Broadway reaches Columbia University and Barnard College . . . Here all is obvious order and quiet. No more stores, no more activity generated by the stores, almost no more pedes- trians crossing—and no more watchers.41

For Jacobs, it was the “watchers,” both on the streets and in their apartments, who through their informal monitoring discouraged crime and encouraged a sense of community and neighborhood. The publication of Jacobs’s book coincided with Neel’s move to the West Side. Although she may not have been aware of Jacobs’s argument that the safety of the sidewalks—secured not by the law but by the inhabitants—is one key to a habitable city, nonetheless, in the 1960s her cityscapes do broaden out from the constricted lives of the poor to include the interaction of various eco- nomic levels and occupations. In an interview from 1980, Neel described her- self as a watcher, although what catches her eye remains the life of the disad- vantaged:

I really live out my front room windows, which face up Broadway from 107th Street. It’s like having a street in your living room . . . Since I’ve always been claustro- phobic, it is a great escape for me not to feel shut up in a room. From my West End Avenue window I can see Strauss Park, shaped like a violin with a fountain, and gingko trees. There is one man, a bum, who is there every morning . . . Then he goes and sits on a stone bench on the Broadway center strip and nurses [his beer] the way the rest of us nurse our breakfast coffee . . . The center strip is like his living room.42 108 / Neel’s Social Realist Art

When Neel painted her view of Strauss Park she avoided slumming: the bum and his beer are not included. In Snow (1967, ƒg. 99), a large, unin„ected grey ground conveys the dead light of midwinter, but the lea„ess branches of the tree outside Neel’s window seem to reach with all the kinetic energy of a Kabuki dancer for the linear tracery of the park’s gingko trees. Even under the constriction of the snow, the paint seems to rise through the vertically multi- plying elements like blood through capillaries. Life, in muted form, still per- sists, and in a less tenuous form than that symbolized by the tattered rag hang- ing from the window of the East Side tenement. The greater size and charm of the later cityscapes thus modulates their key and, with it, their associations to class. Neel’s 107th and Broadway (1976, ƒg. 100) is indebted to Hopper not simply in style but now in content as well. The shadow of death passes across the façade, slowly obliterating the brightness of a summer afternoon. However, the deliberate fusion of interior and exterior, self and nonself that Neel created in Fire Escape is split apart in the later work, where the building is given a uniƒed volume onto which the shadow is cast. “That was Death, of course, creeping over here,” Neel told Hills, and Neel’s mortality may well have been uppermost in her mind, as she had recently had a pacemaker installed. As Hopper does in his work, Neel projects her personal anxieties onto the building in a direct analogy lacking the complex social com- mentary of her earlier tenement façades, where interior and exterior are lami- nated, one to the other. As Raymond Williams has observed, the City of Strangers that became em- blematic of modernism has now been absorbed into mass culture, and the “isolated, estranged images of alienation and loss . . . have become the easy iconography of the commercials.”43 Neel’s cityscapes from 1930 to 1960 ex- emplify those exceptional works within the modernist tradition that replace the alienated “I” with the disenfranchised “we,” suggesting that the bound- aries of identity can only be established when crossed. By using the tenement façade to join the social body with its social space, creating a meeting ground of exterior and interior, Neel reconƒgured the spaces of modernism into a communal art. Part III

The New York Art Network: 1960–1980

7 A Gallery of Players: Artist-Critic-Dealer

When compiling her proletarian portrait gallery during the 1930s to 1950s, Neel included many writers but relatively few visual artists. After 1960, her output is divided between family portraits and portraits of members of the New York artworld, the artist-critic-dealer system. This shift in emphasis from a marginal group of writers to mainstream visual artists acknowledges the greater visibility of ƒne artists within American culture in general after World War II. Although Neel had painted the occasional critic or dealer prior to 1960, for in- stance, Rose Fried, the director of the Pinocatheca gallery in 1939, or the critic Dore Ashton in 1952, these portraits were exceptions rather than a continuing thematic. After World War II, the country’s prosperity and status as a world power provided a base for the exponential growth of art institutions and for an expanding artworld that was able at last to encompass Neel. The years 1958–1962 were thus a period of transition for Neel artistically and personally. She actively sought venues for the exhibition of her work. At the same time, she began to broaden her artistic allegiances. She had been at- tending Friday evening panel discussions at the Club (Eighth Street Club or Artists Club) at 39 East Eighth Street for the previous ƒve years or so in order to keep “current.” Founded in 1949 by Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Ad Reinhardt, Jack Tworkov, and Milton Resnik, the Club was the focal point of

111 112 / The New York Art Network the New York avant-garde during the early 1950s. At that time, the Club’s mem- bers included Alfred Leslie, Larry Rivers, Grace Hartigan, and Joan Mitchell.1 By 1954, when Neel was attending, many of these second-generation artists had turned to the ƒgure while painting in a gestural manner. Neel’s style was directly affected by the Club’s artists. By 1958, her loose, open facture and paint- erly surfaces re„ect her renewed interest in European expressionists like Ko- koschka under the in„uence of the second-generation abstract expressionists. In 1962, the year Neel ƒrst gained recognition, and Pop Art emerged on the scene, the artworld began its period of rapid expansion. Just as in the 1950s and 1960s she had adopted an abstract expressionist facture, so in the 1970s, her painting became larger and brighter under the in„uence of pop art and the new realism. In turn, our culture’s image of the artist shifted from that of the rebel and loner to the artist as a personality or celebrity. Neel charted this change in her portraits of Frank O’Hara (1960) and Andy Warhol (1970), two important paintings from her artworld gallery. This new “wing” includes as well the new generation of femininist artists and critics, who will be discussed in a separate section because of their importance to Neel’s career. In her por- trayals of both male and female artworld ƒgures Neel addresses entrenched negative stereotypes about artists’ sexuality. After 1969, what had been an ac- knowledged but unmentioned fact became an important topic in contempo- rary art and criticism, and Neel, whose sympathies for gay men had been part of her sympathies for oppressed persons in general, explored the changing conƒgurations of professional and sexual identity in her sitters. The transition from the “Proletarian Portrait Gallery” to the “New York Art Network” is exempliƒed by Neel’s participation in the underground ƒlm Pull My Daisy (1959–1960). Although Neel was not part of the ofƒcial member- ship, the Club provided the connection with the artists involved in the ƒlm. Produced and directed by the photographer Robert Frank and the painter Al- fred Leslie and narrated by Jack Kerouac, the short ƒlm’s raw, improvised form is modeled on beat poetry and abstract expressionist painting. Neel was re- cruited to play the mother of the priest whom the poets and artists—Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and Larry Rivers—make the focus of extended mock- ery. A portly ƒfty-nine, she was perfect for the role, and undoubtedly she en- joyed working with the members of the new bohemia that had transformed American art of the 1950s (ƒg. 101). Frank and Leslie also asked her to submit a statement to their “beat” review, “The Hasty Papers.” In it, Neel made ex- plicit the connection in her own mind between the old and the new genera- tion, and also ƒrst characterized her project as Balzacian: “I decided to paint a human comedy—such as Balzac had done in literature. In the 30’s I painted the beat of those days—Joe Gould, Sam Putnam, Ken Fearing, etc.”2 Pull My Daisy has a sort of innocence and spontaneity about it that would A Gallery of Players / 113 be lost as the expanding artworld became an increasingly commercial enter- prise during the 1960s. As sociologist Diana Crane has documented, “the number of galleries handling twentieth-century American art was more than three times as great in 1977 as in 1949.3 After a hiatus of nearly a decade from her ACA gallery exhibition in 1954, Neel was signed on by the Graham gallery in 1963, shortly after the ƒrst important article on Neel appeared in ARTnews. She exhibited there regularly until 1980, and the consistent exposure resulted in ongoing reviews in major publications and increasing critical recognition. In 1982, shortly before her death, she left Graham for the Robert Miller gallery, where her fellow modernist foremothers Joan Mitchell and also exhibited. During these years, as her reputation grew, Neel also beneƒted from show- ing in cooperative women’s galleries and from articles published by feminist critics, a factor crucial to the careers of many female artists. For as Lawrence Alloway noted in his essay “Women’s Art in the Seventies”:

Women’s art in the 1970s emerged in a form unlike that taken by earlier art move- ments . . . Group shows and co-operative galleries have established the ƒrst public phase of women’s art . . . It is a measure of the radical social base of women’s art that it should require changes in the distribution system.4

Apart from the sheer growth charted by Crane, the very structure of the art scene underwent reorganization. Again Alloway provided an analysis of this shift in Network: Art in the Complex Present:

art is now part of a communications network of great efƒciency. As its capacity has increased a progressive role-blurring has taken place . . . Critics serve as guest cura- tors and curators write art criticism . . . All of us are looped together in a new and unsettling connectivity.5

Neel’s “one plus one” method would seem to be inadequate to depict this “new and unsettling connectivity,” and she did express regret to Henry Geldzahler that she had not produced group portraits. Yet, as with the proletarian portrait gallery, the sum of the individual portraits constitutes a representative portrait of the network, the changes in dress and pose indicating the transition from the 1960s to the 1970s, from bohemian to business or celebrity artist. In each case she documents the psychological costs of an artistic career in New York’s increasingly competitive artworld with a clarity that cuts through the romantic haze that still surrounded the modern artist. Neel’s artworld portraits, so lacking in the idealized image of the artist fa- miliar from art photographs, appeared to some critics to be little more than sour grapes. Neel’s New York Art Network received its ƒrst critical assessment 114 / The New York Art Network at the time of her Whitney Museum mini-retrospective in 1974. The exhibit included her portraits of Red Grooms and Mimi Gross, Peter Homitzky, Andy Warhol, David Bourdon and Gregory Battcock, The Family (John Gruen, Jane Wilson and Julia), Duane Hanson, and John Perreault. Reviewing it for the New York Post, Emily Genauer ƒrst attributed Neel’s “venomous, sadistic later pictures” to her personal bitterness: “I know the art world, and many of those sitters, for all their hostilities ƒred by tough struggles, for all their arrogance, they’re not like this...,” but in the end Genauer conceded that perhaps the collective picture had validity, permitting her to see for the ƒrst time “the poi- son that lies just under the surface of creative life in New York...”6 The series begins in 1960 with two paintings depicting prominent mem- bers of the New York School, the painters Milton Resnick and Pat Pasloff (ƒg. 102), and the poet, critic, and Museum of Modern Art curator Frank O’Hara (Frank O’Hara, No. 2, ƒg. 103). Together the portraits illustrate “art in the complex present”: the artist-critic-dealer system. Although respected abstract painters, Resnick and Pasloff are reduced to participants in a required public ritual, the gallery opening. No longer simply creators, they are ofƒcial greeters, looking like a Rabbi and his wife at a bar mitzvah. Nothing could better serve as a counterweight to the mythologizing of Namuth’s photographs of Pollock painting than the all-over „ickering pattern of artworld ƒgures, including Joan Mitchell, with which Neel surrounds the couple. The occasion is the opening at the Pace gallery of the abstract expressionist work of Pollock’s widow, . But now, the kinetic energy of the abstract expressionist stroke has been transformed into the crackling interchanges on the art network, and the artist from a producer to an automaton whose recognition rests on being seen, in the scene. Frank O’Hara, No.2 is the more ambitious work of the two in every sense of the word. Neel speciƒcally asked him to sit for her, no doubt hoping to interest him in her work. Frank O’Hara was associated with the Club, and although the exhibitions he organized at the Museum of Modern Art in the early 1960s helped to canonize the ƒrst generation of Abstract Expressionists—Mother- well, Kline, David Smith—O’Hara also wrote sympathetically about the new ƒgurative artists, in particular Alex Katz and Larry Rivers. With the critical dominance of abstract expressionism yielding to a more heterogeneous situ- ation, both in the return of the ƒgure and with the neo-dadaism of Johns and Rauschenberg, Neel may have sensed the importance of asking O’Hara to pose. Although she was interested in his hawklike face, her request was also an acknowledgment of the practical exigency of cultivating friends in high places if the importance of her work was to be recognized. Of course, what was a dra- matic departure for Neel is now considered merely professional routine. O’Hara did not himself elect to write about or exhibit her work, but Lawrence A Gallery of Players / 115

Campbell’s review of Neel’s group exhibit at the ACA gallery in ARTnews in December 1960 was illustrated with the portrait. Frank O’Hara, No. 2 thus proved pivotal to her career. During the ƒrst of his two sittings, Neel painted O’Hara in proƒle with his prominent hooked nose conveying a keen alertness. The second, and in her view deƒnitive, portrait pushes the stock expressionist motif of the tortured artist, which she ƒrst used with Sam Putnam, into a visualization of pure hyste- ria, a man in the throes of a nervous breakdown. His physical and psychologi- cal dissolution is as complete as that of the aspiring artist in the contemporary Randall in Extremis (1960, ƒg. 104). The lower half of his angular body is dis- located from the upper, his boneless hands hang limply, and a black gash of a shadow cuts a deep trough in the side of his torso. The focal point of the paint- ing, the garishly lit head itself, is a skull with tombstone-like teeth and a rectan- gular ear protruding like a red „ag from the side of his face. Perhaps Neel was aware of the poet’s alcoholism and his conviction that he would not live past 40,7 for she also roughed-in a still life of dead lilacs at the artist’s side. Perched on the triangular point of the chair seat, he is less a man creatively inspired than one living on the edge. In reviving and reinterpreting the legacy of works such as Kokoschka’s Father Hirsh (1907), Neel creates a dramatic entrance into the gestural-realist school and initiates the new direction of her portrait gallery. In May 1962 the Museum of Modern Art would validate the renewed inter- est in ƒguration that had been gathering momentum over the previous decade with the exhibition “Recent Painting USA: The Figure.” As would become the norm in the future, the exhibit at the prestigious MoMA generated satellite shows—at the Kornblee and the Hirschl & Adler galleries and at the Finch College Museum. Neel’s Milton Resnick and Pat Pasloff was included in the Kornblee exhibit, which was accompanied by a short catalog by Newsweek critic Jack Kroll. However, the network’s cooperative venture did not coalesce in a new movement that could generate its own critical literature. As Valerie Peterson pointed out in her ARTnews review of these exhibits, “A coherence is being enforced where none naturally forms...”8 Nonetheless, just as the Club had granted permission, in a way, for each of the gestural realists to ignore the orthodoxy of abstraction and to pursue their own investigation of the ƒgure, so the Museum of Modern Art’s “Recent Painting USA” and satellite exhibits le- gitimated that activity. That summer, Neel would enjoy a retrospective exhibition organized at Reed College in Oregon by the painter-critic Hubert Crehan. Shortly there- after, Crehan’s article, “Introducing the Portraits of Alice Neel,” the ƒrst fea- ture article to be published in a national magazine, appeared in the October 1962 ARTnews. With her portrait of Hubert Crehan (ƒg. 105), Neel visualizes the “beat” artist archetype, the contentious, rumpled intellectual. Whereas 116 / The New York Art Network

O’Hara is angular and nervous, the heavy-jowled Crehan appears stolid, squared-off, holding his position. However, he is not as steady as he seems: his eyes rendered glazed and unfocused by his glasses, his artist’s beret like the proverbial hangover’s icebag, Crehan is the thinker as macho-drinker. Cre- han’s prizeƒghter image is an appropriate one, for indeed he went to the mat for her. In his article, Crehan provided biographies of many of her sitters and insisted that “There is a place for this work. It is an achievement of portraiture in our time and I have no doubt that it will come to be recognized for its right- ful value.”9 When Neel’s show opened at the Graham gallery in October 1963, K.L. (Kim Levin) provided further support in her ARTnews review, stat- ing that this ƒrst New York show in over ten years was “long overdue,” and that Neel’s work had “the stunning honesty of a Cassandra.”10 As critical recognition began to generate some buyers, Neel painted her pa- trons as well: Stewart Mott, whose portrait Thomas Hess and Harold Rosen- berg had selected to receive the Longview Foundation prize in 1962; Arthur Bullowa, lawyer and collector of both American painting and pre-Columbian art (1967); and Walter Gutman, a Wall Street writer (1965, ƒg. 106). Each ex- udes a conƒdence, even self-satisfaction, lacking in the critics. Of the three, the porcine Gutman is the least elegant-looking. The art patron whose ƒc- tional corporation “g-string enterprises” ƒnanced Pull My Daisy, Gutman is the image of the self-made-man/art-collector, a Joseph H. Hirshhorn type. As an art critic in the 1930s, he had the distinction of writing the only negative re- view of Ben Shahn’s Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti series at the Downtown gallery.11 By the 1960s, he was a wealthy collector. Earthy and unpretentious, Gutman’s portrait suggests that his interest in art had little to do with careerism or social status. He is the relic of a different era. Even though Neel never made group portraits, she did paint artist couples, whose relationships symbolized the complex interconnections of the network. Red Grooms and Mimi Gross, No. 2 (1967, ƒg. 107) exemplify the two-career couple under strain in the competitive New York market. The assemblage artist, Grooms, and the painter-poet, Mimi Gross, are linked by Grooms’s padlock- like grip, but by nothing else. Like the later portrait of Benny and Mary Ellen Andrews, they are visual opposites, almost Wolf„inian in their contrasts of painterly vs. linear, open vs. closed form that oppose not only their personali- ties but their art. In coloration and eager stance, Grooms is a golden retriever, his orange tie a panting tongue, whereas Gross’s red shirt, which matches Grooms’s, only points up the coldness of her grey-black hair, white face, and icy boots. On the other hand, The Family (John Gruen, Jane Wilson, and Julia) (1970, ƒg. 108) represents the quintessential artworld establishment team. Gruen, an art critic for the New York Herald Tribune in the 1960s, had written an article A Gallery of Players / 117 on Neel’s 1966 Graham gallery exhibit that was destined to become the most quoted of her reviews. Entitled “Collector of Souls,”12 Gruen’s narrative of Neel’s life from her childhood “in a very puritanical town in Pennsylvania” to her current “underground reputation among whole streams of artists and intel- lectuals,” provided the outline for the majority of the reviews that would fol- low, and the sobriquet “Collector of Souls” adhered for the remainder of her career. Gruen and his wife, the painter Jane Wilson, were prominent hosts to the New York artworld throughout the 1950s, and their parties helped forge al- liances and create a sense of group cohesion vital to the strength of the net- work. Appropriately, then, Neel presents Gruen as the center of a sophisticated family. John and Jane’s casual elegance is as planned and as calculated as the look on Jane’s face, which both welcomes and sizes up the viewer. So impos- ing are the adults that the wai„ike ƒgure of their daughter Julia seems sus- pended in midair like an afterthought. The couple’s true family, one might surmise, was the artworld, and their conspicuous, “dancing” patent leather shoes attest to its glamor, as well as underscoring the increasing connection be- tween art and fashion. At the time of the portrait, Gruen had just completed his personal reminis- cence of the ƒfties artworld, The Party’s Over Now (1970). This autobiography consists of a series of portraits of the New York artists he befriended at that time: among them, Virgil Thomson and Frank O’Hara were also painted by Neel. The verbal and visual descriptions of artworld luminaries show strong parallels: Gruen’s description of Thomson’s anti-Semitism could have come out of one of Neel’s lectures: “In his cups Virgil would expound on the ‘Jewish Maƒa,’ and how it was keeping him from being one of the most performed composers of the day...”13 Both Gruen and Neel were willing to speak in pub- lic the common language of circulating gossip that „ows beneath the system, refusing to dismiss an underground communication pipeline that so decisively colors subsequent historical interpretation. Another contribution of Gruen’s book was a frank discussion of the homo- sexuality that was an accepted part of the art scene in the 1950s. Its publication in 1970 established both O’Hara’s poetry and Rivers’s painting as important precedents for the emergence of an openly gay art in Warhol’s work of the 1960s. Gruen’s book, which links O’Hara to Rivers, in turn provides another position from which to view Neel’s earlier links to O’Hara, Rivers, and the “beat” culture of the 1950s. Neel’s insistence on including in her portrait gallery gay men, a group as invisible as blacks and as despised as communists, was part of her mission to write the truth of society as she saw it. She no doubt was drawn to the gay subculture because of its unacknowledged role in New York’s cultural life. 118 / The New York Art Network

Neel was not alone in addressing the subject. Elaine de Kooning’s painting The Silent Ones (c. 1960), for instance, which was included in the “Recent Painting USA: The Figure” exhibit, depicts an interracial gay couple and ob- scures their faces to point to society’s refusal to acknowledge their bond. Larry Rivers’s paintings provide another, more important example. When Neel painted her portrait of O’Hara, it is doubtful she could have known, much less imitated, the celebratory homoeroticism of Rivers’s stunning, oversized, stand- ing portrait of O’Hara, arms pressed provocatively behind his head and dressed only in combat boots (O’Hara, c. 1954, ƒg. 109). Neel’s painting provides no direct cues to O’Hara’s sexual orientation. Nonetheless in their work both artists addressed the issue of homosexuality as it relates to the artworld, if from quite different points of view. Like Neel, Rivers conceived of his art as a form of history stripped of hypocrisy and true to the facts.14 Neel’s portraits of the gay subculture began when she was living in Green- wich Village. Her ƒrst “gay” portrait, a quadruple image of the critic Christo- pher Lazare (1932, ƒg. 110) evidences strong visual parallels with Demuth’s last, and for the ƒrst time explicitly homosexual, illustration for Robert Mc- Almon’s Distinguished Air (1930, ƒg. 111). Neel may well have seen the water- color at Demuth’s exhibition at the Anderson Galleries in 1931. Lazare’s full- length ƒgure looks like Demuth’s top-hatted fop, turned to face us. Even the imaginative device of having a penis “explode” from Lazare’s head in the pro- ƒle portrait might have been inspired by the phallic projection of Brancusi’s “Princess X” from the fop’s hat. The ƒrst of her “intellectual homosexuals,” Neel’s Lazare, is based on a commonly held social stereotype from the 1920s, whose characteristics range from pose and dress, on the one hand, to the evidence of a sadomasochistic life-style behind the elegant exterior, on the other. As Jonathan Weinberg points out in his study of homosexuality in the early American avant-garde, Speaking for Vice, such overt posturing, as exempliƒed by the prevalence of drag balls, was tolerated for the very reason that it conƒrmed stereotypes and “kept difference in its place.”15 By the 1950s, when the gay artist had been forced into the closet, Neel por- traits of gay men were no longer so clearly typecast. Abandoning stereotype for suggestion, Neel paints homosexuality as one attribute among others, signaled not by physical type but by varying demeanors. As a heterosexual woman, she emphasized the psychological con„icts and social ostracism these men en- dured. In the quiet angst of Paul Kuyer (1959, ƒg. 112), the question of sexual orientation cannot be avoided and yet cannot be conƒrmed. At the time the editor of The Leader, a civil service magazine, Kuyer would later become the director of the Academy of Music. According to Ann Sutherland Harris, Kuyer, one of ten children in a poor family, told Neel that he had con- A Gallery of Players / 119 sidered becoming a priest.16 Neel painted him that way, with a monkish Nehru jacket and gentle, thoughtful gaze. Neel bifurcates the ƒgure, beginning with the deep shadow that divides his face and continuing via the uninterrupted line drawn down the center of the torso, a compositional duality that estab- lishes the possibility of a double life. Kuyer’s stability is not internal but willed by the gesture of his hands ƒrmly pressed into his lap. No doubt, for Neel, gay men in the 1950s, forced to deny their sexuality in order to protect their jobs, were like priests.17 As a bisexual man, Rivers could paint an underground work of overt homoeroticism during the 1950s, whereas Neel, as a friend of gay artists in many ƒelds, painted what she knew of the struggles they faced in try- ing to “pass.” Although Neel’s support of the artworld’s homosexual subculture was clearly linked to her politics, her position put her in con„ict with the stance of the CPUSA. In his important study , Sexual Communities (1983), John D’Emilio documents the link between anticommunism and the perse- cution of homosexuals by the U.S. government during the McCarthy era.

As the anti-communist wave in American politics rose, it carried homosexuals with it. Gay men and women became the targets of a verbal assault that quickly esca- lated into policy and practice . . . Thus the senators’ information culled from the Kin- sey study of the American male . . . [was used] in order to argue that the problem was far more extensive and difƒcult to attack than they had previously thought.18

In the U.S.S.R., meanwhile, Stalin was as active in persecuting homosexu- als as the government of the United States, and according to D’Emilio, “the at- titude of the [American] Commmunist Party toward homosexuality was re- „ected mostly by its silence. Standard histories of the party in the 1930s and 1940s give it no mention at all.”19 For Neel, retaining her allegiance to the CPUSA throughout the 1950s but also maintaining her personal interest in the plight of the homosexual minority, the Party’s refusal to champion homo- sexuality as a civil rights issue as they had the blacks must have seemed hypo- critical.20 In her portrait of the boyish Henry Geldzahler (1967, ƒg. 113) Neel may have used coded cues to his sexual orientation. Henry’s pinky appears pain- fully wrenched from its nearly boneless fellow digits by a huge ring, a likely ref- erence to his sexuality since “wearing a little ƒnger ring, especially on the left hand, is a common way of indicating Gayness to other members of the secret or semisecret Gay underground in America.”21 In this case the cue would be hard to miss. At the time Geldzahler agreed to pose, he had just been appointed curator of the newly created Department of Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan 120 / The New York Art Network

Museum. A ubiquitous ƒgure on the art scene, he was the frequent subject of artists’ portraits. Yet, Neel’s portrayal of the gregarious, hyperkenetic Geld- zahler looks less like a powerful, sophisticated curator than a bad boy of the art- world. Glasses askew, nostrils distended, mouth drawn down, one hand clutch- ing the back of his chair as if to steady himself, Geldzahler displays the revul- sion some gay men feel in the presence of women. Geldzahler’s career would reach its with the exhibit “New York Painting and Sculpture, 1940–1970” (October 18–February 1, 1970), which he organized to inaugurate the Metropolitan’s centennial year. The lack of dignity accorded a man of Geldzahler’s in„uence and position is at ƒrst sur- prising, but as artworld “gossip” Neel’s portrait is „attering by comparison with Warhol’s confession to Emile De Antonio that he never went into the galleries at the opening of the Metropolitan exhibition. “I just pretended to be Mrs. Geldzahler and invited everybody in.”22 In one brief aperçu, he “outed” Henry and reduced the exhibition to the status of a cocktail party. With less irony than outrage, Thomas Hess described “Henry’s show” as follows:

The Metropolitan’s version of the New York School plunks you right down into the lush 1960s and leaves you there. The sunlight is ƒlled with money . . . And the sense of history is lost beneath layers of charm . . . The horrible conditions under which the New York painters worked in the 1940s with real poverty . . . has been re- placed by the problems of af„uence, which are just as bad.23

Perhaps Neel’s depiction of Geldzahler personiƒes her own revulsion at the increasing commercialization and juvenility of the artworld in the 1960s. Or, perhaps she was simply remarking upon the defensiveness of a curator who is anticipating a request for an exhibition. According to her account, Neel asked outright to be included in “Henry’s Show.” “He looked straight into my eyes and answered, ‘Oh, so you want to be a professional?’”24 In any event, the two remained friends.25 In her most complex artworld portrait, Andy Warhol (1970, ƒg. 114), Neel summarizes the decade’s major social and artistic trends, as did Warhol him- self. The ƒrst and most striking, from the appearance of his torso, is the androg- yne. The ideal of slimness and the unisex dressing of the later 1960s and early 1970s permitted Neel to play with the blurring of boundaries between the masculine and the feminine as a metaphor for the era’s changing status of women as well as for its questioning of the construction of sexuality. Neel’s an- drogyne, whether the “mannish” female or the “feminine” male, is not an ideal type exemplifying what Andre Breton called “the unifying ƒgure in the male/female polarity”26 in the ethereal realm of High Art. Instead, androgyny A Gallery of Players / 121 is a disruptive, destabilizing element, attaching itself like a hyphen to the six- ties bohemian and the seventies celebrity alike, in effect, to split their roles into multiple trajectories along the network. In her “Notes on Camp” (1966), Susan Sontag named the androgyne as an important indicator of the cultural sensibility of the 1960s: “The androgyne is certainly one of the great images of Camp sensibility . . . Here, Camp taste draws on a mostly unacknowledged truth of taste: the most reƒned form of sex- ual attractiveness . . . consists in going against the grain of one’s sex.”27 In trans- forming the tastes and attitudes of the nineteenth-century dandy from a hyper- sensitive aesthete to a “connoisseur of Kitsch,”28 the artist could maintain the aesthetic detachment considered a prerequisite for creative autonomy. Neel’s portraits present a sliding scale from the old aesthete to the new. Whereas Duane Hanson (1972, ƒg. 115), with his long, fur-collared frock coat and mut- ton chops, represents the continuation of the image of the dandy, Robbie Til- lotson (1973, ƒg. 116), with his bouffant hair, décolleté shirt, and skirt-like pants, represents the androgyne. With her portrait of Warhol, Neel suggests that he is not merely androgy- nous but a martyr to homophobia. His torso, with its softness and small, droop- ing breasts, is also distorted and scarred, thus “baring” two misconceptions about homosexuals, ƒrst that they are effeminate, and second that their sexual orientation is a deviation from “natural” heterosexuality. Imposing on the por- trait a sympathy Warhol never sought, Neel makes the artist the victim of the alternative life-style he so visibly embraced. Perhaps Neel drew her image of sexual martyrdom from Jean Genet’s de- scription of the transvestite Divine, the protagonist of Our Lady of the Flowers, which she had read when it was published in an English translation in 1963:

[with h]er pale celestial voice (a voice I would like to imagine being that of a movie actor’s, a voice of an image, a „at voice) . . . Divine retreats into her shell and regains her inner heaven . . . She will go on living only to hasten toward Death . . . Now that she no longer has a body (or she has so little left, a little that is whitish, pale, bony, and at the same time very „abby,) she slips off to heaven.29

Warhol was the ƒrst of New York’s avant-garde artists to be openly gay in both the subject matter of his art and in his appearance.30 Neel’s portrait was painted the year after Stonewall, the uprising in a Greenwich Village bar that launched gay liberation in America, and the painting can be considered a dec- laration of the importance of Warhol’s personal contributions to that water- shed event. For before Warhol, the strong gay undercurrent within modern- ism in the visual arts, with notable exceptions such as Rivers, Francis Bacon, or 122 / The New York Art Network

David Hockney, was closeted; afterward, gay artists granted themselves permis- sion to address homosexual subject matters openly in their work.31 According to the art historian Trevor Fairbrother,

In the late 1950s, when Warhol was at the peak of his success as a commercial artist, homosexuals were an invisible minority in the larger world, yet tolerated as a sub-group in a few professions—dance, theater, and the ƒne and applied arts . . . [however,] success rested on a foundation of conformity . . . Warhol did not deny his sexuality in his daily routine, nor did he repress it in his art.32

Such openness was threatening to some gay artists, who feared “that their care- fully carved-out niches would be endangered as soon as someone publicly por- trayed and celebrated their lifestyle...”33 Obviously, Warhol’s actual wounds did not result from his gay lifestyle, but Neel’s metaphor rings true. Yet Warhol is in a state of suspended animation that suggests that his time, the pop art sixties, had passed. Calvin Tomkins, writing in 1970, provided a parallel description:

Andy has been ripped from grace, shot twice in the stomach by a madwoman who mistook him for a God . . . his life nearly extinguished and still not wholly restored to him . . . Afterwards, he would say that . . . he could not be sure whether he was alive or dead. Nor can we. Andy kept his cool, but things are not the same . . . Will his face inhabit the Seventies as it has the Sixties? . . . Andy, in what one fervently hopes is just another put-on, begins to look more and more like the angel of death.34

Undeterred by Warhol’s postmodernist feint, Neel stripped away his carefully constructed shell to reveal a suffering modernist artist who was the victim of his own success. From the waist up, Warhol is a St. Sebastian whose wounds display the suffering his “cool” self-portraits belie. From the waist down, he is a dandy in designer clothes. Is this disjunctive portrait the result of a surrealist game of Corps Exquis? With his ashen face and hands, Andy is an exquisite corpse, recently resurrected from the dead and „oating in a sky-blue surround. The famously vacant eyes ƒrmly shut, Andy has seemingly renounced the world (and the arrows aimed at him), even as his shiny shoes tie him to it. By revealing the Catholic Warhol, divided between his religious background and his earthly desires,35 Neel presaged in an uncanny way the motifs of Warhol’s late paintings. Neel believed that “the same things are involved in art as are in- volved in religion. For one thing this willingness to sacriƒce for it, to give other things up for it...”36 As a camp-dandy who had publicly renounced all per- sonal feeling, Neel made Warhol appear to have made the ultimate sacriƒce for his art.37 A Gallery of Players / 123

Neel’s courage in painting a portrait of the man whose postmodernism had exposed the rapidly eroding base of realist-expressionist art was impressive. If Neel assumed that her portraits could strip her sitters of their shells to reveal their inner self, Warhol, felling the traditions of modernist portraiture and art photography in a single blow, insisted, “If you want to know about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and ƒlms and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”38 Yet Warhol’s own deadpan visage has been read with some justiƒcation as a strategy for protecting the self in an age of mass communication, and Neel elected to depict Andy in that light. Neel was as yet unwilling to admit that the postcapitalist era required some visual ac- knowledgment if art was to remain a form of history, and so she had little sym- pathy for his art. To her, Warhol was “the greatest advertiser living, not a great portrait painter.”39 I would argue that by publicly courting wealthy patrons, Warhol called attention to the fact that the artist was as constricted under late capitalism as under communism.40 Warhol did not sell out, any more than Neel did, even though both enjoyed the notoriety and ƒnancial rewards that deƒned artistic success during the boom years. Neel’s friendship with Warhol also provided her with the opportunity to record the surfacing of the gay underground at a key point of origin, Warhol’s entourage. If the picture of Neel attending evenings at the Club in the late 1950s in order to establish a line to the expanding artworld network is reason- able enough, it is surprising that in her seventies she was able to befriend Warhol and the members of his Factory. Yet, in her lectures she stated that when she ƒrst met Warhol in 1963, he wanted to put her in one of his movies and requested that she paint his portrait.41 Perhaps her Mae West-like persona, her “ƒrst strike wit” and “ability to turn sexuality into a weapon against the ac- cepted norm,” would have had great appeal to the gay subculture.42 Although she never participated in a Warhol ƒlm, she and Warhol did appear in the same issue of the underground publication Mother (no. 6, 1965), where the ƒrst public exposure of Joe Gould was followed by stills from Warhol’s “Ten Most Beautiful Women.” In April 1979, Neel’s photograph, her 1929 poem “Oh the men, the men . . .” and her 1929 nude double portrait Bronx Bacchus were considered sufƒciently outré to be published in Night 2 along with pho- tographs of Mary McFadden and Ultra Violet dancing at Studio 54. Finally, her last dialogue on art, with Henry Geldzahler, was published in Warhol’s In- terview in January 1985. And so came to Neel. The ƒrst was Gerard Malanga (ƒg. 117), who posed in 1969, shortly after his seven-year collaboration with Warhol ended. As Ellen Johnson has noted, Malanga’s pose is as open as Warhol’s is closed,43 and he averts his glance to permit the viewer to survey his body. His tousled hair and sensual, parted lips evidence a modern homoerotic ideal 124 / The New York Art Network found in Warhol’s “Boy” drawings from c. 1957, and found as well in the mo- torcycle macho of Tom of Finland’s drawings. The 1970 paintings of Jackie Curtis and Rita Red (ƒg. 118) and David Bour- don and Gregory Battcock, (ƒg. 119) are her earliest portraits of “gay” couples. All were players in Warhol ƒlms and participants in life at the Factory. The for- mer were two of Warhol’s Superstars, the latter were important contemporary critics. Neel identiƒes her sitters by name only, and in the former portrait, the naive viewer would automatically categorize the sitter on the left, in jeans and a t-shirt, as male, “Jackie Curtis,” and the one on the right, in the 1940s dress with the „aming hair, as the female, Rita Red, whereas in fact the opposite is true. Initially, then, their masquerade succeeds. Like most transvestites, how- ever, the female is dressed to mimic rather than duplicate male-female dress codes.44 The challenge for Neel was to make those differences recognizable, which she does by reproducing the dominant-subservient convention of male to fe- male. Cocker-spaniel like, Red nuzzles against Curtis, whose sweeping lateral kick assures that the dog will heel. “Her” aggressive self-presentation contrasts with Red’s self-effacing gentleness. Moreover, Curtis’s stiffened, angular body and bony face lack any “feminine” sensuality (compared, for instance, with Malanga’s or Kuyer’s portrayal). Thus, “Rita Red,” bearing only the nickname bestowed by Jackie, plays a female while retaining his male dress; Jackie, on the other hand, adopts female dress but retains his male position. The couple is joined at the feet, where Red’s hush puppy meets Curtis’s pump, with his phallically protruding toe. Both shoes would ƒt either foot, just as Jackie’s name could be either male or female. Because, without fuller information, the viewer is left in doubt about which name and which gender to assign to which person, traditional categories are effectively frustrated. We are not permitted to identify either sitter as male or female, but only to peruse an intermediate way of being, “the transvestite,” which in the androgynous Red’s case need not en- tail cross-dressing. Neither of the pair is able to establish the so nearly perfect an ambiguity between male and female as Warhol, when dressed as a both- and, while retaining his media image (Christopher Makos, Andy Warhol, 1987, ƒg. 120). Such “performance-photographs” would establish a precedent for contemporary cross-dressing artists such as Ru Paul. The couple does epito- mize, nonetheless, the castoffs drawn to Warhol in hope of becoming stars. They are the raw material from which Warhol forged a postmodern, gay art. In David Bourdon and Gregory Battcock, Neel uses their opposing dress, staid business suit vs. colorful underwear, to suggest that for gay men, as well as for heterosexual women, sexual identity may be a matter of masquerade.45 Bourdon, who played a leather-clad living bedpost in Warhol’s unƒnished A Gallery of Players / 125

“Batman-Dracula” (1964), appears here as an establishment ƒgure, the sophis- ticated critic for the Village Voice and Vogue. Because both his suit and his shoes seem too large to quite ƒt, Bourdon becomes a “suit,” playing his conser- vative role whether or not it ƒts him. Battcock, on the other hand, is out in the open, his existence displayed as unself-consciously as in his part in “13 Most Beautiful Boys.” If Bourdon protects his private life, Battcock reveals his, and his exposed position seems to leave him vulnerable.46 Battcock’s joyless emer- gence from the closet in 1970 is one that Neel pictures as threatening to his person, which in social terms, of course, it remained.47 Why, when gay men had long been accepted as part of the New York art- world, did the post-Stonewall era frequently ƒnd them still in the closet? The answer, of course, is that both public and private patronage tends to come from conservative sources, which are often stridently homophobic. But by 1985, The Pennsylvania Academy, ninety-nine years after its dismissal of Thomas Eakins, put a color reproduction of David Bourdon and Gregory Battcock on the cover of its catalog, Alice Neel: Paintings Since 1970. By this time the art- world had caught up with Neel, and over the next decade gay and lesbian art would be widely exhibited and performed. Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual De- pendency (1986), the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe (The Perfect Mo- ment, 1988) and Ru Paul’s video Supermodel (You Better Work) (1992) are a few among the many examples of the increasing visibility of the subjects of ho- moerotic desire and gender „uidity in the mainstream artworld. The consoli- dation of a movement of gay art in the 1980s is comparable in many ways to that of feminist art in the 1970s, especially in its establishment of its own net- work and the focus on the topic of sexual identity. Neel’s art presages both. If her portraits had charted the uneasy position of the gay male in straight society, Neel’s portrait of John Perreault (ƒg. 121) is the apotheosis of the liber- ated gay male. Completed in 1972 when Perreault visited her studio to borrow “Joe Gould” for an exhibition “The Male Nude,” which he was curating for the Emily Lowe gallery at Hofstra University, John Perreault is a deliberate re- thinking of the ideal male nude. The critic wrote frequently and admiringly of Neel’s work in the 1970s, and she returned the favor with a painting that is „at- tering but not idealizing. The pretty-boy type of Malanga is replaced by the even, alert features of an intellectual face propped on a sleek body whose sen- sually curving body hair signals “satyr.” Coincidentally, the pose nearly repli- cates a photograph made by Eakins of one of his students at the Art Students League, Bill Duckett in the Rooms of the Philadelphia Art Students League (1887–1892, ƒg. 122). Although Eakins’s nude photographs were not exhib- ited or published until recently, Neel expressed her ongoing admiration for the artist to Karl Fortess in 1980, adding that when she entered life drawing 126 / The New York Art Network class, “One of the ƒrst things I did was a male nude!”48 The similarity between the photograph and the painting is further evidence that Neel had absorbed the tradition of the unidealized male nude that Eakins had established. By the 1970s Neel was no longer alone in exploring this genre, however, as many feminist artists were turning to the subject, Sylvia Sleigh prominent among them. Although as a curator, Perreault’s interest in the sensuous male nude in art was established with his 1973 exhibition, and Neel’s portrait is an unambiguous celebration of his eroticism, Perreault would not announce that he was gay until 1980. At that time, he began to directly address the issue of gay art in his critical writing. His article “I’m Asking—Does It Exist? What Is It? Whom Is It For?” in Artforum in November 1980 probed the subject in ques- tion-and-answer format, distinguishing between a pre-Stonewall homosexual artist, who would re„ect oppression, and a gay artist, who might express his or her liberation. Perreault noted the contribution of feminism to re-eroticizing and repoliticizing art, providing a space for the emergence of gay art, and then, in speculating about why “the art world has not welcomed gay liberation,” ex- plained that the continued silence on the part of the mainstream artworld was “economic.”49 John D’Emilio agrees that feminism assisted the cause of gay liberation in the 1970s:

Feminism’s attack upon traditional sex roles and the afƒrmation of a nonreproducu- tive sexuality . . . paved a smoother road for lesbians and homosexuals who were also challenging rigid male and female stereotypes and championing an eroticism that by its nature did not lead to procreation. Moreover, lesbians served as a bridge between the women’s movement and gay liberation . . . Feminism helped remove gay life and gay politics from the margins of American society.50

A contemporary Adonis, Neel’s John Perreault rides the crest of the wave made by feminism and gay liberation, openly celebrating at last modern art’s debt to the gay community. 8 The Women’s Wing: Neel and Feminist Art

Since God was made a man and all the symbols of strength and power have been made men, naturally women are male chauvinist enough to wish to identify utterly with these magniƒcent beings, so there can be no feminine sensibility because per se it would be inferior. I have always wanted to paint as a woman but not as the oppressive and power mad world thought a woman should paint . . . The enemy is perhaps not men but the very system itself which also encourages men to oppress each other. Alice Neel, unpublished statement, January 24, 1972, Neel Arts, New York City.

Sisterhood! . . . Why there’s nothing more competitive than the women’s movement. It just shows the competitiveness in American life. Neel interview with E. G. Porter, Jr., St. Louis Post Dispatch, December 14, 1975.

To Neel, the three-pronged liberation of the 1960s—of blacks, gays, and women—must have seemed like the successful realization of the underground battle she had fought in her art. During the 1970s, feminist activists in particu- lar provided her with ƒrm connections to the alternative artworld network that

127 128 / The New York Art Network they were creating, and although Neel had ambivalent feelings about some of the rhetoric of 1970s feminism, she gratefully accepted the support and recog- nition of younger feminist artists and art historians. As her artistic stature grew, so did the size of her canvases. Critical acceptance was re„ected visually in in- creasing artistic conƒdence, which compensated for her declining health and permitted her to enjoy a particularly fertile late period. As the critic Thomas Hess noted, now that “the spur of neglect and misunderstanding isn’t so sharp . . . [t]he light in her pictures has turned milder, almost rosy.”1 Her belated artistic success did not blunt her critical edge, however, and her portraits of the members of the women’s art network look dispassionately at the professional woman of the 1970s, as she assumed new roles and new identities. For their part, the emerging generation of feminists drew from Neel an em- pirical example of their arguments and a living inspiration. The rewriting of art history to include women required role models, and Neel personiƒed the characteristics those models demanded. Lawrence Alloway noted in 1974 that “Neel has a special status among women artists: she is a symbol of persistent work and insufƒcient recognition.”2 In 1981, the president of the Women’s Caucus for Art and dean of the Art School, Lee Ann Miller, described Neel as the “symbol of women’s struggles.”3 To female art historians who had gone through years of classroom training without ever studying a woman artist’s work, the discovery of art of outstanding quality by women was part of their , providing an initial impetus for the rewriting of art history. As Linda Nochlin argued in an in„uential early es- say (1971),4 if there were no great women artists, it was because women had had no access to the system, not because genius was exclusively male. Like Neel’s own con„icted status as rebel and celebrity, however, the femi- nist effort to rewrite art history was not without its own contradictions. Although breaking down the barriers to entry into the system required the dismantling of concepts such as artistic “genius,” which had been couched in biased and out- dated terms, feminists nonetheless would ƒnd themselves reverting to the very categories they had declared outmoded when describing an older artist’s ac- complishments. For instance, one of Neel’s earliest and strongest supporters, Ann Sutherland Harris, confessed in her catalog essay for the retrospective she organized at Loyola Marymount University in 1979, “I am not easily im- pressed nor inclined to hero-heroine worship but Alice seemed to me then and [seems] still a real genius.”5 Neel understood the artworld too well not to no- tice the contradictions within feminist criticism: its claims of sisterhood, on the one hand, and its competitiveness on the other.6 Neel’s own attitude to- ward the movement was equally contradictory: both celebratory and critical, she alternately claimed herself as a foremother and distanced herself from the rhetoric of women’s liberation. The Women’s Wing / 129

Neel’s ƒrst portrait of a modern feminist was a commissioned piece, a por- trait of Kate Millet for the cover of Time magazine’s “Politics of Sex” issue, Au- gust 31, 1970 (ƒg. 123). Millet’s Sexual Politics, released that July, had done for feminist intellectual history what Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) had done for social history: it had challenged the very assumptions on which the category of woman rested. The sculptor/author thus served as a means for Time, which used its portrait covers to exemplify historical events, to personify women’s liberation. Ignoring the recent history of feminist writing, Time claimed, “Until this year, the movement had no coherent theory to but- tress its intuitive passions, no ideologue to provide chapter and verse for its as- sault on patriarchy.”7 Millet had no interest in serving as an ideologue, and in a precursor to Neel’s interchange with Gus Hall in 1980, Millet told the artist that she would not pose because she felt the movement should not have a sin- gle spokesperson.”8 Neel rarely worked well from photographs, and the visual result is a fairly lifeless, cardboard ƒgure, an inadvertent demonstration of the validity of Millet’s argument. Time, which still devoted one of its issues annu- ally to “The Man of the Year,” required an establishment image of leadership that neither the sitter nor the artist was prepared to fulƒll. Despite its deƒcien- cies as a work of art, the stilted portrait has the virtue of exposing the contradic- tion of picturing a feminist leader in patriarchal terms. The following year, on June 1, 1971, Neel’s alma mater, the Moore College of Art, which had held a major exhibit of her work in January, awarded her its ƒrst honorary doctorate. Neel had recently garnered several prestigious awards, but this recognition must have been a particular source of pride.9 Her doctoral address to an emerging generation of artists provided Neel with the opportu- nity to re„ect on her views of women’s liberation. “The women’s lib move- ment has given the women the right to openly practice what I had to do in an underground way. I have always believed that women should resent and refuse to accept all the gratuitous insults that men impose upon them.” However, she denied the implication that men, as part of the patriarchy, were the “enemy.” “Injustice has no sex and one of the primary motives of my work was to reveal the inequalities and pressures as shown in the psychology of the people I painted.” For Neel women’s liberation was important as part of the fundamen- tal changes occurring throughout the culture: “Everything is being questioned, all relationships, education, western man, and the very ethos of the west . . . It is a great time to be starting as an artist; who knows where these new investiga- tions will lead?” Neel’s talk offered no prescriptions or simple answers, no solu- tions to what she considered the aesthetic confusion of the day, and no utopian formulations of the future. Instead it envisioned an unprecedented opportu- nity for women to “ƒnd out what they want.”10 For Neel, as for older feminists such as , the means of 130 / The New York Art Network opposing female oppression was not, as Betty Friedan had suggested in the Feminine Mystique, “the lifelong commitment to an art or science, to politics or profession,” but rather, in de Beauvoir’s phrase, the political skills “to sap this regime, not play its game.”11 Shortly before the movement was forced to acknowledge that it represented primarily the concerns of white, middle-class, liberally educated women and had ignored the voice of the lower class or of minorities, Neel used crude speech, as she always had, as an outrageous ges- ture that would strip shallow thinking of its pretense: “What amazed me was that all the women critics respect you if you paint your own pussy as a women’s libber, but they didn’t have any respect for being able to see politically and ap- praise the third world.”12 In an article in the Daily World published in April 1971, Neel used more judicious language, placing her support of women’s lib- eration in the broader context of left-wing politics: [W]omen’s real liberation cannot occur without some change in the social organi- zation . . . Property relations which reduce everything to the status of “things” and “objects” have also reduced women to the status of “sexual objects” . . . [I]n the last two years especially, I have become known, perhaps because, even though so many terrible things are going on, there are great changes taking place: the Black Panthers struggle for ƒrst class citizenship, the revolt of the youth against a mori- bund educational system, and also women’s liberation opening new horizons and hopes for half the human race.13 Appropriately enough, one of Neel’s ƒrst portraits of the new feminist art- world merged feminism with Marxism. Irene Peslikis, one of the founders of Redstocking artists in 1971, is titled, not feminist woman, but Marxist Girl (1972, ƒg. 124). Peslikis posed for Neel at the time she and Cindy Nemser ini- tiated (1972–1979).14 Peslikis’s radicalism is signaled by her pose: she is one of the few women to whom Neel granted the aggres- sively casual “slung leg” position, that spreading out and claiming of physical space that Nancy Henley had identiƒed with male body language. With her severe black pants and shirt and unshaven underarm, she is the personiƒcation of the 1970s radical. However, Neel plays with Peslikis’s rejection of all con- ventional indicators of femininity: her pose is simultaneously a reference to the liberation from old roles and a pun on Matisse’s odalisques. The ƒrst issue of the Feminist Art Journal in April 1972 not only reprinted the full text of Neel’s doctoral address but also published “The Whitney Peti- tion,” which demanded “the admission of Alice Neel into the Whitney Paint- ing Annual.” One of two such petitions, the Women in the Arts petition, writ- ten by Cindy Nemser, was a „at statement of the feminist position vis-à-vis the artworld establishment: “To us the Whitney’s neglect of an artist like Alice Neel is a symbolic action. It is a gesture which embodies completely the un- The Women’s Wing / 131 just and biased treatment that women artists have received from the big ‘estab- lishment’ museums all over the world.”15 Over the previous two years, the Whitney had been the target of criticism of several feminist organizations. Women Artists in Revolution (WAR), which had seceded from the Art Worker’s Coalition in 1969, protested the low percentage of women included in the Whitney’s annuals (8 percent in 1969); in 1970, the Ad Hoc Women Artists’ group, founded by Brenda Miller, Lucy Lippard, Faith Ringgold, and Poppy Johnson, pressed for 50 percent representation. The petitions and pickets proved effective, and the representation of women artists increased substan- tially.16 Although claiming not to have bent to women’s pressure groups, the Whitney did include Neel in its 1972 painting annual.17 The same issue of the Feminist Art Journal also summarized the open hearing on the question “Are Museums Relevant to Women?” that was held at the on December 12, 1971. The event was chaired by Faith Ringgold and Patricia Mainardi, and altogether twenty-nine people delivered prepared statements, among them Alice Neel. Most speakers objected to the exclusion of women on the basis of “quality,” which as Faith Ringgold noted, “is all about male WASPS who have had their stingers removed.”18 Such vocal feminist criticism of current museum policy helped prepare the ground for Neel’s one-person exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974 (February 7 to March 17). As thrilling as the recognition was for Neel, the exhibition was a rather perfunctory showing of ƒfty-eight portraits on one „oor, sandwiched between the “Flowering of American Folk Art” and “Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters.” Neel’s portrait of the museum’s emeritus di- rector, John I. H. Baur (Jack Baur, 1974, ƒg. 125), with his grey suit and Ger- manic features, is the very image of the artworld functionary, attuned to busi- ness rather than art, more Fuller Brush Man than Frank O’Hara. And although Neel became friends with Baur, who would provide an eloquent testimonial to her at the Whitney’s memorial service in 1985, Lawrence Alloway made clear in his exhibit review in The Nation that the museum’s recognition was begrudg- ing. Assessing the exhibit “in the kind of political terms that forced the museum’s hand,” Alloway wondered why neither of the painting curators, or James Monte, was assigned to organize the show, which was delegated to the curator of prints and drawings, Elke Solomon. “It is not the fault of Neel’s work, but the show looks terrible, badly hung and incoherently selected...”19 The weaknesses of the exhibition provided fuel for conservative critics such as Hilton Kramer, who charged: “There are ineptitudes here, in the rendering of the ƒgure, in the handling of design and in the overall control of the motif that are not a matter of style but of basic competence.”20 Perhaps because Neel had served to personify the ’s cause from its inception, Kramer lost no opportunity throughout the seventies to criticize her work, and 132 / The New York Art Network by extension, that of her feminist supporters. Several years later, commenting on the predominance of gallery exhibitions of ƒgurative over abstract work, Kramer complained that museums were not showing what he believed to be the best examples of contemporary ƒguration, such as the work of Fairƒeld Porter: “Thus the Whitney, which can usually be counted on to do the wrong thing, devoted a solo exhibition to Alice Neel, whose paintings (we can be rea- sonably certain) would never have been accorded that honor had they been produced by a man.”21 In retrospect, the open bias and of Kramer’s writing provide an unequivocally clear historical document that legitimates contemporary feminist arguments and explains why 1970s feminists adopted Neel as an example of courage and persistence. The in„uence and authority of is not easy to counter, and required the concerted ef- forts of a generation of women.22 As a result of their efforts, women’s art in general, and Neel’s art in particu- lar, continued throughout the 1970s to be integrated into the artistic main- stream. In a special issue of Time devoted to “The American Woman,” on March 20, 1971, Robert Hughes wrote a lengthy article on contemporary women’s art, “Myths of Sensibility,” that substantiated the premises of Noch- lin’s argument in “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” by citing statistics that quantiƒed the poor representation of women in galleries, exhibi- tions, and museum collections. “At the Whitney, eight out of 129 one-artist shows in the last decade were by women,”23 Hughes noted, using numbers no doubt supplied by WAR. Hughes also mentioned Neel as an example of an artist who had worked in obscurity for forty years and who deserved to be cred- ited with preserving “the expressionist portrait as a live art.”24 Such articles, ad- dressed to a broad general public, may not have convinced a Kramer, but they helped to garner indispensable, broad-based acceptance of the feminist cause. Art with feminist content had emerged simultaneously in Los Angeles and New York in the late 1960s, but by 1972, arts organizations devoted to the sup- port of art by women had been established all over the country. According to Mary D. Garrard, “The near-simultaneous explosions across the country of feminist activism in the arts . . . can only be explained by the special phenome- non of women’s networks.” These networks, she argues, were based on friend- ships. Prominent women artists, such as , Miriam Scha- piro, and Joan Snyder, “crisscrossed the country to speak on college campuses and to women’s groups, bringing news and spreading ideas.”25 Neel was an in- tegral part of this grassroots network, and in the last decade of her life there were few cities in the United States she did not visit. Among the reasons she was so in demand is that she could be counted on to demolish “male chauvin- ist” attitudes with her wit. At a WIA panel discussion on the status of women in the arts in New York in 1972, for instance, a male member of the audience si- The Women’s Wing / 133 lenced the discussion by shouting, “The reason women don’t succeed is they don’t have balls.” Neel’s now-famous retort, “Women have balls. They’re just higher up,”26 had the ego-reinforcing effect of Billy Jean King’s aces against Bobby Riggs. One reason that she was able to follow a schedule of approximately two ap- pearances per month—either a lecture, a panel discussion, or a talk at an exhi- bition opening—and continue to paint, is that many of the administrative de- tails of her burgeoning career were handled by her daughter-in-law Nancy. Nancy also posed frequently for Neel as a member of the family, but in Nancy and the Rubber Plant (1975, ƒg. 126), one of Neel’s most monumental por- traits from the 1970s, she posed as the professional she was. Seated in front of the towering house plant, Nancy’s torso is like a lean trunk from which springs a syncopated canopy of dancing green leaves, a visualization of that vital, or- ganic network to which Neel was connected through Nancy’s tireless assis- tance. Peering through the leaves is Neel’s 1940 portrait of WPA ofƒcial Au- drey McMahon, whose glowering stare contrasts Neel’s past artworld rejec- tions with the open, intelligent acceptance found in Nancy’s face. At 80 inches one of Neel’s tallest paintings, it is a literal measure of the importance of the new generation of feminists, as exempliƒed by Nancy, to her artistic career.27 In contrast, feminist artists portrayed the network through group portraits, for instance, Sylvia Sleigh’s diptych Soho Twenty Gallery (1974) or May Ste- vens’s Mysteries and Politics (1978). According to May Stevens, Neel was un- interested in ideas of collaboratively produced art or in art about group cooper- ation. And although she willingly participated in conferences, panels, and artist residencies, she remained a loner, with few close women friends.28 At the memorial service for Neel at the Whitney Museum on February 7, 1985, Pat Hills publicly acknowledged the struggles she had had with Neel in writing the ƒrst monograph devoted to her work in 1983. “Along the way Alice and I fought, and, for several months, we didn’t speak.” In her fair-minded analysis of the cause of the difƒculties, Hills summarized Neel’s attitude toward the “network”:

Many people regard her as difƒcult, stubborn, egocentric, and opinionated. But what they forget is the context—the milieu in which she worked . . . namely, the art world centered in New York City. (“The rat race,” Alice used to call it.) In this world, she was determined ƒrst to gain a foothold, then to achieve the recognition her talent deserved, and to do it on her own terms . . . She became singleminded and unsentimental about her goals. She began to join artists’ groups, started calling critics, and established a relationship with the Graham gallery . . . In this hectic “rat race” Neel found herself in, a favorite motto became “I’d rather be shot as a wolf than a lamb.”29 134 / The New York Art Network

This lone wolf attitude, a single-minded determination to write herself into history, explains why Neel was an inspiration but never a true mentor to the younger generation of women artists. Nevertheless, to all appearances Neel was an integral part of the women’s movement, for she was ubiquitous. Neel’s participation at one of the earliest and more important of women’s conferences in these years, “The Conference of Women in the Visual Arts” at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., April 20–22, 1972, merits further discussion. Almost all feminist events were held in the egalitarian panel format, and Neel was one member of a panel with M. C. Richards (potter), (sculptor), Agnes Denes (painter), Elaine de Kooning (painter, critic), and (printmaker, critic). Little interested in the democratic format or the topic of discussion, Neel wrested control of the platform to show slides of her work. Although it was the most memorable of the conference’s disruptions, it was not atypical. At the panel “Critical Judgments,” with Lisa Bear, Lucy Lippard, Marcia Tucker, Linda Nochlin, Josephine Withers, and Cindy Nemser, June Wayne “jumped up and demanded a place on the platform, insisting that ‘only artists should judge artists.’” In reviewing the conference, a bewildered Cindy Nemser com- mented: “It seemed to me that the basic antagonism, the love-hate relationship between artist, critic and curator, was undermining our common ground as women that had brought us to the conference.”30 Skeptical about the possibil- ity of disinterested action in the commercialized New York artworld, Neel would have found such comments naive.31 In addition to Ann Sutherland Harris, who had co-founded the Women’s Caucus for Art at the CAA in Los Angeles in 1972, Cindy Nemser, who had co-founded the Feminist Art Journal that same year, was Neel’s earliest and strongest supporter. In 1973, Nemser wrote an article for Ms. magazine, “Alice Neel: Portraits of Four Decades,” and the following spring and summer pub- lished a two-part interview in Feminist Art Journal that formed the basis of her invaluable interview with Neel in Art Talk: Conversations with Twelve Women Artists in 1975. In the same year she wrote a catalog essay for Neel’s retrospec- tive at the Georgia Museum of Art (September 10–October 19), the full retro- spective (83 paintings) that the Whitney failed to do. Nemser’s essay included a description of the portrait Neel had painted the previous June, Cindy Nemser and Chuck (ƒg. 127). The only one of Neel’s portraits of feminist art critics in which the subjects are naked, the two are the Adam and Eve of feminism. The title, Cindy Nemser and Chuck, rather than Cindy and Chuck Nemser or Mr. and Mrs. Chuck Nemser, emphasizes what the composition makes evident: Chuck, although an editor of the Feminist Art Journal, is in the background, supporting Cindy and pushing her forward, while she, as the powerhouse, emerges phallically from his torso. Nemser read the portrait in terms of her marriage: “We sat close together, The Women’s Wing / 135 holding hands in an attitude of mutual support. My body concealed Chuck’s sexual parts while his hand rested on my waist in a gesture of affectionate pro- tectiveness.”32 However tender the portrait may be, Neel was no doubt look- ing at the broader social picture. In place of the brave rhetoric of Nemser’s opening FAJ editorial—“Women Artists, we now have our own place to be our own selves in print. The battle has begun . . .”,33 Neel advances the view she expressed to Nemser in Art Talk: “I don’t think we should ƒght each other . . . Both men and women are wretched and often it’s a matter of how much money you have rather than what your sex is.”34 Neel’s visual argument is, apparently, that women are put forward now, but they are still hesitant and vulnerable, and must join hands with men to affect social change. Neel thus stripped Nemser of her militant rhetoric in order to substitute her own femi- nist views. Between 1971 and 1973, Neel was consistently included in important exhi- bitions organized by New York–based cooperative galleries such as the A.I.R. (Artist-in-Residence founded 1972) and SoHo 20 (1973). The largest and most signiƒcant of these early exhibitions was the “Women Choose Women” exhi- bition, organized by WIA (Women in the Arts) and held at the New York Cul- tural Center from January 12 to February 18, 1973. The jurors—Pat Pasloff, Ce Roser, Sylvia Sleigh, Linda Nochlin, Elizabeth Baker, Laura Adler, and Mario Amaya—selected and hung a total of 109 works, including Neel’s Preg- nant Woman (1971). Douglas Davis’s review in Newsweek criticized the ex- hibit with some justiƒcation as too large and lacking in focus.35 As at the con- ferences, the ideal of equality prevailed at exhibits curated by and for women in these years. Neel’s painting was the only one reproduced with Davis’s arti- cle; it was provided with the caption, “Breaking Stereotypes.” The one consis- tent theme of the exhibition was the exploration of women’s sexuality, and Neel’s nude looked shocking even in the context of work by emerging artists such as , , and . Another link in Neel’s feminist art network was the painter-curator June Blum, who, while at the Suffolk Museum in Stony Brook and, after 1978, at the gallery at Valencia Community College in Florida, consistently included Neel’s art in her group exhibitions.36 Neel painted Blum in 1972 (ƒg. 128), as did the feminist artist and critic Pat Mainardi. The contrast in their approaches exempliƒes the differences between Neel’s social realism and the idealized vi- sions of an essentialized womanhood characteristic of the early years of femi- nist art. The two portraits were reproduced in Feminist Art Journal 3/2 (sum- mer 1974), along with a transcript of an interview with Mainardi, Neel, and Marcia Marcus.37 In response to Judith Vivell’s question, “What are you peo- ple doing in the twentieth century painting portraits?” Neel replied: “I’m writ- ing history!” whereas Mainardi answered, “I painted [Blum] four times before I realized that an idea was emerging—Wonderwoman!”38 Neel created an im- 136 / The New York Art Network age of power, but avoids cartoon stereotypes. With her mane of hair, regal smile, and maroon bell-bottomed pants suit, Neel depicted an artworld authority as a buyer for Bloomingdale’s, somewhat snidely equating feminist professional- ism with commercialism. By the end of the decade, feminist artists working in nontraditional media would critique the search for a mythic essential womanhood. Dara Birn- baum’s “Technology Transformation: WonderWoman,” which mocked the absurdity of the TV series’ image of the female superhero, coincided with the publication of Gloria Feman Orenstein’s in„uential article, “The Reemer- gence of the Archetype of the Great Goddess in Art by Contemporary Women,” which valorized the very ideas Birnbaum’s video art parodied.39 Orenstein’s argument posited that the goddesses of preliterate, matriarchal civilizations provided archetypes for a contemporary art based on “transpersonal visionary experiences.” The culmination of the trend Orenstein charted was Judy Chi- cago’s “Birth Project” (1980–1985) and Ilise Greenstein’s “Sister Chapel” (1974–1979), the latter a monument commemorating “women’s contribution to civilization.” While Birnbaum examined the ways in which our culture con- structs notions of womanhood, Orenstein was engaged in an ahistorical search for its origins. Because Neel’s portraiture had more in common with Birnbaum’s decon- structive project than with the “great goddess” trend in early feminism, it is curious that the one collaborative feminist project in which Neel consented to participate was the “Sister Chapel.”40 However, in place of a goddess, Neel chose to paint a politician, Bella Abzug (1977, ƒg. 129). Although Abzug was not the only nonmythological ƒgure in the group, the other political ƒgures, such as June Blum’s Betty Friedan as the Prophet, were accorded divine status (1976, ƒg. 130). That same year, 1979, Neel traveled to Washington to receive from the lifetime achievement award initiated by the Women’s Caucus for Art, an honor she shared with , , Louise Bour- geois, and (in absentia) Georgia O’Keeffe. According to Newsweek’s account of this crowning moment in the history of women’s art, Neel apparently asked outside the oval ofƒce: “Where is Bella Abzug now?” referring to her removal from her position as co-chairwoman of the president’s National Advisory Com- mission for Women.41 Neel considered the construction of new pedestals for idealized womanhood less important than keeping real women in power.42 When painting Abzug, Neel stated that she deliberately emphasized the ball- shaped breasts to “show that she would nurture the electorate,”43 that is, that Abzug would have the courage to defend women’s issues. With her double portrait of Linda Nochlin and Daisy (1973, ƒg. 131), Neel depicted another art historian who had provided her with critical support, not simply by including her in important exhibitions but by placing her work in The Women’s Wing / 137 historical context. On an immediate level, it is a portrait of the new working woman balancing career and motherhood, intelligently addressing the viewer while calmly keeping an active, curious daughter in tow. No doubt Neel re- membered her own frustrated efforts to walk that tightrope, which she had recorded in The Intellectual (ƒg. 20). If the languid Fanya Foss had been the counterfeit item, we have here the real McCoy: the faceted oval of Nochlin’s head, pressing against the top of the picture plane, is a powerful metaphor for a towering, crystalline intelligence, providing clear evidence that this is an intel- lectual worker. The riveting intensity of Nochlin’s gaze is matched by the full saturation of the primary and secondary colors linking mother and child. In this portrait, Nochlin is accorded the masklike imperturbability and intense coloration of van Gogh’s portrait of Mme. Roulin.44 Perhaps the painting’s style is a deliberate reference on Neel’s part to the scholar’s work. Nochlin’s articulate defense of the realist tradition in twentieth-century art provided yet another validation, apart from femininism, of the principles on which Neel had based her art. The year Neel painted her portrait, Nochlin published an article assaulting the prevailing critical methodology, the formal- ist criticism of , which insisted that abstraction was the inherent goal of modernism. Titled “The Realist Criminal and the Abstract Law,” the essay questioned formalism’s key premises by asking “Why are the demands of the medium more pressing than the demands of visual accuracy?” Why is purity better than impurity?” Tracing an idealist, Platonic bias in art historical writing from the Renaissance to the present, Nochlin deƒned visual realism in the same way it had been deƒned recently in literature, as: “the cre- ative acknowledgement of the data of social life at a recognizable moment in history.”45 Having chosen a phrase that could well serve to summarize Neel’s art, Nochlin concluded; “To condemn contemporary realism as resurgent aca- demicism or trivial deviation from the mainstream—Modernism—is to falsify the evidence...”46 In an article from the following year, 1974, Nochlin joined the feminist de- bate over the question of a “female sensibility.” In “Some Women Realists,” Nochlin wrote, “I was concerned to discredit essentialist notions about the ex- istence of an ahistorical, eternal “feminine” style, characterized by centralized imagery or delicate color, at the same time that I wished to demonstrate that the lived experience of women artists in a gendered society at a certain moment in history might lead in certain speciƒc directions.”47 In section 4, “Painters of the Figure,” which included Neel, she argued that the decline of the Western portrait tradition was due not merely to the invention of photography but to a “male” fear of content:

Fear of content . . . which has marked the most extreme phases of the modern movement in recent years, is at least in part responsible for the demise of the por- 138 / The New York Art Network

trait as a respectable ƒeld of specialization . . . In the ƒeld of portraiture, women have been active among the subverters of the natural laws of modernism. This hardly seems accidental: women have, after all, been encouraged, if not coerced into making responsiveness to the moods, attentiveness to the character traits . . . of others into a lifetime’s occupation . . . in no other case is the role of the artist as mediator rather than dictator or inventor so literally accentuated by the actual situ- ation in which the art work comes into being.48

Nochlin’s essay exempliƒes the strengths of feminist art history in the early 1970s. By rejecting the dominant art historical bias against both realist art and art by women, Nochlin demonstrated that Neel was working within an alterna- tive, if uncharted, tradition within modernism.49 The year of the national bicentennial celebration, 1976, was an especially active one for Neel, and exempliƒes the frenetic schedule she maintained dur- ing this decade. As the following list makes clear, the momentum of her career was fueled to a great extent by the women’s movement. The year culminated in the opening of the landmark exhibition “Women Artists, 1550–1950” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in December. Organized by Linda Noch- lin and Ann Sutherland Harris, it was the ƒrst museum survey of women’s art, and its catalog offered an initial exploration of an alternative . Neel entered the historical tradition of women’s art with T. B. Harlem. The year began with the opening of her Graham gallery exhibit on January 31; Linda Nochlin and Daisy was reproduced on the announcement, perhaps as a preview of the Los Angeles show. On January 25, she was elected a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, as was Meyer Schapiro.50 In Febru- ary she was given a two-person exhibition with Sylvia Sleigh at A.I.R. gallery, which was reviewed by David Bourdon in the Village Voice. In March, she was included in the Studs Terkel PBS documentary on the WPA. That same month, she had an exhibition at the Old Mill Gallery in Tinton Falls, New Jersey, run by Geza De Vegh, who had in 1957 restored some of the paintings slashed by Kenneth Doolittle; from March 31 to April 16, she had a one-person exhibi- tion at Beaver College, where she again met her chum from the Philadelphia School of Design, Rhoda Medary, who ran the art store there. In April she spoke at the Brookdale Community College in Vermont, as part of a feminist lecture series. In July, her portrait of Jean Jadot (1976) represented one of 360 religious leaders whose portraits were exhibited in the Liturgical Arts exhibi- tion organized by Philadelphia Inquirer critic Victoria Donohoe and held at the city’s Civic Center. In the fall, she was included in an exhibition of Time cover portraits organized by the USIA and shown at the American Embassy in London. In September, the Fendrick gallery in Washington, D.C., opened an exhibit of Gillespie/Neel/Robinson/Sleigh, which was a distant satellite to the The Women’s Wing / 139

“Three American Realists: Neel/Sleigh/Stevens” exhibit held at the Everson Museum in Syracuse. The same month, after participating in a panel discus- sion at the Everson, Neel juried a watercolor exhibition for the in Hartford. (Lengthy interviews with Neel appeared in local pa- pers in both Hartford and Syracuse.) In October, she participated in “Close To Home,” an exhibit of thirty-three still life artists at the Genesis galleries. On October 31, she was included in a New York Times article, “The Art of Portrai- ture, in the Words of Four New York Artists,” which accompanied the exhibit “Modern Portraits: The Self and Others” at the Wildenstein gallery. October also saw the premier of the ƒlm Alice Neel by Nancy Baer, at the Second Inter- national Festival of Women’s Films at Cinema Studio in New York. In No- vember, she was included in a show of fourteen members of the Visual Artists Coalition (founded 1973) at Adelphi University’s Alumni House in Garden City, Long Island. On January 9, 1977, after the opening of the Los Angeles show in December, “Alice Neel: A Retrospective Exhibit” opened at the Wash- ington County Museum of Fine Arts in Hagerstown, Maryland. Without question, Neel was now an integral part of the art establishment, but as the above list indicates, she was part of the women’s art establishment, a network that continued to present work in alternative exhibition spaces rather than in prestigious New York museums or galleries. So, too, the majority of reviews of her exhibitions remained conƒned to the women’s pages (the so- called “Living” sections) of newspapers rather than the arts section. Despite her growing reputation, her citizenship in the artworld, like that of most women, remained “second class.” Yet the written record, the prerequisite for the entry into history, had been established. The female members of Neel’s New York art network are primarily the ac- tivists who sought Neel out in order to include her in their projects. The very numbers of these professional women attest to their increasing importance in the artworld, especially when compared with the dearth of female representa- tion in Neel’s proletarian portrait gallery. As with her portraits of male artists, many of her female sitters are androgynous. The androgynous woman had enjoyed as wide a cultural currency throughout the century as the male artist- aesthete, tracing her historical roots to the Modern Woman—the slim, active ideal that emerged in the 1920s—and beyond that to the nineteenth-century tradition of the female bohemian artist in pants. According to Joanna Frueh, by the 1970s the new generation of feminists “adopted androgyny as a symbol and enactment of male/female and feminine/masculine equality.”51 Most of Neel’s androgynous portraits were painted in the mid-1970s, when the debates about the relationship of androgyny to feminism were most vocif- erous. For Jungian psychologist June Singer, whose book Androgyny: Toward a New Theory of Sexuality was published in 1977, androgyny simply mooted all 140 / The New York Art Network other concepts of sexual identity. Like Alfred Kinsey in 1949, she argued that sexual orientation was not stable: “Most people are convinced that they . . . are, by nature, heterosexuals, homosexuals or bisexuals . . . It is my belief that these sexual categories ƒx an idea in mind that need not be ƒxed but can be ex- tremely „uid.”52 In her view, the answer to sexual confusion was to look within to ƒnd the spiritual wholeness of one’s inherent androgyny. Many feminists, such as Carolyn Heilbrun, were initially drawn to this argument.53 But coun- terarguments soon emerged. Within feminism, ’s Gyn/Ecology (1978) attacked the notion of androgyny as expressing “pseudo-wholeness in its combination of distorted gender descriptions...”54 Unlike their male counterparts, many of Neel’s female androgynes appear asexual, and the very contrasts between them indicate that the ideal of androg- yny had not erased questions of “difference.” For instance, the redoubtable, el- egant Oberlin College art historian Ellen Johnson (1976, ƒg. 132) is reduced to an old maid schoolteacher.55 The slightly later portrait of Marisol (1981, ƒg. 133), though more forceful, is still asexual. Like her sculptures, she appears to be made of wood, and, with her high cheekbones and straight black hair, she becomes a “wooden Indian,” inscrutable, unbending. For this group of women born well before mid-century, androgyny is equated with repression, suggest- ing that the sitter had been forced to choose between marriage and career. For the younger generation, Neel permitted a wider but still primarily rather negative range of meanings. Louise Lieber, Sculptor (1971, ƒg. 134) rep- resents one point along the scale: the „eshless ideal of beauty enforced by con- temporary fashion. An artist, Lieber appears to have consciously sculpted her body into a cultural artifact of chic. The angular shoulder emerging from her “toga” references the image of the sensual half-draped female from Greek Kore to Renoir, but it is now reduced, by design, to bone rather than „esh. This ideal, which refuses the woman any material reality at all, gave feminists one basis for questioning whether slim Modern Woman was a positive goal.56 In 1977, Neel painted the prominent feminist art historian Mary D. Gar- rard (ƒg. 135), the young counterpart to Ellen Johnson. The second president of the Woman’s Caucus for Art, the Washington-based art historian would subsequently co-edit two important anthologies of art historical writings that served to “question the litany.” Garrard, in tan pants, navy pea coat, and rakish knit cap, is a model of the androgyne as a militant feminist activist. Seated squarely in her chair, Garrard appears to converse with the viewer, while the horizontal of Garrard’s interlaced ƒngers, a gesture Neel highlights with the red scarf, speaks of calm rationality and balance as well as of a defensive wall or barrier, of political equality as well as protection of privacy. In Lieber androg- yny is a sign of oppression; in Garrard it signals a political and sexual liberation that must as yet be carefully guarded. The Women’s Wing / 141

There exist but a few hints in Neel’s art of an interest in exploring the rela- tion between the culture’s lesbian stereotype and the complicated issue of les- bian identity that she had consistently addressed in her portraits of gay men. Certainly there are no paintings from the 1970s that celebrate lesbian activism in the way that John Perreault does gay liberation. Nor did Neel provide any verbal commentary on the increasingly visible efforts of lesbian women artists over the course of the decade. This absence may in part be explained by the fact that what one might term a lesbian sensibility in contemporary art did not emerge until the very end of Neel’s life. The symbiotic relationship described by D’Emilio between gay liberation and women’s liberation was, ironically enough, not immediately extended to gay women.57 It was not until 1980 that a “movement,” in the sense of a signiƒcant number of artists addressing the topic, can be said to have been established.58 The portrait of Garrard is an indi- cator of the tentative emergence of that sensibility. Neel offers two alternatives to her artworld androgynes, both young and old: the fecund ƒgure of Faith Ringgold (1978, ƒg. 136) and the „amboyant one of Hungarian-born multimedia artist Sari Dienes (1898–1992) (1976, ƒg. 137). In a portrait as coloristically magniƒcent as Neel’s portrait of Nochlin, Ring- gold is the embodiment of the 1960s phrase “Black Is Beautiful.” Neel empha- sizes the splendor of Ringgold’s ethnic dress by tipping the familiar tub chair forward to suggest the round ceremonial stools used by leaders of African tribes. Splendidly arrayed in her red costume, Ringgold represents the change in the formulation of racial identity in the 1970s from black (skin color) to African American (ethnicity). In contrast to Neel’s contemporary portrait of the African businessman Kanuthia (1973, ƒg. 138), whose neckless head ap- pears glued onto his tan, western-style, business suit, Ringgold takes pride in adopting African fabric art as a sign of her cultural heritage. Kanuthia, rigid in his corporate attire, becomes a “suit,” the representative of Western colonial- ism in Africa. Ringgold is an African American, Kanuthia an Americanized African. Each uses dress rather than skin color to establish identity. Like Neel, Sari Dienes was a role model for feminist artists, and because a number of them, including Martha Edelheit, had painted portraits of her, Dienes’s dealer at the Buchfer/Harpsichord gallery planned to include a selec- tion in her 1976 exhibit there. Neel agreed to contribute a portrait as well, and depicted the seventy-eight-year-old artist, two years Neel’s senior, garbed in a multicolored muumuu, in full bloom. Smiling as if in delight at her clownish appearance, she is the bawdy comedienne, whose self-presentation need no longer contain any element of irony or anger, for she is past the age where criti- cal opinion or neglect can harm her. An artworld Persephone, she has been re- born into a vital, springlike old age; the red, purple, and green polka dots on her caftan have the bold simplicity of Matisse’s late cutouts. Neither a Great 142 / The New York Art Network

Goddess or a Wonderwoman, Dienes is an older artist who exudes creative en- ergy. In this sitter, Neel found a kindred spirit. Dienes wrote that “Bones, lint, Styrofoam, banana skins, the squishes and squashes found on the street: nothing is so humble that it cannot be made into art.”59 Although not widely known to the general public, Dienes, who had studied with Fernand Léger, André Lhote, and Henry Moore in Paris and London, was a ƒxture on the New York art scene. The artistic pluralism and the political climate of the 1970s brought into the mainstream four new artis- tic typologies: the gay male androgyne, the African American, the militant feminist, and the „amboyant elderly female, represented by Perreault, Ring- gold, Garrard, and Dienes respectively. The last of her elderly artworld matriarchs was Neel herself, presented in her natural element: as a painter. (Self-Portrait, 1980, ƒg. 139). The self- portrait is a standard modernist subject, but a portrait of a painter who is a naked, eighty-year-old woman is not, and so the effect is initially comic: ever the bawdy woman, her antic makes us laugh at this breach of conventional barriers. Yet unlike the one obvious precedent, the octogenarian Picasso, wiz- ened but still horny in his 347 suite from 1968, Neel presents a noneroticized body shocking only because what is supposed to be a source of disgust and shame is merely old. Because Neel’s aged body is so schematically rendered, its grotesque or pathetic implications are minimized, and its current condition granted limited relevance to the task at hand. With this summary work, Neel quite deliberately places herself in art his- tory through citation. The pose is based on Rembrandt’s well-known etching, Woman Seated On a Mound (1631), and the lava-like cone of her „esh out of which her head spews with such force recalls Rodin’s Balzac (1897). Yet while Balzac’s towering form is absorbed in contemplation, Neel, like Eakins before her, presents herself as a worker, holding her brush with the authority Eakins accorded Dr. Gross’s scalpel. Passing across her heart, it is a lifeline, pointing both to her lineage (realism) and to her legacy (feminist art). She had spent a lifetime creating her own comédie humaine, which she presents as a product of human effort, created in the shadow of past art history. Although her „esh is sagging, her brush creates a boundary between her head and her body, demar- cating the triumph of mind over matter. Although elderly, she is still a produc- tive laborer. In The Coming of Age, her pessimistic account of the inevitable miseries of old age, Simone de Beauvoir reserved special praise for the old per- son whose world remains “inhabited by projects: then, busy and useful, he es- capes both from boredom and from decay.”60 Neel personiƒes proliƒc old age, and she might have added that, for a woman released from caretaking respon- sibilities, from the body’s reproductive demands, and from any accusations of antisocial behavior, the last stage of life represents the ƒnal liberation. The Women’s Wing / 143

Looking back, she would note, “I could accept any humiliation myself, but my pure area was art, and there it was the truth . . .”61 Recognizing through pose the nineteenth-century origins of her approach, both European and American, she painted herself as “the last of the buffalo,” in her words.62 Neel’s late self-portrait is her own monument to her oeuvre, the product of an adult lifetime of sustained effort. No network, just work.

Part IV

The Extended Family

9 Truth Unveiled: The Portrait Nude

In the process of dismantling the artiƒcial barriers between public and private in her portraits, Neel also reconƒgured the meanings of the body, and in par- ticular the unclothed body. Whereas when naked the human body is in its least public state, when depicted as a nude it is the most prevalent and public of artistic genres, the genre that signiƒes art.1 For Neel, whose portraits violate decorum and insist on the validity of all observed experience, the depicted nude was necessarily to appear to be naked. Her approach to nakedness, and the sexual charge it carries in this culture, was matter-of-fact. Whether clothed or unclothed, the sexual component of the body is never absent in Neel’s por- traits. A constant throughout her work, Neel’s most innovative portrait nudes occur at either end of her career, during two decades of “sexual liberation,” the 1930s and 1970s. In The Female Nude, Lynda Nead has argued that the classical nude of Western art history was deƒned in terms of containment, metaphorically and metamorphically “a sheath, as regular and structured as the column of a tem- ple.”2 This girding of the wayward form of the body is, Nead argues, a doubly regulatory act—regulartory “of the female body and of the potentially wayward viewer whose wandering eye is disciplined by the conventions and protocols of art.”3 The site of this discipline is the art academy, where the representation of

147 148 / The Extended Family the nude is maintained under strict supervision. There, the naked model is not a person but a mold from which is extracted a restricted range of meanings. The model’s very anonymity is thus a form of dress, draping her in an aca- demic pseudonym, “Study.” The shock and embarrassment beginning art stu- dents often experience when ƒrst confronted with a naked stranger is routinely dismissed by their professors. By making that initial confrontation the subject of her portraits, Neel removed the nude from the ideological realm of the aca- demic classroom and returned the body to its central position in the formation of identity. Neel’s portrait nudes are a signiƒcant contribution to the modernist de- mystiƒcation of the body. Like her contemporaries, Neel’s concept of the re- lationship between identity, the body, and sexuality was in„uenced by the Freudian theories prevalent in the Village in the 1930s. Neel was fully as capa- ble of violating taboos and of celebrating the release of the repressed sex drive as her literary contemporaries, James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, whom she ƒrst read in art school. Of the two writers, her work most closely parallels that of Joyce, who, unlike Lawrence, did not make a religion of the sexually liber- ated body. Rather, Joyce considered the body “matter-of-fact . . . a tragically re- bellious servant, and . . . also comic.”4 The private body is both uncivilized and unprotected; lacking the veneer of propriety, aware only of its own needs, it is scandalous when in public, often humiliating in private. From such an emperor’s-new-clothes approach to the tradition of the ideal nude in art came Neel’s invention of the portrait nude. The word “invention” may seem too strong a claim; after all, the full-length male and female nudes of both Eakins and Henri at the turn of the century gave equal attention to the face and body, and so could be considered portrait nudes. Moreover, the Aus- trian expressionists Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele had developed the por- trait nude by 1910 as a means of depicting the “sex drive,” although in the 1930s Neel was not familiar with their radical work. Other precedents include Paula Modersohn-Becker’s ƒgure drawings made in Paris in 1906, and Suzanne Valadon’s nudes from the early 1920s, which also have the speciƒcity of por- traits, even though they are not named. Although Neel’s portrait nudes are a logical and not unexpected develop- ment within modernist art and literature, she remains the only American artist of her generation to strip from the naked subject all reference to the model. Between 1930 and 1980 she observed the changing deƒnitions of sexuality and gender identity as they were inscribed on the bodies of her sitters. Neither sim- ply objective recordings of the individual body nor expressionist exposures of sexual obsessions, her naked men, women, and children present identity as part and parcel of embodied experience. Like all professional artists, Neel had learned to paint the nude in art Truth Unveiled / 149 school, where she worked from both plaster casts and live models. During the 1930s, when Neel invented the portrait nude, the tradition of the unidealized rendering of the female nude was continued at the Art Students League, where John Sloan taught. The New York–based urban realists , Raphael Soyer, and Reginald Marsh all painted “Art Students League” nudes marked by academic competence; of the three only Marsh courted the lewd- ness of modern romance book covers—the others were pointedly detached. Perhaps because Neel never held a long-term teaching position, she was able to crack the Art Students League’s academic mold. In 1930, after Carlos had departed for Havana with Isabetta, Neel returned home, and for several months in the summer before her psychic collapse, painted in the studio shared by her school friends Ethel Ashton and Rhoda Medary. As they painted together, they also served as each others’ models. Whereas Ashton and Medary produced nudes in the Ashcan School style, much like those Carlos had made of Alice in Cuba, Neel represented instead the experience of modeling, the embarrassed confrontation of two differently positioned individuals, subject and model. She returned thereby to that individual personality which is evacu- ated from the nude model in the academic setting. Sitting for her portrait, Rhoda was able to affect a feigned nonchalance, but Ethel, a painfully shy woman, evidently could not help but let her discomfort show. In Ethel Ashton (1930, ƒg. 140), Neel abolishes the distance required for objectivity and brings the ƒgure forward into the viewer’s space, where she is literally too close for comfort. At that close range, we are forced to look in Ethel’s eyes, there to ƒnd the vulnerability we feel when required to remove our clothes and present our bodies, on one pretext or another, for ofƒcial in- spection. With eye contact comes recognition, and with recognition, the con- strictive convention of the nude collapses with the same gravitational force as the folds of Ashton’s „esh. The genre of the nude has undergone a seismic shift, for the subject is no longer the artist’s fantasy, erotic or otherwise, about the model, nor an objective anatomical rendering, but the ways in which the model’s relationship to her body conditions her interpersonal relationships. The arrowhead shape of Ashton’s face, thrust down into her chest like a turtle’s into its shell, is doubled in her pendulous breasts. The body is now part of a person’s permanent psychological baggage. One wonders whether Eakins’s iconoclastic approach to the nude was a precedent here. While at the PSDW, Neel surely heard the popular lore of his dismissal from the PAFA in 1886 for removing the loincloth from a male model in a coed life drawing class. Eakins’s frank nudes, such as Study of a Seated Nude Woman Wearing a Mask (1896), may have been on view at the Philadel- phia Museum when Neel returned home in 1930. By “removing the mask,” so to speak, Neel transformed Eakins’s ƒgure study into a psychological portrait. 150 / The Extended Family

Like Eakins’s nudes, Ethel is a modernist revision of the allegorical ƒgure of the Truth Unveiled. With her female nudes from the 1930s, the Truth is that in our culture the image of the woman’s body is so thoroughly manipu- lated that very few women ƒnd it to be a source of ego reinforcement. Instead, their bodies are evidence to them of their own inadequacies, their failure to measure up. By 1930, the ideal of the Modern Woman, as streamlined and ac- tive as the products of modern industrial design, had replaced the passive, voluptuous Victorian ideal.5 Popular images of the Modern Woman, whether personiƒed by a Zelda Fitzgerald, , or Marlene Dietrich, were ubiquitous. Moreover, the new ideal had garnered the power of medical au- thority as early as 1908 when a Dr. Louis Dublin, having linked obesity to de- creased longevity, developed the ƒrst height/weight charts, which have served ever since as the medical counterpart to high art’s ideal nude.6 When Ethel’s naked body is measured against the Modern Woman’s, it simply does not ƒt. Because Ethel’s body fails to meet the requirements of the decade’s image of the Modern Woman, she endures a tragic collapse of the ego. Moreover, with her hands and feet amputated, she is helpless to move from her position, but is forced to remain identiƒed with/as her torso. Her departure from the cultural norm reduces her to a grotesque, traditionally deƒned as a “monstrous quality, constituted by the fusion of different realms as well as by a deƒnite lack of proportion and organization.”7 Ethel cannot contain herself, and so she lacks a culturally sanctioned feminine identity. By granting the “Academy” subjectivity, Neel created the antitype of the Modern Woman, thereby posing questions that remained pertinent throughout the century. During 1932–1933, when she had moved to Greenwich Village, Neel con- tinued her dialogue with the tradition of the nude, speciƒcally with the turn- of-the-century image of woman’s bestial sensuality in visual art and its psycho- analytic counterpart, Freudian theory. At this time, her model was her close friend Nadya Olyanova, whom she had ƒrst met in New York in 1928. Nadya (a.k.a Edna Meisner from Brooklyn) was petite and dark, and apparently Neel accepted the exotic, gypsy fortune-teller persona the woman had adopted for her career as a graphologist. Although quite perky in the photograph of the two of them as “Modern Women” in Greenwich Village (n.d., ƒg. 141), Nadya is prematurely aged and hardened in Neel’s portrait from 1928 (Nadya Olya- nova, ƒg. 142). Seated at a carved table, Nadya, cigarette in hand, appears to be sizing up a customer. Hardly the Modern Woman with the streamlined body and glamorous career, Nadya is the marginalized woman whose business, what- ever it may be, is more than slightly disreputable.8 Nadya Nude (1933, ƒg. 143), the most traditionally posed of her portrait nudes, seems to revert to the tradition of the physical and moral lassitude, “the decadence,” of the ƒn-de-siècle female nude. Like Ethel’s body, the weight of Truth Unveiled / 151

Nadya’s „esh succumbs to gravity, pulling the thighs open, not in provocation but in fatigue. Her tiny head has no control over her material bulk which, log- like, rolls forward under the force of its own weight. Nadya Nude reopens the question of sexual identity that had been deƒned in the Ashton portrait in terms of lack—the shapeless body fragment, the black hole of the pubic re- gion, all of which denied Ethel an intact sexuality. Whether intentional on Neel’s part or not, the profound sense of inferiority, even shame, conveyed by her expression makes Ashton an almost textbook illustration of Freud’s con- cept of the female as a castrated male. Nadya’s utter lassitude, in turn, appears illustrative of Freud’s deƒnition of feminine personality traits, such as irra- tionality and passivity, that result from her discovery of her “castration.” In his essay “Femininity,” which was published in New Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis in 1933, the year Nadya Nude was painted, Freud located the key to feminine psychic experience in the moment when a girl discovers that she is not fully human, for she lacks a penis. From that time forward she is destined to “fall a victim to envy for the penis.” The three corollaries of femi- nine psychology that result from penis envy are passivity, masochism, and nar- cissism.9 As Kate Millet argued in Sexual Politics, any woman who resists her role “is thought to court neurosis, for Femininity is her fate as ‘anatomy is des- tiny.’” Nadya could be considered a textbook case of female neurosis. Mind- less, lacking will or consciousness, Nadya passively and without any anticipa- tion of pleasure opens herself to observation. Blanketing her “hapless defect” is a luxuriant growth of pubic hair, which Freud described as “the response of ‘nature herself ’ to cover the female fault.”10 If depilation had historically served as a convention that visually deprived the classic nude of any evidence of the model’s own sexual desire, Neel’s overcompensation suggests that Nadya suffers from a surfeit of sexual freedom. Published in the United States during the Depression, Freud’s theory of fe- male sexuality marked the end of the ƒrst wave of feminism. Looking back in 1969, Millet could argue convincingly that,

Coming as it did, at the peak of the sexual revolution, Freud’s doctrine of penis envy is in fact a superbly timed accusation, enabling a masculine sentiment to take the of- fensive again . . . The whole weight of responsibility, and even of guilt, is now placed upon any woman unwilling to “stay in her place.”11

Is that the “argument” of Nadya? If she is the half-civilized force Freud de- scribed, will the exercise of sexual liberty drag her further toward animality? In an era of free love, this modern Olympia need not be paid for, but, even gratis, a mindless body is not much of an offer. The Freudian sexual revolution has not liberated Nadya in any signiƒcant way. 152 / The Extended Family

In a double nude portrait from the same year, Nadya and Nona (ƒg. 144), Neel attacks the nineteenth-century theme of lesbian lovers, used both to dou- ble the amount of female „esh per painting and as a sort of proof of women’s natural perversity. She may have been responding to the nudes of the French émigré Jules Pascin, whose portraits of prostitutes were shown in New York in the late 1920s and early 1930s. According to Raphael Soyer, it was Pascin “who created a cult among the younger artists for painting and drawing the female ƒgure nude and semi-clothed.”12 Pascin’s women, however, are clearly prosti- tutes, and their individuated bodies speak less to personality than to the type of the decadent woman, morally misshapen.13 The sexual tension in Nadya and Nona is of a different nature. The naked women’s nocturnal moonbath is a private ritual that de„ects the potentially judgmental gaze.14 Although their dirty feet and Nadya’s drugged expression convey “decadence,” the ƒxed beam of light from Nona’s blue eye returns the viewer’s stare and unplugs fantasy. We cannot feel certain, as we can with Pascin, that we are witnessing a lesbian encounter. Neel has reinterpreted the theme of transgressive erotic activity by asserting their right to privacy. In the same years, Neel turned to the subject of male sexuality in a series of nude drawings of Kenneth Doolittle that are the companions to her Nadya paintings. Despite the fact that he had provided her ticket to the New York in- telligentsia, Neel never included Doolittle in her proletarian portrait gallery. His place is not as an intellectual but as a lover. In her two full-length nude drawings of Doolittle, one reclining, one standing, she transforms the lean, sinewy body type found in Eakins’s boxers. In a brilliant, sacrilegious spoof of every Sleeping Venus in art history, Neel depicts the sleeping Kenneth Doolit- tle (1932, ƒg. 145) splendidly spread-eagled in unconscious abandon, his hands folded prayerfully in dream-worship of the God of sex. Even though Nadya Nude assumes a similar pose, her body lacks the angular tension of Doolittle’s bony frame, which appears to be gathering energy from the coiled springs beneath him as he sleeps.15 When the male rather than the female is exposed and unconscious, the power relations within the artist-model para- digm become explicit. Based loosely on Michelangelo’s Dying Slave, whose plaster cast Neel had copied in drawing class, Kenneth Doolitte removes four centuries of ƒg leaves. The male nude is exposed as no longer heroic, but as much the victim of his “unconscious drives” as is Nadya. In another drawing from 1932–1933 (Kenneth Doolittle, ƒg. 146), Doolit- tle’s wiry body collapses under the in„uence of drug withdrawal. As in Egon Schiele’s drawings, the lack of musculature equates to lack of control, but nei- ther insanity nor sexual obsession is the subject here. An early representation of drug addiction, this decadence has consequences more dire than that of Truth Unveiled / 153

Nadya’s addiction to sex. In retrospect, her Picassoesque drawing of Doolittle in long underwear (Kenneth Doolittle, 1931, ƒg. 147) becomes a red „ag warn- ing of the destruction he would cause to both himself and to her. Neel found refuge from that decadence in her relationship with John Roth- schild, which began in 1932 when they met at the annual outdoor exhibition. A loyal friend until his death in 1975, Rothschild had a keen appreciation of her art; in addition, he assisted her ƒnancially throughout her years of obscurity. A Harvard-educated businessman, John was her bourgeois lover, and Neel, the communist sympathizer, was unapologetic about her own enjoyment of the middle-class comforts he offered as an escape from the stresses ƒrst of Doolittle and then of life in Spanish Harlem. The cos- mopolitan lifestyle they enjoyed together is absent from the portraits, however. In the ƒve portrait busts Neel painted between 1933 and 1958, John is de- picted as emotionally withdrawn. In the three 1935 watercolors to be discussed here, Joie de Vivre, untitled (Bathroom Scene), and Alienation, Neel depicts their sexual relationship, and male and female desire in general, as a dance ending in disappointment. Like Kenneth Doolittle asleep, Joie de Vivre (ƒg. 148) is a parody, in this in- stance of modernism’s investment in sexuality as the originating or motivating source of human behavior. Neel’s cartoon version of Matisse’s modernist mon- ument metamorphoses the circle of female dancers into pigs. In the center, Rothschild-Bacchus, penis „apping, kicks his red pointed boot between the pig-Alice’s legs. In 1980, Neel bragged with considerable justiƒcation to re- porter Jerry Tallmer, “If the world hadn’t discouraged me, I would have done some magniƒcent .”16 Yet, although the piggies are raunchy, they are also far too lighthearted in their turning minuet for their barnyard per- sonae to become degrading. And although the pigs also reference the legend of Circe, which fathered some of the most bestial of all of the representations of female sexuality in turn-of-the-century art, Neel reverses the story: it is the man’s lust that turns her into a pig. Nor does Neel condemn John as the paint- ings of Circe condemned her; she seems to enjoy her temporary metamorpho- sis, which draws together in one image the playfulness of Disney’s animated cartoon The Three Little Pigs (1933), the aplomb of Astaire and Rogers in Top Hat (1935), and the sly naughtiness of Aubrey Beardsley’s “decadent” turn-of- the-century illustrations. As in her painting of the lecherous Joe Gould two years earlier, Neel’s geni- tals are represented in triplicate. The multiplication in this instance has the ef- fect of increasing rather than decreasing sexual potency, an insatiable lust that Rothschild tries to quell with a well-aimed boot. What Matisse omits from his canonical representation of the dance, the female genitals, Neel aggressively 154 / The Extended Family asserts. Neel’s active self-display is comparable here to the Greek mythological ƒgure of Baubo, who shook Demeter out of her mourning for her child Perse- phone by displaying and playing with her pudenda, an act Peter Wollen has described as a “display to another woman [whose] effect is to provoke laugh- ter...”17 In postmodern parlance, Neel, like Baubo, is “a ƒgure who resides outside the regime of phallocentrism, undermining its logic.”18 Neel’s uninhibited, female version of the Bacchanal may refer as well to the conventions of modern dance. At the turn of the century, the founders of mod- ern dance such as Ruth St. Denis, Mary Wigman, and Isadora Duncan had transformed their socially assigned traits of animal sexuality and irrationality into expressive ones. Modern dance, unlike other modern art forms, was con- sidered a uniquely, indeed essentially feminine medium. So convincing were their representations of elemental female sexuality that D. H. Lawrence’s de- scription of the newly sexually liberated Lady Chatterley makes a generalized reference to them: “She . . . ran out with a little wild laugh, holding up her breasts to the heavy rain . . . and running blurred in the eurhythmic dance- movements she had learned so long ago in .”19 For Lawrence, how- ever, the “lady” is an animal who performs for his own pleasure: “bending so the rain beat and glistened on the full haunches . . . then stooping again so that only the full loins and buttocks were offered in a kind of homage towards him, repeating a wild obeisance.”20 As Kate Millet would point out in Sexual Poli- tics in 1969, Lady Chatterley is Mellor/Lawrence’s sexual slave. Neel may have accepted Lawrence’s notion that “The body’s life is the life of the sensations and emotions,” but may not have acquiesced to Lawrence’s version of its cosmic signiƒcance, in which the “balance of male and female in the universe” was maintained through the worship of the male principle. John is a participant in rather than the choreographer of this primitive performance; it is he who is the “„apper,” whereas Neel herself effects the metamorphosis of woman into animal that Lawrence imposes through his look. Since she is play- ing at being an animal, she cannot actually become one—her guise is thus her protection. Was she deliberately mocking Lawrence’s charge that the new Vil- lage bohemians failed to give sufƒcient respect to (his version of) sexuality? “These young people scoff at the importance of sex, take it like a cocktail . . . The body of men and women today is just a trained dog. And of no-one is this more true than of the free and emancipated young.”21 Maybe for the cocktail-snorting dancing pig, sex was not the origin and end of existence. Maybe, like Mike Gold, she was mocking the decade’s obsession with sex: “You can read essays by American intellectuals to prove . . . that Abe Lincoln made the civil war because he was undersexed; that history is sex; that America is sex; that sex is soul; that soul is all; Oom, oom, pfui!”22 On the other Truth Unveiled / 155 hand, Gold’s Marxist perspective may not have been necessary, for this witty send-up of sexual liberation in Greenwich Village in the 1930s exempliƒes what June Sochen called the ribald laughter of the bawdy woman, for whom sex does not entail “obeisance.”23 Neel’s „irtation with pornography in the “John” watercolors permitted her to transgress the boundaries of both middle-class values and modernist “high” art. Whereas Joie de Vivre was aimed at the latter, untitled (Bathroom Scene, ƒg. 149), is aimed at the former, and particularly at its concepts of modesty that had been assailed by both Lawrence and Joyce. Two years after the ban on Ulysses was lifted in the U.S. District Court of New York, Neel staged a little sideshow to Joyce’s monumental comedy of the body. A genuine contribution to the underground tradition of bathroom humor, untitled depicts the practi- cal preparations for sexual . The lovers are not swooning in a rap- turous embrace; rather they are each urinating so that their subsequent activi- ties will not be interrupted. In place of the closeted boudoirs of Degas’s bathers, Neel’s “toilet” (she is undoing her hair) occurs on the commode. For his part, John, like the sailor in Ulysses, has the „exibility to pee where he pleases, in this instance into the sink. Bourgeois gentleman that his delicate physique if not his action reveals him to be, he has a condom at the ready to slip onto his aroused male member. Both John and Alice close their eyes to fantasize about the coming encounter: John empties himself into the vagina-shaped sink, while Neel squats on the toilet, with its phallic base. The viewer’s fantasies, on the other hand, rapidly fade before the stark black-and-white reality of the scene of bodily preparations in the modern bathroom. In isolating this subject, Neel has not simply violated all norms of modesty, privacy, and decorum, she has demystiƒed the sex act. Neel’s humorous approach to transgressive subjects, like that of women writers such as Djuna Barnes and Mary McCarthy, is at the opposite pole from that of male artists, who use it to celebrate a revised, modernist heroism: their dangerous courting of debasement and death. In Georges Bataille’s surrealist novel, The Story of the Eye (1928),24 for instance, sex represents the realm of the primal, characterized not by positive male-female union but by base in- stincts whose “release” is not merely impolite but potentially destructive of all social codes. Urination is not a mundane bodily function, it is part of the un- controlled debauchery of the sexual act.25 In countering the view that the avant-garde’s transgression of social codes was subversive, Kate Millet has pointed out that “contemporary literature has absorbed not only the truthful explicitness of pornography, but its anti-social character as well.”26 Bataille acknowledges only his own fantasies, whereas Neel acknowledges that both men and women have sexual fantasies, fantasies 156 / The Extended Family that function in counterpoint to the banal physicality of sexual activity. Unlike her male contemporaries, sex for Neel is neither liberation nor transgression but one bodily act requiring speciƒc preparation, blunt, awkward, and yet fun. If the 1935 watercolors are placed in a narrative sequence, the reality prin- ciple is extended to the bedroom as well, where it suffers its tragic denoue- ment. In Alienation (ƒg. 150), Neel is posed voluptuously on the bed, but John, still in his slippers, stands immobile before her, his legs crossed, his arms folded, head bowed in shame. If the priapic male is a staple of modernist art and literature, impotence is a subject largely absent from the art of a Picasso, Bataille, Lawrence, or Joyce. (Dali is an exception.) The distance between the cultural myth of male sexual potency and the reality of its performance has led to personal disappointment for both parties in Neel’s depiction, a common enough real-life occurrence. Instead of the supposed transcendent experience of sexuality, we must share the humiliation of the body’s malfunction, a mal- function not based on biological deƒcit but on con„icted emotions: “He had just left his wife and a couple of kids,” Neel commented, years later. The evidence of Neel’s portrait nudes from the early thirties suggests that Neel did not subscribe to Freudian ideas of an essential womanhood, but, rather, interpreted the various effects of the period’s ideologies of sexuality, in- cluding Freud’s, on her friends and lovers. Ethel’s and Nadya’s destinies had been determined as much by the decade in which they came to maturity as by their biology. Similarly, with her pregnant nudes from the 1960s and 1970s, Neel examined procreation as experienced by her children’s generation, in a different era. Between 1964 and 1978, the active years of the women’s liberation move- ment, Neel painted a series of seven pregnant nudes, a subject virtually un- precedented in art history. (The rare exceptions include Gustave Klimt’s Hope from 1903 and Picasso’s life-sized bronze Pregnant Woman from 1950.) In a period of “revolutionary changes” when “everything was questioned,” Neel questioned what pregnancy might mean to the 1970s version of the liberated woman. For in choosing the subject of pregnancy, she chose the one subject that threatened to “prove” that anatomy was destiny, sending women back to their suburban prisons. (Erica Jong would conclude a celebration of her own sexual potency with a confession stated in precisely those terms: “I have dreaded pregnancy as a loss of control over my destiny. I had fantasies of the . . . death of my creativity during pregnancy, the alteration of my body into some- thing monstrous.”27) Having faced her own con„icts over creativity vs. procre- ativity, Neel must have been interested in observing how the next generation would resolve the issue. Neel’s pregnant nudes posed the question: How does the mater matter to individual women at this historical moment?28 Despite Neel’s 1978 claim that “I did begin to paint pregnant nudes before Truth Unveiled / 157 others were doing them,”29 Raphael Soyer must be credited for introducing the subject as early as the 1950s. Soyer also came to the pregnant nude matter- of-factly: he could hardly help but notice that many of his models became pregnant, and simply decided to continue painting them in that condition. However, because Soyer’s pregnant nudes retain the air of the studio, they oc- cupy that netherworld in which personality is suspended (Nude, 1952, ƒg. 151). In comparison, Neel’s ƒrst pregnant nude, Pregnant Maria, from 1964 (ƒg. 152), seems to take pleasure in the viewer’s possible discomfort. The differ- ence, as always, between her nudes and those of her urban realist contempo- raries lies in the speciƒcity she gives her models, who are as re„ective of their period and social status as Soyer’s models are detached from theirs. In 1964, when Pregnant Maria was painted, the birth control pill was be- coming widely available,30 and the ƒrst rumblings of the 1960s rebellions, emerging from the counterculture of the 1950s, had begun. As with Nadya Nude, Neel again references Manet’s Olympia, in this instance borrowing her prototype’s look of aloof indifference not simply to her nakedness but to the display of her pregnancy. The pill had promised sexual pleasure freed from fear of the consequences, and at the very historical moment that sex and repro- duction were disconnected, Neel reunited them. Even in the era of the pill, after all, pregnancy remained a “basic fact of life” resulting from the sexual act, a causal relationship suppressed in the history of erotic imagery. In Blanche Angel Pregnant from 1937 (ƒg. 153), Neel had depicted a friend who, like her- self, had chosen to bear children without the legal sanction of marriage. The similarity in their facial expressions suggests that Neel considered Maria to be the representative of the next generation of openly rebellious bohemian women. Taut and well-proportioned, Maria’s body projects a sexual autonomy comparable to that of the nude portrait of her daughter Isabetta, painted thirty years earlier. By the 1960s, Freud’s postulate of women’s “weak libido” was being over- turned by sexual research. In The Human Sexual Response (1966) Masters and Johnson found that women are multiorgasmic and that their bodies are pos- sessed of numerous erogenous zones, as opposed to just one. Dr. Mary Jane Sherfey’s contemporary ƒndings suggested that the female sexual response, rather than diminishing during pregnancy, actually increased.31 With Freud’s authority on the defensive, women’s sexuality could be pictured differently. Neel painted Pregnant Maria the year after Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published and the year that the word sex was added to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Because the second wave of feminism was directed primarily at workplace equity, just as earlier it had narrowed its agenda to suffrage, pregnancy was increasingly seen as inimical to liberation. As wrote in 1975, “Pregnability . . . has been the basis of female 158 / The Extended Family identity, the limit of freedom, the futility of education, the denial of growth.”32 If pregnancy had been seen as the fulƒllment of a women’s biological destiny in the 1940s, by the mid-1970s Ms. magazine’s premier issue would depict it as the badge of her slavery (1972, ƒg. 154). In her essay “Stabat Mater,” Julia Kris- teva would point out that the feminist repudiation of pregnancy was based on the very false image of maternity propounded by Jung and Freud:

When feminists call for a new representation of femininity, they seem to identify maternity with this idealized misapprehension; and feminism, because it rejects this image and its abuses, sidesteps the real experience this fantasy obscures. As a re- sult, maternity is repudiated or denied by some avant-garde feminists, while its tra- ditional representations are . . . accepted by the “broad mass” of women and men.33

Pregnancy in the 1970s was thus a disputed territory. While disdained as un- inhabitable by “avant-garde” feminists, the terrain of pregnancy was celebrated by women’s health advocates, such as the authors of Our Bodies/Ourselves (1971), who argued, for instance, that natural childbirth in the home, beyond the borders of the medical establishment, would be a way for women to re- claim their property. The medical establishment, in turn, tried to re-establish its hold on the woman’s body by arguing that “the occasional woman who is fanatic in her zeal for ‘natural childbirth’” is emitting “danger signals, fre- quently indicating a severe pathology.”34 The second of Neel’s portraits of her pregnant daughter-in-law, Pregnant Woman (1971, ƒg. 155), provides a metaphor for the societal pressures en- dured by the educated white woman who became pregnant in the 1970s. Al- though her pose recalls that of the reclining Maria, it evidences none of the ease of Maria’s lithe body. Rather, her arms and the rivulet of her hair sever the head from the body, and her head, in turn, is pictorially at one remove from the disembodied image of her husband, Richard. The tripled framing and the husband’s ghostly image, as much absence as presence, transform her monu- mental isolation into alienation, from her husband and from her body.35 Her physical condition has transformed Nancy into a “pregnant woman,” a cate- gory in„ecting, infecting identity. Gone is any reference to pregnancy as a form of bohemian rebellion. The distended belly threatens to rend the body in two, and the chartreuse-brown color chord lends the pall of disease to the torso and its womblike surround. Both the fecal coloration and the deƒnition of the buttocks call forth associations with Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the carnival as the embrace of the “material, bodily lower stratum . . . the zone in which ex- cretion and conception occur...”36 The carnival of sex has released degenera- tion as well as regeneration. This image of pregnancy as a battleground over which con„icting forces Truth Unveiled / 159 are played would be analyzed ƒve years later by in Of Woman Born (1976). In this now classsic text, Rich distinguished between the poten- tial meanings of a woman’s reproductive capacities and those institutionally imposed upon her, just as Neel had done in her series of nudes from the 1930s and 1970s:

I try to distinguish between two meanings of motherhood, one superimposed on the other: the potential relationship of any woman to her powers of reproduction and to children; and the institution, which aims at ensuring that potential—and all women—shall remain under male control. This institution . . . has withheld over one-half the human species from the decisions affecting their lives; it exonerates men from fatherhood in any authentic sense; it creates the dangerous schism be- tween “private” and “public” life; it calciƒes human choices and potentialities. In the most fundamental and bewildering of contradictions, it has alienated women from our bodies by incarcerating us in them.37

With her belly separating from her torso, Nancy’s body bears the evidence that pregnancy, that most “essential” of female conditions, was a sore subject indeed in the 1970s, the very site of the ƒssures within the social body, dividing women from women. The fact that the pregnant nudes are pictured as of an era and yet alone with their bodies, conveys both their historical status and their psychological reactions to their condition. Neel’s last pregnant nude, Margaret Evans Pregnant, from 1978 (ƒg. 156), is perhaps her most complex. In her ninth month of pregnancy with twins, the wife of the painter John Evans clings tightly to the „uted pedestal that serves as the woefully inadequate support for the larger oval of her belly.38 Ramrod stiff with her effort, she would have the regal bearing of an Old Kingdom queen, were not her condition and her perch so unstable. Evans’s condition has in- vaded, ƒlled, every part of her body: her womb has taken over her torso, her nipples her breasts, so blockading the central region that the blood pools in her lower legs. The image re„ected in the mirror, composed in a series of relaxed curves, contrasts with the contractions along Evans’s breast, waist, and chair, thus sug- gesting a postpartum state. Familiar throughout the history of art as a device for presenting different aspects of the sitter, the mirror functions in a particularly apposite way here. For in her monumental verticality, Evans seems to picture the Phallic Mother, the woman who in Freudian terms has compensated for her lack of a penis by producing a child. But the mirror denies the phallic unity projected by her swollen imposing form. If the re„ected image is seen as Evans herself, at that moment she appears to conƒrm the studies of “body im- age” researchers that the pregnant woman perceives her womb as separate 160 / The Extended Family from her body. In Body Schema and Body Image, for instance, Douwe Tie- mersma noted that “The identiƒcation of the mother with the child decreases from the sixth month of pregnancy onwards, especially when the child grows towards the front . . . The mother sees herself more as standing behind the child.”39 Tiemersma declines to pursue the ramiƒcations of such radical bod- ily dualism, but in both Pregnant Woman and Margaret Evans Pregnant the compositional disjunction between head and body as well as the advanced stages of their pregnancies suggest a radical disjunction of body and mind. The moment when one is most fully identiƒed culturally “simply as a pregnant woman,” in Rich’s words, is also the moment of greatest alienation from the body. This disjunction is pictured as well by the placement of the mirror, which disrupts the cohesion of the pictorial space, creating an image within an image by effacing the corner of the room, cutting off the re„ected body image pre- cisely at the subject’s belly and, ƒnally, by a sort of magnetic effect, shifting the ground plane up, thereby undermining its stability. Within this disjunctive space, the black triangular wedge—that female symbol—lodged between the image and its re„ection can only be that gap, that void through which the child will pass. It is also the passage that Margaret must simultaneously tra- verse between Margaret Evans Pregnant and Margaret Evans Mother. The element of time, inseparable from pregnancy, when the sense of self permits no clear, stable boundaries, thus also refers representationally to the mother/child relationship (as conveyed in the double meaning of the noun generation). Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering (1978) argued that the woman’s need to “turn to children to complete a relational triangle, or to re-create a mother-child unity, means that mothering is invested with a mother’s own con„ictual, ambivalent, yet powerful need for her own mother.”40 Contrary to Freud, this theory posited that in giving birth the woman does not gain a penis but reproduces the mother. The mirrored Evans does indeed look like a different person, an older woman—both herself as the mother of a growing child and as her own mother. This tripartite identity, as split between self-mother and self-daughter is suggested by Evans’s shadow, a mirror image of the image in the mirror and the ghost of her former-future self. The trope of the mirror, traditionally a symbol of female vanity, is found throughout feminist literature and criticism in this period. In 1960, Anne Sex- ton’s poem “The Double Image” linked the mirror and the painted portrait, as would Neel in 1978:

And this was the cave of the mirror that double woman who stares at herself, as if she were petriƒed Truth Unveiled / 161

in time—two ladies sitting in umber chairs . . . I, who was never quite sure about being a girl, needed another life, another image to remind me And this was my worst guilt . . . I made you to ƒnd me.41

The French feminist Luce Irigary described feminine identity in comparable terms: “You look at yourself in the mirror. And your mother is already there. And soon your daughter . . . Between the two what are you? . . . Just a scansion: the time when one becomes the other...”42 From the 1920s, when Neel began to explore the theme of the family and women’s role within it, her work had shown strong parallels with that of Ed- vard Munch. In 1978, Munch’s Puberty (1893, ƒg. 157) was shown in the ret- rospective exhibition in Washington, D.C., and reproduced in the accompa- nying catalog, which Neel owned. It is likely, then, that the modernist’s depic- tion of the uncanny splitting of self at the onset of menstruation and the hyster- ical rigidity it induced in the subject in„uenced Neel’s analysis of gestation. Both the shadow in the Munch and the strangely disassociated mirrored other in the Neel speak to the unbidden, the unacknowledged, the unidentiƒable, those aspects of a woman’s being which mediate between the self and nonself. As Margaret Miles has pointed out, “Pregnancy, like menstruation, reveals that woman’s body is not the ‘closed, smooth, and impenetrable’ body that serves as the symbol of individual, autonomous, and ‘perfect existence.’”43 When Neel began the series in 1964, the Pill had promised sex without re- production. Now, with in vitro fertilization and surrogacy, medical technology provides reproduction without sex.44 The consequence, according to cultural historian Stafford, is that “reproduction has become part of the textu- alized and symbolized world of duplicable or disposable goods.”45 In retro- spect, then, Neel’s pregnant nudes become the last of their breeders: Neel has pictured pregnancy at the ƒnal moment in history when from conception to parturition the process was identiƒed with the woman. A humanist to the last, Neel provided these dinosaurs not only with evidence of their discomfort, their malaise, but with courage, strength, and endurance. The pregnant nudes en- ter the portrait gallery as heroines representing a revised humanism based not on the stable, intact ego but on a concept of identity as a node, linked, through sexuality, to lovers and offspring. 10 Shifting Constellations: The Family (Dis)Membered

The individual portraits in Neel’s gallery are metaphorically the basic building blocks of reality, atoms whose energy radiates out from the nucleus to the perimeter of their universe, there to combine with others to form elements, or units. In bourgeois culture the fundamental unit is the family, the initial con- vergence of energies from which identity is constructed. For Americans the family has been and continues to be deƒned in terms of the “nuclear” family: the constellation of mother-father-son-daughter that generates “related” iden- tities, such as brother-sister. The sociologists Arlene and Jerome Skolnick have termed this “the nuclear family ideology,” promulgated through the snapshot and popular illustration, which includes the “half-myth” that the nuclear fam- ily is universal. “In our own society, the nuclear model deƒnes what is normal and natural both for research and ‘therapy’ . . .”1 The myth that the nuclear family is timeless, natural, and stable, while it has endured, has been coun- tered by a long literary tradition, as well as con„ict theories of the family devel- oped early in our century by Freud and the sociologist George Simmel, and more recently by feminist psychologists like Nancy Chodorow.2 Neel followed the well-worn path of modern art and literature in recogniz- ing the instability of this supposedly supportive unit. From 1927 on, Neel’s work could be characterized as an extended meditation on the family, in

162 Shifting Constellations / 163 which both the nucleus and the circulating orbits are dismantled and recon- ƒgured, forming shifting constellations which are unfamiliar. In this, Neel adopted the attitude of the bohemian Villagers, whose “experimental” atti- tudes toward the family were charted by Caroline Ware. In 1935, 86 percent believed women should have independent interests, 76 percent believed that it was not wrong for unmarried couples to live together, 70 percent believed that husbands should share in household tasks, and 65 percent believed that married women should be self-supporting.3 These attitudes were hardly re„ected in popular culture. From the turn of the century, when the Kodak camera was invented, photographs of family members gathered for ritual occasions, such as religious holidays or weddings, provided assurance that the family was a cohesive unit. Similarly, in American illustration, works such as Norman Rockwell’s bountiful Thanksgiving table in Freedom from Want (1943) became as emblematic of patriotism as the „ag.4 Neel’s family album contains no family ritual and little evidence of who is re- lated to whom. Her relations are not necessarily next of kin, but nephews, step- sons, or people whom she includes by “elective afƒnity.” Her portrait gallery thus blurs the distinction between relationships and blood relatives. Neel’s critique of the construct of the American family reads from the point of view of a woman who dared to „out its norms and who suffered the conse- quences. Like Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot before her, she examines the woman’s realm, but unlike her nineteenth-century upper-class predecessors, she will ƒnd in that shared space of interpersonal relationships discord and iso- lation as well as intimacy and privacy. In the private wing of the portrait gallery, the family is portrayed as a site permeated by social and political pressures. The meaning of each portrait re- sides in its juxtaposition with associated portraits: one must be interpreted as it “relates” to another. In 1965, for instance, Neel painted three works that re- ferred metaphorically to the . The most monumental of the three depicts her son Hartley at the end of an emotionally stressful ƒrst semester at Tufts Medical School (Hartley, 1965, ƒg. 158). Posed with his hands on top of his head like a captured prisoner of war, his elbows forming visual road signs pointing in opposite directions, Hartley registers his dilemma over what course his life should take. Representing the moral quandary of so many American men of his generation, Hartley was “in a trap,” as Neel put it. Drafted Negro (ƒg. 159), in turn, shows a dejected young man whose number has come up; he is of the wrong race and class to be eligible for deferment from service in Vietnam. Finally, when placed with the two portraits, the Soutine-like Thanks- giving (1965, ƒg. 160) can be interpreted as Neel’s comment on the escalating slaughter of the war and the wrenching internal con„ict into which it thrust our citizenry: the capon is a „ayed corpse and the contiguous dishrag its dis- 164 / The Extended Family carded „esh. Stuffed into the shallow grave of the sink, the fowl embodies a vi- olent death suffered with no higher purpose beyond the commercial products that loom above it. The photojournalistic images of massacre, self-immolation, and mutilation that formed the daily diet of Americans at that time had come home to roost. Norman Rockwell’s Freedom from Want has been reinterpreted in terms of the black humor of the 1960s, so to speak. The three together point to the folly of conceiving of private life as a refuge from the war in Southeast Asia. Neel’s family saga encompasses three generations—her parents, her own, and her adult children’s—but it is only in the last that the nuclear family is rep- resented in recognizable form. Her parents and siblings are represented in terms of death or loss, perhaps metaphorically referring not only to her rejec- tion of the conventional family life, but also to the process of growth and matu- ration that leads inevitably to the splitting of the family unit. As head of her own household, Neel represented the family in terms of her experience of par- enting, and to do so, she turned to the conventions of surrealism. Although Neel’s portraits of her parents are contemporary with her portraits of her matri- archal family, I will structure the discussion along the model of a family tree and place them ƒrst. Neel’s immediate family consisted of her father, George Washington Neel, her mother, Alice Concross Neel, and four children: Albert, Lily, Alice, and George (called Peter). If one tries to ƒnd a picture of that family in Neel’s por- traits, one ƒnds that the elemental structure, the parental nucleus with four orbiting offspring, has been altered. There are no signiƒcant portraits of her siblings, and after 1927, the progenitors, the parents, exist not as a formative presence but only as loss. The theme of loss as the deƒning characteristic of family life originates, as we have seen, with Requiem (1928). In Neel’s ƒrst and only picture of her family unit, the Family (1927), Neel’s father is the personiƒcation of drudgery, his days on earth marked by dulling routine. In his only signiƒcant subsequent portrait, he has died. Dead Father (1946, ƒg. 161) is an image as brutally frank as its title. Reminiscent of the deathbed photographs that were a staple of family albums before the twentieth century „ed in fear from the face of death, Dead Father is a memorial with- out a eulogy. The corpse in the cofƒn, presented from the point of view of a mourner, depicts death as a fact of life without larger meaning. Only the feath- erlike lilies and the two pink roses suggest the gentleness that inhabited the body in life. Initially too numbing to open out to metaphor, nonetheless Dead Father may well be linked to its historical moment. Because Neel connected sig- niƒcant events in her personal life with important events in American history, she was able to use the former as a metaphor for the latter. Just as Childbirth Shifting Constellations / 165 was a metaphor for the acute anxiety of bringing a child into a world of poverty and war, so Neel’s portrait of her father’s corpse may have served as a memorial not just for those who were killed in World War II but for the death of Roo- sevelt the previous year and perhaps for the collapse of the U.S.A.-U.S.S.R. alliance as well. In February 1946, when Stalin declared capitalism and com- munism incompatible, the journalist Eric Sevareid commented that “the Comintern, formalized or not, [was] back in effective operation.”5 Coexis- tence was impossible, as it meant appeasement. Neel’s father lies within this state of affairs. As she customarily did, Neel registered her personal feelings of loss in her nonƒgurative work. Both The Sea (ƒg. 162) and Cutglass Sea (ƒg. 163) were painted after a walk to the ocean from her house at Spring Lake, New Jersey, the summer following his death. Although Neel had pasted into her scrap- books the announcement of her father’s retirement from the Ofƒce of Super- intendent Car Service of the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1931, and kept snap- shots of him as a young man,6 she never painted a portrait of her father at their summer house, and so the seascapes mourn the loss of someone who, pictori- ally speaking, was never there. Signiƒcantly, both are nocturnal landscapes precipitated by her father’s “going into the night”; they are not portraits of her father but of her own feelings. Although references to the seascapes of John Marin and Milton Avery can be found in The Sea and Cutglass Sea respec- tively, Neel weights the works with metaphorical meaning absent from the work of the two American modernists, whose reputations were then at their height. The expressionist turmoil in The Sea and the motionless Cutglass Sea project the extremes of feeling—anger and depression—characteristic of the grieving process. Neel returned to the landscape of mourning in 1957 in Sun- set Riverside Drive (ƒg. 164). This warmly colored “tropical” sunset may have been a memorial to Carlos, as it was painted after learning, via a terse note from her estranged sister, that the artist had recently died.7 Her pictures of her mother from the early 1950s do not so much address the sorrowful aftermath of death as the suffering leading to it. In Last Sickness (1952, ch. 2, ƒg. 16), her mother’s chair resembles an old-fashioned wheelchair, her bathrobe a shroud or body bag. In recording this frail, elderly woman, helpless and afraid, Neel offers little sense of her once forceful, dominating personality. During the last year of her life, Neel’s mother moved in with her. Neel thus assumed the position of caretaker/mother, and so the mother in turn is positioned as a dependent. Despite her terminal cancer thirty years later, Neel would deƒnitively re- ject her mother’s fearful, helpless resignation, replacing fear with willful deƒance in her self-portrait at eighty. Her extraordinary discipline and will to create are exempliƒed by her last painting, the portrait of Dr. James Dineen 166 / The Extended Family

(ƒg. 165), an unusually caring physician who treated her during the summer of 1984. Although she liked him personally, in his portrait he becomes “Dr. Death,” the image of the unspoken reality of the imminent death she was then facing. Like Picasso’s last self-portrait (1972), it speaks to the unwelcome mo- ment of realization that the end of life has arrived. Despite severe incapacita- tion, which affected her draftsmanship, she continued to speak the truth. As with her parents, so with her sisters and brothers. From the visual evi- dence, one might conclude that Neel was an only child, for her siblings are erased from her gallery. Only her nephew, Peter’s son Georgie, is recorded in stages from a troubled adolescence to marriage to a woman who could be his mother (Georgie Neel, 1947, ƒg. 166; Annemarie and Georgie, 1982, ƒg. 167). As the portraits of Georgie and the later portraits of Sam’s sons (Julian and David Brody) and José’s family attest, the boundaries of the family unit are opened up so that it is no longer coincident with its container, the home, and relations are no longer based on biology. This “nomadic” family, cut off from national, racial, and social roots, deƒes a coherent deƒnition. The transition from one generation to the next was ƒrst pictured in The Fam- ily, when Neel was in the anomalous position of residing at her parents’ home with a child of her own: a child with a child, a mother without a husband. In The Family from 1928 (ƒg. 168), Neel depicts the reunited family unit—hus- band, wife, and infant daughter. In it, Neel assumes her mother’s crouched position from the previous year. Dressed like a native in her sarong and bare breasts, Neel-as-Cuban-peasant bears the burden of her husband and child. A„oat in the striped bloodstream of the daybed, the infant Santillana, in turn, forms a linchpin joining father and mother. The undulating sea that engulfed Alice and Carlos in grief in Requiem is now calm, but the burden of family sta- bility is a weight borne by the woman. Forty years later, in her portrait of Preg- nant Julie and Algis (1967, ƒg. 169), Neel recreated the dominant-subordinate, male-to-female compositional structure of The Family. In Berkeley at a time of tremendous social change, the oppressive family structure reproduces itself again. It was this structure that she would examine in light of the second wave of femininism. Neel told Patricia Hills that she felt only disdain for women’s roles in con- ventional marriage: “I thought they were stupid because all they did was keep children and dogs in order . . . I thought the most they ever did was back some man they thought was important.”8 This criticism of the patriarchal family was voiced for Neel’s generation by Emma Goldman’s “Marriage and Love” (1917): “The institution of marriage makes a parasite of woman, an absolute dependent. It incapacitates her for life’s struggle, annihilates her social con- sciousness, paralyzes her imagination, and then imposes its gracious protec- tion, which is in reality a snare, a travesty on human character.”9 Given her be- Shifting Constellations / 167 liefs, it is hardly surprising that Neel should have depicted her own nuclear family in negative terms; the surprise is that she married in the ƒrst place, even if she had convinced herself that she was marrying into a life in art. Despite her decision to bear children, Neel consciously decided never to remarry lest she be cast in the role of housewife and jeopardize her artistic call- ing. Neel’s uprooted family tree is a matriarchal one, like the families of the culture of poverty in Spanish Harlem. When the primary relationship is the lover rather than the legally sanctioned husband or wife, the family is indeed transformed from a unitary circle into a biomorphic entity of constantly chang- ing shape. Neel visualized the dismembered family unit, with its continually shifting positions, twice, once in 1942 and again in 1964 (Subconscious, 1942, ƒg. 170; The Flight of the Mother, 1964, ƒg. 171). These two paintings consti- tute her most radical meditation on the family. Painted in 1942, when the center of the surrealist movement was in the United States and the in„uence of European surrealism on New York artists was at its height, Subconscious both in title and style bears witness to its impact on Neel. In March 1942, the Pierre Matisse gallery held an exhibit of “Artists in Exile” that included Matta, Tanguy, Ernst, Chagall, Masson, Tchelitchew, Kurt Seligmann, and Eugene Berman.10 In October, the exiled surrealists exhibited at the Reid mansion on Madison Avenue; the exhibit, “The First Papers of Surrealism” included Duchamp’s infamous installation with a laby- rinth of twine. In addition, important exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art— “Picasso: Forty Years of His Art” (1939), which exhibited his surrealist work from the 1930s, and “Salvador Dali” (1941)—also provided models on which to base an indigenous response to surrealism. In Reframing Abstract Expres- sionism, Michael Leja explains that in wartime culture, “the unconscious was, like the primitive, an essential ideological construction, mobilized in the effort to cope with the trauma and perplexity induced by recent historical events. In a broad array of cultural productions, fascism and modern evil were portrayed as products of the mysterious depths of the unconscious or of the unnatural functioning of the mind . . .”11 During these years, Neel also turned to the precedent of surrealism in order to place her project within the context of her existing artistic exploration of family psychodynamics. The goal of her battle was not simply the oedipal destruction of the patriarchal family; it had a higher cause, just like the “good” war being fought at the time: that of Richard and Hartley and a re-visioning of the process of the formation of identity within and through the family unit.12 Like her American contemporaries, then, Neel adapted surrealist biomor- phism to her own uses. When the birth of Richard prompted a a restructuring of her family, the centrality of both Freud’s and Jung’s psychoanalytic analysis of the mother-father-child relationship as constitutive of the individual psyche, 168 / The Extended Family was particularly germane. Leja has pointed out that both Freudian and Jun- gian theories enjoyed prestige during the war years, but that women analysts, in particular those associated with the New York–based Analytical Psychology Club, were drawn to the writings of Karl Jung because “the attention given to ‘the female’ by Jung—his emphasis on the role of the mother in the Oedipus complex, the prominence given to female archetypes, his notion of an ‘anima’ (the female component in the male unconscious)—coincided with ongoing social and ideological changes in the U.S. regarding women.”13 In Jung’s essay “The Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype,” published in English by the Analytical Psychology Club of New York in the spring of 1943,14 he de- scribes the mother as at once human and necessarily archetypal:

Why risk saying too much . . . about that human being who was our mother, the ac- cidental carrier of that great experience which includes herself and myself and all mankind . . . [A] sensitive person cannot in all fairness load that enormous burden of meaning, responsibility, duty, heaven and hell, on to the shoulders of one frail and fallible human being . . . Nor should we hesitate for one moment to relieve the hu- man mother of this appalling burden, for our own sakes as well as hers. It is just this massive weight of meaning that ties us to the mother and chains her to her child, to the physical and mental detriment of both. A mother-complex is not got rid of by blindly reducing the mother to human proportions.15

Neel painted Subconscious the year before this text was published in En- glish, but it can be seen nonetheless as a response to the Jungian ideas that were in the air. The social realism of the Spanish Harlem portraits has been re- placed by surrealist biomorphism, and the child-doll of Symbols (Doll and Ap- ple) metamorphosed into an armless, subhuman, maternal automaton with a tumorlike child appendage, an externalized fetus. This grotesque image of the “mother’s burden” con„ates the psychological and the physical toll of child- rearing, presenting the interpyschic con„ict in terms parallel to Dali’s The Ar- chitectonic Angelus of Millet, exhibited at MoMA the previous year (1933, ƒg. 172). Because until the age of two the infant’s helplessness requires that the mother carry it constantly, Neel pictures motherhood as an abnormal exten- sion of pregnancy, distorting the “natural” form of both mother and child to create a monstrous hybrid. Although there is no evidence that she read Jung’s work at this time, she may have become acquainted with his theories through her friendship with the painter John Graham, whom she met in 1939, and who gave her a copy of his in„uential book The System and Dialectics of Art (1937). A strange, pedan- tic text structured in question-and-answer format, System attempts a compre- hensive analysis of the nature of art and of the creative act. For Graham the Shifting Constellations / 169 origin of art was “the human longing for enigma, for the miraculous,” which is accessed by the unconscious mind: “Our unconscious mind contains the record of all our past experiences—individual and racial, from the ƒrst cell germination to the present day...Artoffers an almost unlimited access to one’s unconscious . . . Thus art is the best medium for humanity to get in touch with the sources of its power.”16 This is the Jungian collective unconscious. The in„uence of Graham’s painting and by extension his philosophy is evi- dent in Neel’s portraits of women artists during the late 1930s and 1940s. In Dorothy Koppleman (c. 1940) and Bessie Boris (1947, ƒg. 15), the harsh, noc- turnal chiaroscuro that obliterates half of the sitter’s face creates a Jungian con- nection between woman-night-moon similar to that found in Graham’s paint- ings from the 1920s (Head of Woman, 1926, ƒg. 173). Perhaps Neel saw in Graham’s work the Jungian concept of the two aspects of the mother-image: fertile, protective, and benign, or devouring, seductive, and poisonous, “the loving and the terrible mother.”17 Seen in the context of the theory and images available to her in 1942, Neel’s Subconscious presents an interpretation of the Mother Archetype, with the two halves of the face, the son/sun and mother/ crescent-moon, pointing to the intimate psychological relation between mother and son, female and male. Subconscious is exceptional in critiquing via surrealism modern society’s ideological investment in the role of the mother. In the 1940s, the origin from which psychoanalysis set out was the mother, a ƒgure who was never visible but was present only as the cause, the source of the neuroses of her offspring. As points out in For Her Own Good, Freudian theory had spawned the concept of the “libidinal” mother dominant in these years; “Not only would she naturally fulƒll her child’s needs, but she would ƒnd her own fulƒllment only in meeting the needs of the child.”18 In a radical reversal of the causal relationships established in the “science” of psychoanalysis, Neel makes the subject of her painting not the effect of the mother on the child, but the effect of the child on the mother. The exclusiveness of the child’s de- mands, and the woman’s consequent lack of autonomy, are imaged in terms of a monstrous Siamese twin. The juxtaposition of her crescent proƒle and his circular face, beyond its evocation of the Jungian female to male relation, initi- ates the process of separation. That such a fall into individuated selfhood is a precarious one is suggested by the jutting club of Sam’s chin, which hovers above the child’s head, waiting to strike. Isolated and trapped on all sides by totemic male ƒgures that ring the perimeter like jagged coral reefs, the mother- child diad is in a visibly vulnerable position. Neel’s hallucinatory vision brings to the surface the fear and exhaustion, as well as the potential for psychic col- lapse, that can result when a mother is a primary caretaker. In its depiction of the appalling burden of motherhood, Subconscious again 170 / The Extended Family anticipates concerns that would be voiced by the later feminist and psychoana- lytic investigations of the writers Adrienne Rich and Nancy Chodorow. Both Of Woman Born and The Reproduction of Mothering address motherhood as a cultural phenomenon, as learned behavior that “does not come by instinct.”19 For Rich, the con„ict between the mother’s need for self-preservation and her maternal feelings was experienced as “a primal agony.”20 Chodorow described this con„ict from the point of view of object-relations analysis: at ƒrst the child does not differentiate at all between self and nonself (the mother), after which “The mother functions, and is experienced, as the child’s ‘external ego’ . . . the child behaves as if it were still a unit with its mother . . . The infant’s behavior is functionally egoistic, in that it ignores the interests of the mother...21 Coun- tering the view predominant in psychoanalysis that, “Just as the child does not recognize the separate identity of the mother, so the mother looks upon her child as part of herself and identiƒes its interests with her own,”22 Chodorow contends that a mother’s experience of her infant is informed by her relation- ship to her husband as well as her societal expectations.23 The mother/child relationship to the male guardian ƒgure is the subject of Neel’s most excruciating drawings and watercolors from 1940 to 1942, four of which record Sam beating her year-old son. In a lost drawing from 1940, Sam and Richard (ƒg. 174), Neel depicts Sam as what we now term a “child abuser,” venting his rage on the terriƒed infant. To the right Neel scrawls a surrealist automatic drawing situating this scene within the realm of uncontrollable im- pulse. This is not the psychoanalytic Oedipal drama, but a lived trauma. Although a common occurrence, neither spousal nor child abuse has been pictured as part of family life until recently. According to the sociologist Rich- ard Gelles, it was not until Henry Kempe and his colleagues published their paper on the “battered child syndrome” in 1962 that the issue of child abuse gained national attention.24 When Gelles began his research in the 1970s he was surprised to ƒnd that despite the predominance of violent subjects in the media, child abuse was never portrayed in normal, average families, but only in deviant ones.25 Thus, Neel’s image is unprecedented not only in American art but in American culture at large in 1940, for she represented it before it had a name.26 Because it would be another thirty years before statistics would be gathered to document its widespread practice, Neel could do little more at the time than to serve as a “silent witness” (as she titled one painting). Her portrait of Richard at Age Five (1944, ƒg. 175) could bear the same title. Solemn and rigid, his face, like Margarita’s in The Spanish Family from the previous year, is a rigid mask of suppressed pain. In another drawing from the 1940 series, Neel borrowed from the Minotaur theme from Picasso’s Vollard Suite (1937) (Minotaur, 1940, ƒg. 176). Here, Sam, with claw-like hands and horned head, bars access to the helplessly cry- Shifting Constellations / 171 ing child. The mythological theme exempliƒes the shared concern of Ameri- can artists with the terror and tragedy of modern life during the war years, as seen in the mythological paintings of Pollock, Newman, and Rothko from the mid to late 1940s. Mythology, attached to the “universal unconscious,” was ev- idence that modern man’s essential condition—his destructive and violent im- pulses—had remained unchanged from the time of the caves. In 1945, the an- thropologist Bronislaw Malinowski stated that “Impulses to beat a wife or a husband or an antagonist are personally known to all of us. They are ethno- graphically universal and timeless.”27 In other words, to the extent that child or spousal abuse was discussed publicly, it was considered part of man’s tragic fate, not a social problem. One can only assume that Neel adopted the devices of surrealist automatism, biomorphism, and mythological subject matter in her portraits of Sam from 1940 to 1943 in order to refer the paintings to the realm of the psychic, the private realm. But just as Goya’s Caprichos were alle- gories for the bestiality spawned by the superstitions as well as by the living conditions of the lower classes in late eighteenth-century Spain, so Neel’s drawing is an allegory for the con„icts generated within the family as then structured. In the broadest sense, then, her allegory remains a social realist one, espe- cially when read as part of a constellation that includes the portraits of Peggy, one of her white neighbors in Spanish Harlem. The oil Peggy (1949, ƒg. 177) presents a sullen ƒgure with awkwardly „ailing elbows who appears to be suf- fering from a hangover. But the manner in which her hand pushes against her shadowed left cheek hints that her disjointed appearance may result from hav- ing been beaten. In 1979, Neel provided Peggy with a literary biography in a hard-boiled style worthy of her friend Kenneth Fearing:

In 1943 I was living in Spanish Harlem. I met Aef Grattama who built shelves for my paintings. He was a very intelligent man but a terrible drunkard . . . Peggy was his sweetheart . . . They used to go out and get drunk together and her classic remark when she posed for the painting was “Aef said he didn’t do it.” She had “no bruise” covering a black eye . . . One night she took sleeping pills and Aef coming home late dead drunk slept with the corpse all night—not realizing she was dead.”28

A commercial product, “no-bruise,” existed to erase the evidence of a wide- spread problem society had yet to address. In 1964, after Richard had married Nancy Greene, Neel restaged the mother-son drama on her kitchen wall. Returning to the surrealist mode she had abandoned after the end of the war, Neel literally followed Leonardo’s ad- vice to ƒnd artistic subjects by staring at a wall spotted with stains. Neel’s apart- ment building on West 107th Street dated from circa 1910 and the plaster 172 / The Extended Family walls on the interior had developed long, irregular cracks. At the time of Nancy’s marriage to Richard, Neel began to trace them. What “emerged” from her “subconscious” into the space that was the center of her family life and the site of many of her portraits was “The Flight of the Mother,” the process of disconnection from the primal unitary bond represented in Subconscious. Richard stands full-length with his legs facing toward the doorway leading into the hall, but with his head facing back into the kitchen, staring across a fe- male torso, whose one large breast is pressed against his arm. The maternal breast, of course, is the symbol of the narcissistic unity the child imagines it has with the mother. According to the psychoanalyst Michael Balint, all adult love relationships attempt to replicate the primary mother-child bond: “This pri- mary tendency, I shall be loved always, everywhere, in every way, my whole body, my whole being . . . is the ƒnal aim of all erotic striving.”29 In marrying, Richard leaves home but at the same time looks back toward his primary at- tachment, forcing his body into an unnatural posture. The maternal body, in its turn, is losing its head. Neel’s own wizened pro- ƒle sweeps away from the torso and appears ready to defend itself against the encroachment of a cloudlike, amorphous, one-eyed “head” „oating up against its right side, ƒnding its point of access at the ghostly right breast. Presumably, if this head-cloud-womb can get past the vigilant, threatening stare of the harpie/sphinx above her, the body will no longer be a fragment, but a new, complete whole. Neel’s body, dismembered in the process of being displaced, forms a treacherous bridge between Richard and the object of his desire. Like Tom Wesselman’s pop art multimedia works from the early 1960s, which may have served as a source here, Neel’s “installation” piece combines everyday objects with painted fantasy. In Wesselman’s work as well, the breast is revealed as a fetish object comparable to the consumer items that surround it. Yet in contrast to the pop art cool of Wesselman’s bathrooms, it is hot in this kitchen. This mural looms large, and the battle it depicts, the battle Leonardo foresaw emerging from the spots on the wall, is a life and death struggle over the ownership of the product of her own body, „esh of her „esh. Akin to grafƒti art, it is a message scrawled from the unconscious to the New Hampshire– born Nancy: “Yankee Go Home!” Thus when Neel turned brie„y to the mural form, shortly before its revival in the politically concerned art of the late 1960s, she chose an internal rather than an external wall to make, not a public, but a private statement. Within the conƒnes of the kitchen, she broadcast the scene of a bitter dispute over the body’s domain. Loneliness (1970, ƒg. 178) depicts the inevitable aftermath of that battle. Like all of her nonportrait work, the painting served as an object of mourning. As the painter May Stevens eloquently noted, “The paintings painted when no one was there to sit for her show us what she sees when she is a woman alone Shifting Constellations / 173 by the windows, by the sink, or by the dining room table with its empty drawn- up chairs, feeling the life in the inanimate world and the death that comes close in the pain of absence.”30 Painted after Hartley was married, it is a compel- ling visualization of the trauma that goes under the trivializing nomenclature of “empty nest syndrome.” One of her densest metaphors, this exceptionally tall, narrow painting opposes stasis to movement within a conƒning frame. In the play of rectangles in the upper half, a black shade is drawn down as if to cover the framed view of the two empty windows on the opposite facade. In the lower, the oxblood leather chair, unmoored by the amorphous shadows on the ground plane, turns away from the view toward the interior of the room. An on- tological metaphor for the mother’s loss of self when her children leave home, Neel painted her body as her apartment, with her children now permanently outside its boundaries and her identity (the chair) consequently destabilized. In the last ƒfteen years of her life Neel charted the growth and changes in her grandchildren as she had done for her own children and her extended “Spanish Harlem family.” Her narrative of her experience of parenting, culmi- nating in Loneliness, had been a chronicle of con„ict and loss. The picture of her children’s families is, at least superƒcially, a quite different one, domi- nated by attractive women and charming children. As her grandchildren grew from infancy into childhood, Neel painted their portraits, one at a time, as in- dividuals as well as part of a family or mother-child unit. Because Richard and Nancy lived only seven blocks south of her West Side apartment, and because Nancy was her administrative assistant as well as her daughter-in-law, many of her portraits were of Nancy and of her ƒrst child, Olivia. In this sense, her fam- ily portraits do replicate the family album in that the majority of pictures are of the ƒrstborn. As such, they belong more properly to a biography; for our pur- poses the importance of the later work lies in Neel’s continued meditation on life cycles and their relation to speciƒc moments in history. The softening of Neel’s critique of the construction of the family in her later work may be due to her increased ƒnancial stability as well as her justiƒ- able pride in her sons’ successful professional careers. And even though they had adopted conventional life-styles, her children were living through what Neel knew were “revolutionary changes,” when “The Madonna has been re- placed by abortion and the wife and helpmate has become woman the aggres- sor and so she should.”31 While indulging in her role as the doting grand- mother, Neel kept her eye on how those revolutionary changes were playing out. Returning to the Madonna and Child motif permitted her to examine the changes in the woman as wife-helpmate and mother-caregiver, while pointing out that child rearing remained the sole responsibility of the mother. The new workplace equity had not taken into account the workplace in the private home. Her earliest portrait of Nancy and the infant Olivia is typical of the series. As 174 / The Extended Family a mother, Nancy may not evidence the same preternatural calm of Mary Cas- satt’s mothers: Mother and Child (Nancy and Olivia), 1967 (ƒg. 179); none- theless, the pose at ƒrst signals the return of the Western idealized “misappre- hension” of maternity. Yet Nancy is no modern madonna, nor is the infant a saint. In her embroidered shift, she sits awkwardly astride her kitchen chair, struggling to restrain the child, just as Neel had done in The Intellectual. Olivia tries equally vigorously to stand on her own two feet, while Nancy’s arms bind the child to prevent its inevitable fall. Head to head, each has a mind of her own. In her green dress, Nancy is a “tree of life,” but her relation- ship with her child is not a naturally harmonious one: she is learning what is entailed in being a mother. By 1974, with the birth of her fourth child, Victo- ria (Nancy and Victoria, 1974, ƒg. 180), Nancy is an old hand at holding ba- bies: one arm propped casually on the kitchen table while the other buttresses the child, she is now a true master of her unpaid profession. That free arm had but recently held twins, Antonia and Alexandra, who were born in 1971. In Neel’s portrait of Nancy and the Twins (5 months) (1971, ƒg. 181), one of her most delightful paintings, the infants launch eagerly for- ward from the support of their mother’s body, crawling vigorously toward the future. Reclining on the couch, Nancy resembles a dog with her puppies. Is this the new natural mother of the 1970s, a feminist rather than a Freudian in- terpretation of the old theme? During the “back to the earth” movement of the late 1960s, women had embraced the idea of natural childbirth and nursing. Between the publication of Thank You, Dr. Lamaze (1965) and the Women’s Health Collective’s Our Bodies/Ourselves (1971), the advocacy of natural child- birth outside the hospital became a feminist stance, another way for women to reclaim their bodies from the medical establishment. Unfortunately, the ap- peal to nature played into the very formulations the new earth mothers were trying to escape. In 1967, using the familiar strategy of naturalizing social structures to make them appear inherited rather than historically mutable, the biologist Desmond Morris argued that if one took a group of suburban families and placed them in a primitive environment, the family structure of this new tribe would not change. The men would go off to hunt for food; the women would remain in their caves with the children.32 Nancy’s body thus represents a contradictory construct: both emancipated woman and “natural” mother, a hybrid phenomenon whose structural faults were bound to lead to problems. These tensions surface in The Family (1980, ƒg. 182), a portrait posed as a family snapshot. The “V”-shaped composition funnels the eye downward from the bookends of Antonia and Alexandra to the seated ƒgure of Nancy holding her “baby,” Victoria, now a chubby six-year-old. As in The Family from 1929, Nancy is weighed down. Her eyes disarticulated and unfocused, Nancy ap- pears shell-shocked, and the unit as a whole seems to be slowly sinking into the Shifting Constellations / 175 void below them. As a single mother, Neel had improvised an alternative fam- ily structure; her children in turn had returned to the nuclear ideal in a period in which one out of two marriages would end in divorce. In Richard in the Era of the Corporation, painted the previous year, her son is the traditional bread- winner locked in his professional role. Here, the women in his family are conƒned to an arrangement that conforms to Morris’s biologically determined division of labor. The home (the house at Spring Lake) is light and sunny, but the women are trapped by a model of family life that supposedly orginated in the caves but that is now an anachronism. These paintings recognize the nuclear family as the locus of colliding so- cial forces. By painting separate portraits of Richard and of Nancy and their children, Neel replicated the sexual division of labor that feminism in its vari- ous formulations had been challenging for a century. In 1971, a wol„ike Nancy had released her “Romula and Rema” into the world, swimming toward a fu- ture of social change. But by 1980, American society was still structured accord- ing to the binary oppositions of public and private, masculine and feminine, and so Neel’s meditations on sexual identity and the family continue to picture the stresses caused by those oppositions. Isolated from the bright outside world, the women are bound together by what Jung would term “this massive weight of meaning that ties us to the mother and chains her to her child...” In her study Motherhood as Representation, E. Ann Kaplan cites recent so- ciological research that addresses “the inadequacy of our institutions to new social developments regarding the mother . . . North America retains the nine- teenth-century concept of the nuclear family as its predominant concept for child rearing, despite the fact that the social roles, and the division of labour re- quired in such a family, no longer routinely apply...”33 It is for this reason that Neel’s family portraits retain their relevance.

Concluding Remarks

Artistically, Alice Neel’s achievement was the revival of portraiture not as a val- orization of the individual, but as a cumulative record, perhaps the only valid way of picturing twentieth century America in all of its complexity. What saved her project from turning into a Tussaud’s museum is her ability to read the evidence presented by her sitter’s appearance and to interpret it in terms of the historical moment. Unlike the elect in the National Portrait Gallery, her sitters do not represent a single concept, either leadership or achievement, but a con„uence of forces that had to be indicated through subtleties of expression and pose. The themes traced here are some of the historical trends that may be gleaned from her work; potentially there are many others, which, when brought 176 / The Extended Family together, would picture American society in a somewhat different light. Like any individual, the portraits, and the historical moment they personify, can never be completely known nor their meanings permanently ƒxed. Neel’s American portrait gallery provides not proof but evidence, visual evidence for a visually based culture to examine. Her realist charge remained to elicit recognition. In answering James Joyce’s call for the “Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes,”34 Neel not only constructed herself but brought us into confrontation with ourselves. This inter- change, based on a reading of facial and bodily signals, permits the viewer to situate him/herself along various axes, to posit identity as located on a series of trajectories. Now that interpersonal exchanges frequently occur on-line rather than face to face (or face to portrait), and images themselves proliferate and metamorphose electronically without connection to a body, identity has be- come ever more mobile and mutable. In our current world of electronic inter- change, Neel’s portrait conventions constitute an invaluable database, a re- source as well as an historical record. NOTES

Introduction. The Portrait Gallery (pp. xvii–xxi)

1. Patricia Hills, Alice Neel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1983, 1995), 184. 2. Ibid., 185. 3. Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and The Worms (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1976; 1982), xii–xv. 4. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (: Press, 1980), 231. 5. Paul Ricoeur, “The Metaphorical Process,” in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 142.

Chapter 1. The Creation (of a) Myth (pp. 3–12)

1. In Patricia Hills, Alice Neel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1983, 1995), 12. 2. Ellen Landau, “Tough Choices: Becoming a Woman Artist, 1900–70,” in Randy Rosen and Catherine C. Brawer, Making Their Mark: Women Artists Enter the Mainstream (New York: Abbeville Press, 1988), 33. 3. Lawrence Alloway, “Patricia Hills, Alice Neel” (review), Art Journal 44/2 (summer 1984), 191–92. 4. Hills, Alice Neel, 28.

177 178 / Notes

5. Transcript of Bloomsburg State College Lecture, March 21, 1972. Alice Neel pa- pers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 6. Marcelo Pogolotti, Del Barro y las Voces (Mexico City, c. 1955), 191–223. In his ac- count of the early Cuban avant-garde, Pogolotti describes Neel as naive but excep- tionally talented. See also Gerald L. Belcher and Margaret L. Belcher, Collecting Souls, Gathering Dust: The Struggles of Two American Artists, Alice Neel and Rhoda Medary (New York: Paragon House, 1991), ch. 1. In describing Neel at the Phila- delphia School of Design for Women, the Belchers write: “At twenty-one years of age, Alice still approached life tentatively. She had little experience with creative people . . .” (12). 7. June Sochen, Enduring Values: Women in Popular Culture (New York: Praeger, 1987), 61–62. 8. So compelling was the image she forged that four biographical ƒlms were made about her. In addition, she conducted numerous TV and radio interviews, includ- ing two appearances on the Johnny Carson Show in 1982 and 1983 where, even in her ƒnal illness, she was far more lively than Carson’s other guests. As she remarked to the critic Harry Gaugh in 1978, “In a culture like ours, anything is better than anonymity.” Harry Gaugh, “Alice Neel,” Arts (May 1978), 9. 9. Alice Neel lecture, Harvard University, March 1979. Oral History Collection, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 10. If asked to vary her routine, Neel became evasive or even rude. When the artist Karl Fortess taped an interview with her at Boston University in September 1975, he de- clared in frustration: “I want to press you on your work. Please cut out your fascinat- ing personal life.” Neel responded with another anecdote. Questioned about her artistic sources, she claimed disingenuously that she “never looks at other artists.” Thus Neel the performance artist carefully concealed the tracks of Neel the painter, transforming a sophisticated and visually educated artist into an “original” and de- „ecting attention from the deeper issues her art raised. To be fair, she may have wanted not simply to distract the listener but also to mask her own pain. When Fort- ess asked her which of her teachers was most supportive of her work, Neel started to cry, and for a moment the long-suppressed emotional strain of forging an artistic ca- reer on her own surfaced. Her nonstop patter perhaps kept both critics and her own feelings at bay. Karl Fortess’s taped interviews with artists, Oral History Collection, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 11. This and most of the quotes in this paragraph are from Carolyn Heilbrun’s study of the genre of women’s autobiography; Writing a Woman’s Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988). 12. Quoted in “Introduction” to Heilbrun’s Writing a Woman’s Life, 11. 13. Hills, Alice Neel, 103. 14. Heilburn, Writing a Woman’s Life, 17–18.

Chapter 2. From Portraiture to Pictures of People (pp. 13–28)

1. George Biddle, Reality 3 (summer 1955). 2. Frank O’Hara, “having a coke with you,” 1959. Notes / 179

3. Emile de Antonio and Mitch Tuchman, Painters Painting: A Candid History of the Modern Art Scene, 1940–1970 (New York: Abbeville, 1984), 126. 4. The photographer-artist has occupied an intermediate ground, a terrain with shift- ing boundaries, between the artworld, peopled by a small group of cognoscenti, and the world of high-end commercial publishing, directed to a broader but well- educated public. During the 1920s and 1930s, Edward Steichen’s portraits of Bran- cusi or Jacob Epstein could appear in Vanity Fair along with his portraits of Holly- wood stars, musicians, novelists, journalists, and polititians. The visual artist thereby took his place among the realm of the country’s cultural elite. In the context of a monographic art book devoted to the work of Steichen, however, the portraits weigh in as evidence of the photographer’s interpretation of the artist’s personality, that is, as the photographer’s artistic expression. Thus, the type of publication in which the portraits appeared served to deƒne the portrait photograph either as an il- lustration of cultural ideals or as art. 5. Barbaralee Diamonsteen, Inside New York’s Artworld (New York: Rizzoli, 1979), 254. 6. Gerrit Henry, “The Artist and the Face, A Modern Sampling,” Art in America 63/1 (January-February 1975), 40. 7. Ibid., 34. 8. Ibid., 40. 9. Neel began in illustration, where her classes were taught by the muralist George Harding. A pupil of the well-known illustrator Howard Pyle, Harding had also stud- ied with at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Harding’s conservative work provides a tenuous link at best with the Ashcan School, however. Neel considered Paula Balano a more challenging teacher. 10. Gerald L. Belcher and Margaret L. Belcher, Collecting Souls, Gathering Dust: The Struggles of Two American Artists, Alice Neel and Rhoda Medary (New York: Para- gon House, 1991), 19. 11. Ibid. 12. Patricia Hills, Alice Neel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1983; 1995), 15–17. 13. Ibid., 21. 14. William Innes Homer, Robert Henri and His Circle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), 182. It is unlikely that Neel ever met Henri, as he died in 1929, shortly after Neel moved to New York City. 15. The artists speciƒcally mentioned as exemplars of these principles were Velasquez, Hogarth, Goya, Daumier, Titian, Homer, Corot, Manet, and Cézanne. Degas and Eakins do not appear in the book, although Ryerson and Homer assert with author- ity that he did hold them up as models. 16. Robert Henri, The Art Spirit, ed. Margery Ryerson (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1923/1930), 80–81; 85–86. 17. Edmond Duranty, “La Nouvelle Peinture” (1876), quoted in Carol Armstrong, Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 76. 18. Quoted in Hills, Alice Neel, 134. 19. Ibid., 167. 20. Henri, The Art Spirit, 10–11. 180 / Notes

21. Hills, Alice Neel, 143. 22. Ibid., 77. 23. Annette Cox, Art-as-Politics: The Abstract Expressionist Avant-Garde and Society (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1977; 1982), 19–20. 24. Blacks appear in numerous genre scenes throughout nineteenth-century American art, usually in stereotyped roles. Henri was one of the ƒrst artists to paint portraits of blacks, as individuals, with (ƒrst) names. 25. Homer, Robert Henri and His Circle, 158. 26. Henri, The Art Spirit, 215. 27. Ibid., 95. 28. Sheldon Nodelman, “How to Read a Roman Portrait,” Art in America 63/1 (January- February 1975), 28. 29. Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 110. 30. Ibid., 68. 31. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 3. 32. The authors cite a third category, structural metaphors, in which one concept is structured in terms of another. These metaphors are inapplicable to the physical medium of painting. 33. Ibid., 59. 34. Hills, Alice Neel, 182–83. 35. In her important discussion of Neel’s portrait conventions, “Alice Neel’s Fifty Years of Portrait Painting,” Studio International 193 (March 1977), Ellen H. Johnson provided a wonderful list of Neel’s animal metaphors: “She has herself remarked that the portrait of Virgil Thompson [sic], for example, suggests an elephant in its colour and leatherish texture . . . The elegantly long, thin Kristen Walker looks like a Russian Wolf Hound . . . One sitter was disturbed when the artist inadvertently asked her to move her left ‘paw.’ About a well-known ƒgure, Alice Neel remarked gleefully, ‘She looks like a ferret, doesn’t she?’ and of another, ‘His hands are like a racoon’s . . .’ She sees a man’s arms as a carp, a leg as a zucchini and a woman’s but- tocks as the foot on a Queen Anne Chair” (179). 36. Hills, Alice Neel, 167. 37. Ibid., 141. 38. Nancy M. Henley, Body Politics: Power, Sex and Non-Verbal Communication (En- glewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1977), 18. 39. Ibid., 38. 40. Gerald I. Nerenberg and Henry H. Calero, How to Read a Person Like a Book (1971), quoted in Henley, Body Politics, 126. 41. Quoted in Fritz Graf, “The Gestures of Roman Actors and Orators,” in Jan Brem- mer and Herman Roodenburg, eds., A Cultural History of Gesture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 41. 42. Lynn F. Miller and Sally S. Swenson, Lives and Works: Talks with Women Artists (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1981), 125. Notes / 181

43. Gombrich, “The Experiment in Caricature,” Art and Illusion (Princeton: Prince- ton University Press, 1960), 355. 44. Paul Enkman and Wallace Freisen, Unmasking the Face (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1975), 24–27. 45. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 34. 46. Ibid. 47. Sanford Sivitz Shaman, “An Interview with Philip Pearlstein,” Art in America 69/7 (September 1981), 122.

Chapter 3. Starting Out from Home (pp. 29–41)

1. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, Brace, Jovano- vich, 1929; 1957), 103–105. 2. Sculley Bradley, Richmond Croom Beatty, and E. Hudson Long, eds., The Ameri- can Tradition in Literature, vol. 2 (New York: W. W. Norton/Grosset and Dunlap, 1967), 1027, 1029. 3. Married in the summer of 1925, Alice, evidently con„icted about married life, did not follow Carlos to Cuba until January 1926. According to the Belchers, after San- tillana was born on December 26, 1926, Neel “complained that Carlos’s family never left her alone . . . [W]hen she relented and took her daughter to visit them, she was forced, despite her protests, to defer to their social mores and sit apart— with the women.” From their interviews, the Belchers draw the conclusion that “Her departure seems to have been an attempt to force him [Carlos] to choose be- tween . . . the world of independence and the continued dependence on this father for whatever income he received.” Gerald L. Belcher and Margaret L. Belcher, Collecting Souls, Gathering Dust: The Struggles of Two American Artists, Alice Neel and Rhoda Medary (New York: Paragon House, 1991), 83. 4. Neel provided a narrative of her breakdown in her autobiography (Patricia Hills, Alice Neel [New York: Abrams, 1983], 29–40), which is summarized with greater detail and coherence in Belcher and Belcher, ch. 9. 5. Charlotte Willard, “In the Art Galleries,” New York Post, (January 16, 1966). 6. Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 28. 7. Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in American Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925; 1929), 129. 8. James Patterson, America in the Twentieth Century: A History (San Diego: Har- court, Brace, Jovanovich, 1989), 193. 9. The Lynds noted that “It is perhaps impossible to overestimate the role of motion pictures, advertising and other forms of publicity in this rise in subjective standards . . . [A]dvertising is concentrating increasingly upon a type of copy aiming to make the reader emotionally uneasy” (Ibid., 82). Lillian Breslow Rubin’s Worlds of Pain: Life in the Working-Class Family (New York: Basic Books, 1976) documents the fact that “in the working class, the process of building a family, of making a living for it, of nurturing and maintaining the individuals in it costs ‘worlds of pain.’” (215). 182 / Notes

10. Neel was commissioned by their mutual friend Katherine Cole to paint Lynd’s por- trait in 1969. Then on the faculty at Sarah Lawrence College, Lynd was to Neel a “lion,” and the artist gave her face the appearance of intelligence and strength she needed to rise, as a woman, to the top of her academic ƒeld. 11. Perhaps for similar reasons, the regionalist painter Grant Wood would borrow the stiff poses and architectural conventions of Currier and Ives prints for some of his paintings such as Dinner for Threshers (1933), a quite conscious parody of our cul- ture’s oversimpliƒed, idealized vision of farm life. 12. Isabetta was born on November 24, 1928, at the Fifth Avenue Hospital where the Well-Baby Clinic was located. 13. Susan Noyes Platt, Modernism in the 1920s: Interpretations of Modern Art in New York from Expressionism to (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985), 67. 14. Rom Landau, “Modern Movements in German Art,” The Arts 14/1 (July 1928), 28. 15. Neel must have learned about Munch’s work in the same way she absorbed the in„uence of German expressionism; through periodicals. Although Munch was shown in the 1913 , his paintings were not exhibited in this country again until 1950. However, publications available in English, from Julius Meier- Graefe’s 1907 Modern Art on, cited Munch as a precursor of expressionism, so no doubt Neel was familiar with the artist. Although Gustav Schie„er’s two-volume catalogue raisonné of Munch’s graphic work was published in Berlin in 1927, there is no evidence that Neel had access to a copy. 16. Hills, Alice Neel, 22. 17. Michel Foucault, “The Birth of the Asylum,” from Madness and Civilization, (trans. Richard Howard [New York: Random House, 1965]), quoted in Paul Rabi- now, ed., Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 159–60. 18. Hills, Alice Neel, p. 37. 19. The French surrealists are the obvious example here. 20. Hills, Alice Neel, 32. 21. From 1928 to 1930, Carlos, a Cuban aristocrat, tried to keep the family a„oat by taking commercial art jobs. His parents also sent money, and promised to send Alice and Carlos to Paris. On May 1, Carlos took Isabetta to Cuba for a visit so that they would be free to go to Paris. When, with the onset of the Depression, Carlos’s parents had to withdraw their offer, Carlos went on to Paris on his own. According to Isabetta’s friend, Maria Diaz, Carlos felt that his actions were necessitated by what he felt was neglect of his child. During the winter of 1929 to 1930, Carlos came home to ƒnd Isabetta in her bassinet on the ƒre escape, slowly being covered by the falling snow while Neel painted. For Alice, the loss of both her husband and her child was devastating. On August 15, having lost over twenty-ƒve pounds since Carlos left, she collapsed and was hospitalized. 22. See, for example, Dick Polsky, interview with Alice Neel, tape no. 2, April 29, 1981, Oral History Collection, Butler Library, Columbia University. The quote is from Cindy Nemser, Art Talk (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975), 125. 23. Poems such as Alice Walker’s “Now That the Book is Finished” (c. 1975) situate the con„ict in the body, as did Alice Neel’s painting forty-eight years earlier: “Now Notes / 183

that the book is ƒnished / Now that I know my characters / will live / I can love my child again / She need sit no longer / in the back of my heart / the lonely sucking of her thumb / a giant stopper in my throat.” 24. Lawrence Alloway, “Patricia Hills, Alice Neel” (review), Art Journal 44/2 (Summer 1984), 191. 25. Robert Storr, “Alice Neel at Robert Miller, Art in America 70/9 (October 1982), 130. 26. Lucy R. Lippard, “Introduction,” From the Center: feminist essays on women’s art (New York: Dutton, 1976), 6.

Chapter 4. Art on the Left in the 1930s (pp. 45–66)

1. The couple had met in 1924 at the Pennsylvania Academy’s summer school pro- gram in Chester Springs; they were married in the spring of 1925, but Neel refused to accompany Carlos to Cuba until the following winter (see Gerald Belcher and Margaret Belcher, Collecting Souls, Gathering Dust: The Struggles of Two Ameri- can Artists, Alice Neel and Rhoda Medary [New York: Paragon House, 1989], 71–75). After overcoming her indecision, she found her stay in Cuba a seminal one. As she confessed to Hills: “My life in Cuba . . . conditioned me a lot.” Patricia Hills, Alice Neel (New York: Abrams, 1983, 1995), 21. 2. Hills, Alice Neel, 33. 3. Juan A. Martinez, Cuban Art and National Identity: The Vanguardia Painters, 1920s–1940s (Ph.D. Diss., Florida State University, 1992), ch. 1. 4. Ibid., 90. 5. Ibid., 97. 6. Marcelo Pogolotti, Del Barro Y Las Voces (Havana: Editorial Letras Bubas, 1982), n.p. My thanks to Prof. Lynette Bosch for translating the quoted passage. 7. Letter from Neel to Robert Stewart at the National Portrait Gallery, summer 1969. 8. These artists are discussed by Juan A. Martinez in “Cuban Vanguardia Painting in the 1930s,” Latin American Art 5/2 (fall 1993), 36–38. 9. John Dos Passos, “Margo Dowling,” The Big Money (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1933), 253. 10. Two pieces of anecdotal evidence suggest that Neel never abandoned her “Cuban” identity. In 1983, she told Johnny Carson (and the television audience) that she had moved to Spanish Harlem with José Santiago in 1939 in order “to correct the mistakes I made with the ƒrst Latin.” During the 1960s or 1970s, after Carlos’s death and Isabetta’s emigration to Miami, Neel drafted a letter to Fidel Castro (c/o the Center for Cuban Studies in New York) praising his regime and requesting per- mission to paint his portrait, explaining: “I have wanted for years to do a portrait of you for your government to give to the people of Cuba. My experience, my political allegiances as well as my work as a painter have been in„uenced by the same forces as those which brought about the Cuban revolution . . .” [Draft of a letter at Neel Arts, New York, New York.] Although the letter is undated, it may well be from the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The June 1962 issue of Mainstream fea- 184 / Notes

tured a wooden bust of Castro by the Russian artist V. Telishev, and the confronta- tion between the United States and the Soviet Union that October may have pre- cipitated her note. 11. While she was living in Cuba, Carlos had painted a ƒne portrait of the turn-of-the- century Cuban revolutionary leader Jose Martí. For Neel, no doubt, Castro’s re- gime was the realization of Martí’s vision of a Cuba independent of North Ameri- can political interference. Prevented by practical exigencies from portraying this communist leader, she instead represented his martyred comrade, Che Guevara. An undated drawing inscribed “Aij-Aij-Aij” was no doubt done from the newpaper photographs of Che Guevara’s corpse, circulated by the Bolivian government in 1967 as proof of the guerilla leader’s death. As might be expected from her Cuban conditioning, Neel saw American imperialism at work in the charismatic Guevara’s demise: “The Green Berets murdered him.” Hills, Alice Neel, 128. 12. Matthew Baigell has written that although Herman Baron’s ACA gallery, which was speciƒcally devoted to politically engaged, left-wing art, was founded in 1932, Baron did not feel that social realism as a movement could be said to exist until after Joe Jones’s exhibit there in 1935. Matthew Baigell, The American Scene: American Painting of the 1930s (New York: Praeger, 1974), 58. 13. The Communist Party will not release the dates of her membership, and a request to the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act elicited the following bureau- cratic evasion: “We have located documents which may pertain to your request and will assign them for processing . . . In view of the large volume of requests on hand, delays in excess of one year are not uncommon.” Letter of February 4, 1994, from J. Kevin O’Brien, Chief, Information Resources Division, FBI. As this book goes to press, the FBI has still not answered my request. 14. Among the canonical texts in her library are: Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1948 trans.); “Workers of the World Unite” (Literature of the Central Organ of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers, 1931); V. I. Lenin, The State (1919); The War and the Second International (1930); Imperialism: The High- est Stage of Capitalism (1939); Joseph Stalin, The Problems of Leninism (1934), Mao Tse-Tung, On Contradiction (1953). With thanks to Antonia Neel for compil- ing this list. 15. Annette T. Rubenstein, “The Cultural World of the Communist Party: An Histori- cal Overview,” in New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism, ed. Michael E. Brown, et al. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993), 241. 16. Irwin Granich (Mike Gold), “Towards Proletarian Art,” The Liberator 4/2 (Febru- ary 1921), 21–22. 17. Barbara Melosh, Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Art and Culture (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 95. 18. Ibid., 14. 19. Reviewing the exhibition for Art Front, Harold Rosenberg argued that the “social causes” that motivated van Gogh’s artistic expression can be better understood in 1936 than they could in his own time: “in our own day, van Gogh might not have found his original efforts to speak to the working people in whose society he lived so inconsistent with the movement of art . . . [T]hough van Gogh converted his art Notes / 185

into a language of temperament, he did so not through temperamental but through social causes.” Harold Rosenberg, “Peasants and Pure Art,” Art Front 9 (January 1936), 5–6. 20. Hills, Alice Neel, 60. 21. Stuart Davis, “Why an Artists’ Congress?,” in Matthew Baigell and Julia Williams, eds., Artists Against War and Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists Congress (Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 67–70 passim. 22. E.G. (Emily Genauer), “New Fall Art Exhibits Featured by Tyros’ Promising Ef- forts,” New York World Telegram, September 12, 1936. The exhibiting artists, recip- ients of honorable mention in a competitive exhibition of members of the Ameri- can Artists Congress, held at the ACA galleries June 15–30, 1936, were Elizabeth Olds, Louise Nevelson, Amalia Ludwig, and Neel, all women. 23. Hills, Alice Neel, 61. For its part, the United States Government would not recog- nize the systematic extermination of European Jewry until 1944, with the establish- ment of the War Refugee Board. 24. Such blunt, unambiguous messages were revived in socially concerned art during the 1980s, in, for example, Judy Baca’s “We Fight Fascism Abroad and at Home,” which commemorates a 1940s struggle for equal housing in Los Angeles. 25. Meyer Schapiro, “The Public Use of Art,” Art Front (November 1936), 10. In a re- cent issue of the Oxford Art Journal (17/1, 1994) devoted to Meyer Schapiro, An- drew Hemingway (“Meyer Schapiro and Marxism in the 1930s,” pp. 13–29), and Patrica Hills (“1936: Meyer Schapiro, Art Front, and the Popular Front,” pp. 30– 41) both argue that Schapiro’s criticism was the most coherent and consistently rad- ical Marxist criticism in the mid-1930s. 26. Ibid., 6. 27. Hills, Alice Neel, 36. 28. “Migratory Intellectuals,” New Masses 21 (December 15, 1936), 27; quoted in Hills, Alice Neel, 38. 29. Ibid., 38. 30. Garnet McCoy, “The Rise and Fall of the American Artist Congress,” Prospects 13 (1988), 339. 31. Philip Evergood, “Sure, I’m a Social Painter,” Magazine of Art (November 1943), 259. 32. Luis Quintanilla’s drawings of the war in Spain had been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1938. 33. In 1940–1941, Jacob Lawrence also documented this death toll as part of his monu- mental series of sixty gouache paintings, “The Migration Series,” his visual history of the exodus of the Negro from the rural South to northern cities after World War I. No. 55 in the series depicts three men, their black triangular bodies carrying a tan rectangular cofƒn. Lawrence’s laconic text states the facts simply: “The Negro be- ing suddenly moved from out of doors and cramped into urban life, contracted a great deal of tuberculosis. Because of this the death rate was very high.” Image and text reproduced in Elizabeth Hutton Turner, ed., Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series (Washington, D.C.: Rappahannock Press in association with The Phillips Collection, 1993), ƒg. 55. 186 / Notes

34. Hills, Alice Neel, 53. Rahv’s “sidekick” was William Philips, whose pseudonym was Wallace (not Lionel) Phelps. 35. Belcher and Belcher, Collecting Souls, 158. 36. Solman was instrumental in keeping Neel on the WPA and in obtaining several ex- hibitions for her at the ACA gallery. 37. Caroline Ware, Greenwich Village, 1920–1930, A Comment on American Civiliza- tion in the Post-War Years (Boston: Houghton Mif„in, 1935), 5. 38. Ibid., 85. 39. Ibid., 235–40. 40. Ibid., 424. 41. Writing in 1935, Malcolm Cowley observed that the Lost Generation “had enjoyed the beneƒts of the revolt against gentility, and its ƒnal limitations are revealed in their careers. They had been liberated from the narrow standards that developed at a certain stage of American middle-class society. But a principal result of this libera- tion had been to uproot them, to cut them off from the daily hopes and worries of their communities . . . They still saw the world as middle-class people . . . [T]hey were still as politically powerless as almost all the members of their class . . . [The younger novelists of the post-1930 generation, on the other hand,] were dealing with textile or waterfront strikes or the struggles of the tenant farmers. It seems to me that no great new writers have as yet emerged . . . Yet there is promise everywhere.” Malcolm Cowley, “Postscript,” in After the Genteel Tradition (Carbondale and Ed- wardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1936, 1964), 178–79. 42. Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalin- ist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1987). 43. “Books: Wineskin into Giant” (review of Putnam’s translation of Don Quixote), Time, October 3, 1949, 76–77; “Milestones,” Time, January 30, 1950. In France in the 1920s, Putnam published translations of Rabelais, Pirandello, and Cocteau. Later, in 1947, he would write his own account of the Lost Generation, Paris Was Our Mistress: Memoirs of a Lost and Found Generation. Neel’s anecdotal history, as quoted in Hills, gets the dates of the last decade of his life wrong. 44. Samuel Putnam, “Marxism and Surrealism,” Art Front 3/4 (March 1937), 11–12. 45. “Max White,” in W. J. Burke and Will K. Howe, eds., American Authors and Books (New York: Crown Publishers, 1972), 451. 46. Neel made two subsequent portraits of White, one in 1939, the other in 1961, where he sheds his proletarian guise. 47. Joseph Mitchell, Joe Gould’s Secret (New York: Viking, 1965), 1–12 passim. 48. For a description of the ƒrst-person narrative project see “Text From Federal Writ- ers’ Project,” in Harlem: Photographs by Aaron Siskind, 1932–1940, Ann Banks, ed. (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art, 1990), 5–6. 49. The project’s ambitious scope, far beyond that of the Writers’ Project, so intrigued Mitchell that he felt it was his duty to assure that the Oral History was preserved and published. What followed was a cat and mouse game that ended after Gould’s de- mented death in Pilgrim State Hospital on Long Island in 1957. Seven years later, Mitchell confessed that he had examined what little was extant and found there Notes / 187

only one repeated entry, the story of the death of Gould’s father, a prominent Bos- ton physician. “The Oral History of Our Time” was nothing more than the words Gould used to describe his project, a charade formulated to sustain an identity. 50. Neel claims that Gould in fact requested to pose nude. 51. In 1962, for instance, Hubert Crehan was obliged to remove it from the exhibition he had organized at Reed College. It was ƒrst published in the underground mag- azine Mother in 1965. Linda Nochlin published a small black and white photo- graph of the painting in her “seminal” essay “Eroticism and Female Imagery in Nineteenth-Century Art,” in Woman as a Sex Object (ARTnews, 1972), 15, where Nochlin predicted that “The growing power of woman in the politics of both sex and art is bound to revolutionize the realm of erotic representation.” In 1973, John Perreault included it, along with Neel’s nude portrait of him, in an exhibit at the gallery at N.Y.U. However, in 1975, Gould was removed from the “Three Centuries of the American Nude” exhibition at New York’s Cultural Center, and in the same year, at Neel’s exhibition at the Georgia Museum of Art, he appeared in the catalogue but not in the „esh. 52. Sigmund Freud, “The Medusa’s Head,” quoted in Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana Unversity Press, 1989), 6. 53. Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 9. 54. Neel’s portrait gallery is notable for its absence of women, and despite the presence of writers of the stature of Kay Boyle and Meridel LeSueur in the community. How- ever, Malcolm Cowley’s After the Genteel Tradition from 1936 did not discuss a sin- gle woman writer, nor, a half a century later, did Alan M. Wald’s New York Intellec- tuals (1987). The sole woman entrant was not part of Greenwich Village bohemia, but a WPA bureaucrat who is subjected to a vicious caricature lacking the subtlety of the Gould parody. Neel’s portrait of Audrey McMahon (1940) reduces the attrac- tive, hard-working regional director of the WPA/FAP in New York City to a tooth- less hag, with eye bags drooping to meet three stunted ƒngers on a rigid yardstick of an arm. In 1938, when McMahon had written that “it is no longer essential . . . that we produce antiquated allegorical subjects . . . that we go in heavily for sweetness and light,” she could have had no idea how literally one of the artists under her su- pervision would take that statement. Quoted in Lucy R. Lippard, “Empathy and In- dignation,” Women Artists of the New Deal Era (Washington, D.C.: National Mu- seum of Women in the Arts, 1988), 16. As Neel’s “boss” on the WPA, McMahon was forced on more than one occasion to lower Neel’s wages as the result of cut- backs in the program. In his essay, “The Easel Division of the WPA Federal Art Project,” in F. V. O’Connor, ed., The New Deal Art Projects: An Anthology of Mem- oirs (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1972), 119, Joseph Solman writes that, as head of the grievance committee of the Artists Union, he had to inter- vene to prevent Neel from being transferred to the teaching division. 55. Neel did not use the device again until the late 1960s, in her portrait of the theatri- cal producer Joseph Papp. 56. In the preface to his 1956 book of collected poems, which includes an extended po- lemic against McCarthyism and censorship in the media, Fearing acknowledged 188 / Notes

his debt to Marxism. In a statement again applicable to Neel’s portrait gallery, he said he was writing “about the people and events of this time and this place, through imaginary characters and transposed circumstances, all of it coming in the end to an expression of the changing relationships between people in varied crises...” Kenneth Fearing, “Preface,” New and Selected Poems (Bloomington: Indiana Uni- versity Press, 1956), xxiii. 57. This is not the Daily Worker headline for that date, but the paper had been ƒlled with discussions of strikes during the previous months. 58. Hills, Alice Neel, 64–65. 59. Bruce Nelson, “Introduction,” Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen and Unionism in the 1930s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 1, 5. 60. Ibid., see ch. 3, “Red Unionism: The Communist Party and the Marine Workers Industrial Union.” Founded in 1930, the Marine Workers Industrial Union con- tributed greatly to the era of insurgency between 1933 and 1935. The MWIU tried unsuccessfully to end the ethnic particularlism of the docks, which was maintained by the International Longshoreman Union’s head, Joseph P. Ryan. As part of its call for the end of racial and ethnic particularism, the MWIU fought actively for the rights of black workers. 61. Ibid., 89–90. 62. and Lewis Coser, The American Communist Party (New York: Prae- ger, 1957), 458. 63. Herman Bahr’s Expressionism, the earliest text on expressionism, had been trans- lated into English in 1920; in 1934, the American critic Sheldon Cheney pub- lished Expressionism in Art. 64. Charmion von Wiegand, “Expressionism and Social Change,” Art Front 2/10 (November 1936), 12. 65. J. K., (Jacob Kainen), “Exhibitions and Reviews,” Art Front 2/11 (December 1936), 16. 66. Jacob Kainen, “Our Expressionists,” Art Front 3/1 (February 1937), 15. 67. For a more sophisticated discussion of this subject, see Ernst Bloch, “Discussing Ex- pressionism” (1938), in Aesthetics and Politics: The Key Texts of the Clasic Debate Within German Marxism, ed. Fredric Jameson (London: Verso, 1977; 1980), 22. 68. Von Wiegand’s essay is cited in Virginia Hagelstein Marquart, “Art on the Political Front...” Art Journal 52/1 (spring 1993), 80. 69. For a thorough history of The Ten, which includes a brief discussion of The New York Group, see Isabelle Dervaux, Avant-Garde in New York, 1935–1939: The Ten, Ph.D. dissertation, , 1992. 70. Neel was included in von Wiegand’s article on the expressionist movement, but not in Kainen’s. However, Kainen obviously recognized Neel’s importance by includ- ing her in the group. 71. Dervaux, The Ten, 12. 72. “The New York Group,” ACA gallery exhibition brochure, May 23–June 4, 1938. Special Collections, Museum of Modern Art library, New York. 73. I have not traced the two other paintings, “La Bailarina,” and “Golden Boy,” which I assume are portraits. Notes / 189

74. J.L., “New Exhibitions of the Week: First Showing by a New & Democratic Artists’ Group,” ARTnews 36/36 (June 4, 1938), 13. 75. “New Exhibitions of the Week: Three Dramatic Shows Establish the Greatness of Kathe Kollwitz,” ARTnews 36/33 (May 14, 1938), 13. 76. Hills, Alice Neel, 77. 77. Kenneth Fearing’s proletarian introduction added expressionist tone but no con- tent: “They are as savage, as primitive, as man is in today’s civilization; as civilized, as sensitive, as the individual is against the contemporary background of sheer chaos.” “The New York Group,” ACA gallery exhibition brochure, February 5–18, 1939. 78. Jacob Kainen, “Social Painting and the Modern Tradition,” unpublished typescript presented at ACA gallery, New York, February 10, 1939; quoted in Harry Rand, “Notes and Conversations: Jacob Kainen,” Arts 53/4 (December 1978), 139. 79. Ibid., 140. 80. Avis Berman, “Images from a Life,” in Jacob Kainen (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1993), 21. 81. It may have appeared that Neel would fare better apart from the New York Group, for she was given her ƒrst one-person show at the Contemporary Arts gallery on 57th Street in May 1938, at the same time her work was included in the ƒrst New York Group exhibit. Neel was also included in at least four group exhibitions at Con- temporary Arts, Inc., between 1938 and 1941, such as “Twenty Artists Look North From Radio City” (May-June, 1938) and “The Painters Paint Each Other” (June 1939); “Miscellaneous Papers,” AAA reel NAAA3/173–217. Founded in 1931 by Emily Francis, the gallery was devoted to “the introduction in New York and the sponsoring of mature American artists”; it also fostered sales for the “sponsored group” through its afƒliation, the “Collectors of American Art.” After 1941, Neel is no longer listed as one of the “sponsored artists.” Despite the fact that Joseph Sol- man, , and John Kane had their ƒrst shows there, the gallery’s “spon- sored” roster did not include any of the prestigious names carried by the ACA: Philip Evergood, Joe Jones, William Gropper, who were identifed with Social Realism. Contemporary Arts, Inc., papers, Archives of American Art, D226, frames 600ff. 82. Telephone interview with Joseph Solman, October 5, 1993.

Chapter 5. The Cold War Battles (pp. 67–89)

1. Quoted in Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, The American Communist Party: A Criti- cal History (New York: Praeger, 1957), 245. 2. Norman Barr, “Statement of Purpose: United American Artists,” Charles Keller papers, AAA 7/739. 3. “From Rockwell Kent, President of the United American Artists,” The New York Artist 1/3–4 (May-June 1940), 10. 4. Elizabeth McCausland, “Two Gallery Exhibits of United American Arists,” The New York Artist 1/3–4 (May-June 1940), 6. “Its aesthetic values are compelling be- cause its roots are deep in social integration.” 190 / Notes

5. Robert Shaffer, “Women and the Communist Party,” Socialist Review 45 (May- June 1979), 95. 6. Increasingly embattled after 1940, it lost its union accreditation in 1942, emerging as the Artists League of America. Although the ALA continued to hold annual ex- hibitions until 1948, its membership gradually declined as its cause retreated ever further from view, until in a letter of August 23, 1948, to Daniel Koerner, Rock- well Kent suggested, “Let’s liquidate our assets in booze.” Daniel Koerner papers AAA1337/880. For information on United American Artists and the Artists League of America see Lynd Ward papers, AAA4466/108–354; Charles Keller papers AAA7/591–740; Daniel Koerner papers, AAAN70–40/499–567; AAA1337/551– 1028. For an excellent history of the trade union movement in American art see Gerald M. Monroe, “Artists as Militant Trade Union Workers During the Great Depression,” Archives of American Art Journal 14/1 (spring 1974), 7–10. 7. Letter of September 1943 from Joseph Solman to Jacob Kainen, Jacob Kainen pa- pers, AAA565, 0170–0193. 8. Anon., “The Passing Shows,” Art News 42/3 (March 15–31, 1944), 20. 9. “Well, the mystery w/ WPA is cleared up. all the oils stored in King St. & adjacent warehouses showed up in a second hand bric a brac shop down on Canal St . . . I hurried down, recovered four really good ones of mine as well as several for [Mer- vyn] Jules, Louis Nisonoff & Alice Neel . . . Most of the stuff still lies in back of his junk shop on the „oor without beneƒt of stretchers—just one huge cofƒn.” Letters of February 26, 1939, September 1943, and January 1944 from Joseph Solman to Jacob Kainen, Jacob Kainen papers, AAA565, 0170–0193. 10. Kenneth Fearing, The Big Clock (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1946), 153–56 passim. 11. Ibid., 47–50. 12. Ibid. 13. Philip Evergood, “Sure, I’m a Social Painter,” Magazine of Art 36 (October 1943), 257. 14. Anon., “The Passing Shows.” Unfortunately, this review cannot be attributed to the young Hilton Kramer, but it anticipates by thirty years the main points of his scath- ing review of her Whitney Museum exhibition in 1974. 15. According to Irving Howe, “In its origins the line that America was approaching fascism re„ected the need of Russia to revile its main enemy in the cold war. As applied by the party this line was supposed to bind the ranks during a time of trou- bles.” Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, The American Communist Party (New York: Praeger, 1957), 457. 16. Gropper, for instance, was called before the McCarthy Committee on May 6, 1953, where the stoolpigeon Harvey Matusow testiƒed that Gropper was a commu- nist. Later that year, the Cranbrook Academy canceled their scheduled Gropper ex- hibition. The artist’s response to this censorship by a respected arts institution was a series of prints titled after Goya’s Capriccios. Like Neel’s The Stoolpigeon, The In- formers (1953–1956) from this series visualizes the perversion of the truth in terms of exaggerated caricature. Louis Lozowick no doubt summarized their collective opinion when he wrote that “informers are the most despised of all groups in cur- rent society.” Norma Shiela Steinberg, “William Gropper: Art and Censorship Notes / 191

from the 1930s through the Cold War Era,” Ph.D. dissertation, Boston University, 1994, 151. 17. Telephone conversation with Nancy Stewart, Information Resources Division, FBI, May 24, 1995. 18. Ibid., 87. 19. Donald Drew Egbert, Socialism and American Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 126. 20. V. J. Jerome, Culture in a Changing World: A Marxist Approach, (New York: New Century Publishers, 1947), 46. 21. Ibid., 90–91. 22. She told Pat Hills the following story: “After V. J. Jerome came out of the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary I went to his home. He told the story of how he went into Lewisburg, and they gave him the mattress of Remington who was murdered by other prisoners because he was a Communist. They said to him: ‘Here, take this bloody mattress . . . and mind your P’s and Q’s.’” Patricia Hills, Alice Neel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1983), 87. 23. Irving Howe, the editor of Dissent, called it “unin„uential,” and Paul Buhle described it as “hard to read and hardly worth the effort.” (Paul Buhle, Marxism in the United States: Remapping the History of the American Left (London: Verso, 1987), 198. 24. “The Editors” (Samuel Sillen), “Preface for Today,” Masses & Mainstream 1/1 (March 1948), 3–4. 25. In the May 1949 issue, for instance, the well-known Soviet author Alesander A. Fa- deyev called for a literature whose narratives charted an inevitable progress toward the socialist state: “What is socialist realism? Socialist realism is the ability to pre- sent life in its development . . . The characters in these books and plays . . . in their everyday, ordinary and yes creative activity . . . do not drift, they anticipate the mor- row and bring it nearer.” Alexander A. Fadeyev. “Our Road to Realism,” Masses & Mainstream 2/5 (May 1949), 56. 26. Charles Humboldt, “Communists in Novels: II,” Masses & Mainstream 2/7 (July 1949), 64. 27. The Marxist group was put off as well by his hypocrisy: the dogmatist collected modern art. 28. Interview with Annette Rubinstein, September 17, 1993. 29. Annette Rubinstein, “The Cultural World of the Communist Party: An Historical Overview,” in Michael E. Brown, et al., eds., New Studies in the Politics and Cul- ture of U.S. Communism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993), 157, 159. 30. Alice Neel, “Editors,” Masses & Mainstream 8/7 (July 1955), 62–63. 31. For example, in his “Open Letter to Soviet Painters,” in the April 1956 issue of Masses & Mainstream, David Alfaro Siqueiros stated bluntly what Neel had phrased obliquely. Speaking as a member of the Communist Party since 1923, Siqueiros ar- gued that “Realism . . . cannot be a ƒxed formula, an immutable law . . . Realism can only be a means to ever progressing creativity.” Having lost sight of that essen- tial principle, Soviet art perpetuated “representational styles already passé, for ex- ample the styles employed in American advertising at the beginning of the cen- tury.” David Alfaro Siqueiros, “Open Letter to Soviet Painters,” Masses & Main- 192 / Notes

stream 9/3 (April 1956), 3. J. P. Marquand has also noted the similarities between Soviet socialist realism and American capitalist realism in Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–40 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). 32. Bonosky interview. 33. Neel painted a portrait of Bonosky at that time. 34. The ƒrst published illustration was for “A Walk to the Moon,” in the April 10, 1949, issue of the Daily Worker. The ƒrst Masses & Mainstream illustration was for “The Wishing Well” (May 1949), the second for “I Live on the Bowery,” (January 1951). Her one political illustration, Relief Check, was published in Masses & Mainstream in April 1950. 35. The story became a chapter of Jews Without Money (New York: New Century Pub- lishers, 1980). 36. The Twelve included Eugene Dennis, Councilman Benjamin J. Davis, and Gus Hall. A second trial in 1951 that indicted and convicted twenty-one others, sent V. J. Jerome to prison. Egbert, Socialism, 126. 37. Charles Humboldt, “Books in Review: Trial by Stoolpigeon” (review of George Marion, “The Communist Trial: An American Crossroads.) Masses & Mainstream 2/12 (December 1949), 66–67. 38. Joseph North, “The Trial of the Twelve: Justice, Inc.,” Masses & Mainstream 2/4 (April 1949), 10–11. 39. The Editors, “, 1892–1951,” Masses & Mainstream 4/9 (Septem- ber 1951), 3. 40. Shaffer, “Women and the Communist Party,” 92. 41. Paul Buhle, Marxism in the United States, 99. 42. Interestingly, Frida Kahlo made a similar comment in one of her last paintings, Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick (1954), painted shortly before Kahlo’s last public appearance in a communist demonstration in Mexico City on July 2, 1954, which protested the ouster of Guzman. Beyond their shared commitment to com- munism, both artists retained a contempt for the Big Brother policies of the United States. Neel’s painting is reproduced in Rob A. Okun, ed., The Rosenbergs: Col- lected Visions of Artists and Writers (New York: Universe Books, 1988), pl. 20. 43. Gerald Horne, “Civil Rights Congress,” in Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas, The Encyclopedia of the American Left (New York and London: Gar- land, 1990), 134. 44. Idem. 45. Addressed to the General Assembly of the United Nations under the Convention of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations of December 11, 1946, the introduction to the 200- page document argued: “Seldom has mass murder on the score of ‘race’ been so sanctiƒed by law . . .” The Civil Rights Congress, “We Charge Genocide!” Masses & Mainstream 4/5 (May 1951), 22–23. 46. Igor Golomstock has identiƒed four categories of Socialist Realist portraiture: the leader as Fuhrer, the leader as inspirer, the leader as wise teacher, and the leader as Notes / 193

a man (who loves children). Igor Golomstock, Totalitarian Art (New York: Harper- Collins, 1990), 230–31. 47. Tony Safford, “Interview with Sam Brody,” Jump Cut 14 (1977), 28. 48. These ƒlms were restored in 1982 and are in the ƒlm library of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Information on the League is compiled in the Tom Bran- don ƒles. 49. Safford, “Interview with Sam Brody,” 29. 50. Ibid., 30. In the same issue of Jump Cut, Leo Seltzer described Brody as “somewhat of a writer and a talker and a screamer. Those who did most of the ƒlming, editing and screening were Del Duca, Balog and I.” Ibid., 31. 51. Ibid., 29. 52. “Horizon Films Presents ‘Of These Our People,’” „ier in the archives of the Na- tional Center for Jewish Film, Brandeis University. With thanks to the Center’s di- rector, Sharon Rivo, for providing me with this material. 53. Ibid., 58. 54. His description of the patrician Edmund Wilson ascending the “proletarian ‘band wagon’ with the arrogance of a myopic, high-bosomed Beacon Hill matron enter- ing a common street-car” is unforgettable. For his part, Wilson was quite measured in his assessment of Gold. 55. Buhle, et al., Encyclopedia of the American Left, 414. 56. Mike Gold, “Foreword” to catalog of Alice Neel exhibition, New Playwright’s The- atre, 1951, in scrapbook 1, Neel Arts, New York City. 57. It is hardly coincidental that the vicissitudes of their careers are parallel. In the 1950s and 1960s, neither artist enjoyed favorable critical reception, but by the 1970s and 1980s, neo-Marxist and/or feminist critics had begun the process of re- evaluation and reassessment. In 1961, in an important early history of American proletarian literature, Writers on the Left, Daniel Aaron concluded that communist writers such as Gold produced little more than “journalistic ephemera.” Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (New York, Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961), 393. Thirty years later, in Left Letters: The Cul- ture Wars of Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman, James Bloom found that the density and complexity of Gold’s prose demonstrated a “subtle sophisticated cultural poli- tics [that] belies the surviving image of him as a primitive sentimentalist, merely a Communist Party mouthpiece.” James D. Bloom, Left Letters: The Culture Wars of Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 21, 23. A contemporary of Bloom, Morris Dickstein, in his 1990 essay “The Tenement and the World: Visions of Immigrant Life,” also countered the received opinion that Gold was a bad stylist: “I came to realize that his abrupt, impacted sentences and paragraphs were long-limbed lines of prose-poetry . . . Gold was the missing link between the plebian Whitman, whom he idolized, and the youthful Allen Ginsberg, who must have read him as a Young Communist in the 1930s or early ’40s.” In William Boelhower, ed., The Future of American Modernism: Ethnic Writ- ing Between the Wars (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1990), 68–69. 58. Frederick Ted Castle, “Interview with Alice Neel,” Artforum (October 1983); re- 194 / Notes

printed in Alice Neel: Paintings Since 1970 (Philadelphia: The Pennsylvania Acad- emy of the Fine Arts, 1985), n.p. 59. In Samuel Sillen, ed., The Mike Gold Reader (New York: International Publishers, 1954), 28. 60. Art Shields, “Pittsburgh: Peace on Trail,” Masses & Mainstream 4/4 (April 1951), 18, 21. 61. In 1959, when the McKie Memorial Library was opened in Dearborn, Neel sent the portrait to the dedication ceremonies. Correspondence with Lou Leny, Secretary, McKie Memorial Library, Dearborn, Michigan, April 3, 1959; undated letter from 1960; Neel correspondence, Neel Arts, New York City. A document of the history of the U.S. labor movement, McKie’s portrait should ideally be placed with his papers. 62. Neel did ask Annette Rubinstein to sit for her, but the writer did not have the time. 63. Not until 1974, when they were mainstream issues, did the CPUSA create the Women for Racial and Economic Equality to address equality of opportunity and pay for women. See , “The Question Seldom Asked: Women and the CPUSA,” in Brown, et al., New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Com- munism, 158. 64. Margrit Reiner, “The Fictional American Woman: A Look at Some Recent Nov- els,” Masses & Mainstream 5/6 (June 1952), 10. 65. Alice Childress, “Florence,” Masses & Mainstream 3/10 (October 1950), 34–47. 66. Childress was to enjoy increasing recognition: she was given the Obie Award for Trouble in Mind in 1956 and voted into the Black Filmmaker’s Hall of Fame in 1977. In the preface to the second edition of Of Woman Born, Adrienne Rich cites the literary achievements of women of color, praising “Florence” for its depiction of a mother who is “ƒercely determined to support her daughter’s aspirations in a world which wants her daughter to be nothing but a domestic worker.” Adrienne Rich, “Ten Years Later: A New Introduction,” Of Woman Born (New York: W. W. Nor- ton, 1986), xxv. 67. In the April 1955 Masses & Mainstream, Charles White’s autobiographical “Path of a Negro Artist” voiced the author’s frustration when in high school in Chicago he asked about Frederick Douglass, or mentioned the painters Bannister and Tanner: “My teachers answered smugly and often angrily. The histories from which we were taught, they would say, were written by competent people, and whatever they did not mention was simply not important enough to mention.” Charles White, “The Path of a Negro Artist,” Masses & Mainstream 8/4 (April 1955), 36. 68. Letter of Oct. 31, 1958, from Mike Gold to Alice Neel, Neel correspondence, Neel Arts, New York City. 69. The four untitled drawings were published in the June 1958 issue. 70. The editors remained the old guard: Charles Humboldt, Aptheker, Bonosky, Gel- lert, Lawson. There were more women on the list—Barbara Giles, Meridel Le Sueur, Annette T. Rubinstein, and Shirley Graham—but who precisely the “snoot young intellectuals” were is impossible to say. 71. Both share a disdain for American materialism that marks Gold’s “120 Million” (1929) as the predecessor of Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1955–1956). Both pummel the ears with a rhythmic barrage of short, declarative phrases and rhetorical questions Notes / 195

designed to jolt the reader out of complacency. Gold: “They told me to love my country, America. / But where is America? . . . America, I cannot worship your Money god / This monster whose heart is a Ford Car / Whose brain is a cheap Holly- wood Movie / Whose cities are mad mechanical nightmares.” Mike Gold, “120 Million,” in 120 Million (New York: International Publishers, 1929), 191. Gins- berg: “Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose ƒngers are ten armies!” Allen Ginsberg, “Howl,” in Col- lected Poems, 1947–1980 (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 131. 72. For a comparison of Gold and Ginsberg see Dickstein, “The Tenement and the World,” 71–72. 73. Hills, Alice Neel, 118–19. 74. Michael Gold, “The Happy Corpse,” in “Spring in the Bronx,” Masses & Main- stream 5/7 (July 1952), 17. 75. From the eulogy by Hank Starr, Daily World, June 21, 1974. 76. He was also a member of the American Society for the Study of the German Demo- cratic Republic, which once owned the portrait. Newsletter for the American Soci- ety for the Study of the German Democratic Republic 1/1 (October 1979). Neel archives, Neel Arts, New York City. 77. Anthony Tommasini, “A Critic’s Creed: Plug Yourself and Your Fellow Ameri- cans,” New York Times, August 21, 1994. 78. Lawrence Alloway, “The Renewal of Realist Criticism,” Art in America 68/7 (September 1981), 110. 79. May Stevens, “The Non-Portrait Work of Alice Neel,” Women’s Studies, an Inter- disciplinary Journal (London, 1978), 64. 80. Moses would die the year after the portrait was completed, but Raphael would out- live Neel by three years. 81. Barbaralee Diamonsteen, Inside New York’s Artworld (New York: Rizzoli, 1979), 374. 82. Milton Brown, “Interview with Raphael Soyer,” 38. 83. Unlike Neel, he avoided the male nude, which he confessed embarrassed him. Dia- monsteen, Inside, 379. 84. Brown, “Interview,” 65. 85. Letter from Gus Hall to Neel, February 5, 1982. Neel correspondence, Neel Arts, New York City. 86. Michael Riley, “Proƒle: Last of the Red-Hot Believers,” Time, September 9, 1991. 87. Benny Andrews and Rudolf Baranik, eds., “Foreword,” The Attica Book (New York: The Black Emergency Cultural Coalition and Artists and Writers Protest Against the War in Vietnam, 1972). 88. Stevens, “The Non-Portrait Work of Alice Neel.” 89. Interviews with Rudolph Baranik and May Stevens, New York City, March 5, 1991 and October 12, 1993. The artists do not claim credit for their support of Neel, but the credit is unquestionably due. 90. Appropriately enough, Neel’s art appeared ƒrst in an anthology of literature: Jerre Mangione, The Federal Writers Project, 1935–1943, The Dream and the Deal (Boston and : Little, Brown, 1972), which was illustrated with her portraits 196 / Notes

of Sam Putnam, Joe Gould, and Kenneth Fearing, and which Neel herself re- viewed for the Daily World. Alice Neel, “WPA Writers Project Seen as Success, De- spite Rightists,” Daily World, November 11, 1972. She was included in important exhibitions such as the extensive “New York City WPA Art” at the in 1977, Patricia Hills’s “Social Concern and Urban Realism” in 1983, and “Women Artists of the New Deal” at the National Musem of Women in the Arts in 1988. She was also included in exhibitions of the politics of the 1930s to the 1950s: Irving Howe’s “Images of Labor” (1981); Philip S. Foner and Reinhard Schultz’s “The Other America: Art and the Labour Movement in the United States” (1985, Germany); and Rob A. Okun’s “Unknown Secrets: Art and the Rosen- berg Era” (1988). The Foner-Schultz exhibit included Nazis Murder Jews, Uneeda Biscuit Strike, and Pat Whalen. 91. Typescript (undated) by Anton Refregier of Foreword to catalog of “American Artists Gift Exhibition.” ACA gallery papers, Archives of American Art, D304, 1093. Among the artists in the exhibition were Anton Refregier, Philip Evergood, Fred Ellis, William Gropper, Frank Kleinholz, Joseph Hirsch, Alex Dobkin, Sarai Sher- man, Abram Tromka, Antoney Toney, Mervyn Jules, Charles Keller, Rockwell Kent, Raphael Soyer, Abraham Harriton, , Philip Reisman, Morris Kriensky, Gerrit Hondius, Gladys Rockmore Davis, Nicoli Cikovsky, Neel, Harry Gottlieb, David Burliuk, and Paul Sample. Neel’s statement for the brochure em- phasized her Spanish Harlem work: “I live . . . in a neighborhood where there are many Puerto Ricans and I have painted many pictures of them. I have painted the old and the young, the young writers and poets, and the working people” (3). 92. From the Moscow Writer’s Union in 1959 he wrote: “You asked me to tell you the real truth about the U.S.S.R.—as far as I am concerned, I am quite at home here.” Neel correspondence, Neel Arts, New York City. 93. For example, Eva Cockcroft, 1974; David and Cecile Schapiro, 1977; Serge Guil- baut, 1980; the authors are not speciƒcally cited, however. [Philip Bonosky, Intro- duction], “Alice Neel,” exhibition catalog, Soviet Artists Union, July 9–31, 1981; trans. Thompson Bradley (Russian to English), typescript, Neel Arts, New York City. 94. In her interview with Susan Ortega, Neel echoed Bonosky: “The Soviet Union wants peace and friendship and Brezhnev has offered any number of times to talk to this country . . . This country is now warlike and a threat to the world. Reagan said the government doesn’t owe anybody anything. In the Soviet Union you get free medical care—everything is free. There the government owes you everything.” Su- san Ortega, “Art for Detente,” [1981], Daily World. Neel scrapbook 4, Neel Arts, New York City. 95. An editorial, “United, Multinational,” published in Pravda on May 19, anticipated the tedious speechmaking that would take place six weeks later at the Seventh Re- public Writers Congress at the Writers Union, which coincidentally opened on June 30, one week before Neel’s exhibit opened at the Artists Union. As articulated by Georgiy Mokeyevich Markov, ƒrst secretary of the USSR Writers Union: “The sphere of artistic creativity is an arena of keenest ideological struggle . . . True patri- ots of their socialist homeland, our literary and artistic ƒgures . . . are heralds of peace and progess and ƒghters against all forms of reaction and fascism. Socialist re- Notes / 197

alist art, permeated by humanism and historical optimism, counters the bourgeois west’s ‘mass culture,’ which tramples human dignity and sows disbelief in man’s strength and future.” Translated in Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FIBIS), “Pravda Editorial on the Role of Artistic Criticism,” Daily Report: Soviet Union, June 9, 1981. 96. One short review appeared in the art journal Iskusstvo, (Art) as part of an overview of all the summer 1981 offerings. It summarized her subject matter and praised her realist style. “In Moscow,” the reviewer concluded, “she and friends met true ap- preciators of realist art” (no. 9, 1981, p. 76). I thank Pam Kachurin for locating this review, which I had overlooked, and for providing the translation. Although the re- action of the art critics was minimal, Neel was interviewed on television, and so, ironically, her persona instead of her work reached a wide audience. Nancy Neel, who along with her husband and children accompanied Neel to the U.S.S.R., re- ports that the crowds at the exhibit were consistently large, and that a TV interview had a wide audience as well. There were no reviews in Dekorativenoe iskusstvo or Khudozhnik Itvo. Pravda [July 10, 1981?] provided a brief notice. 97. Margarita Tupitsyn, “U-Turn of the U-topian,” in David Ross, et al., Between Spring and Summer: Soviet Conceptual Art in the Era of Late Communism (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1990), 36. 98. Lucy Lippard, “Introduction: Art and Ideology,” New Museum of Contemporary Art, quoted in Hilton Kramer, “Turning Back the Clock,” in The Revenge of the Philistine: Art and Culture, 1972–84 (New York: The Free Press, 1985), 386.

Chapter 6. El Barrio (pp. 90–108)

1. Louisa Randall Church, “Parents—The Architects of Peace,” American Home (No- vember 1946), quoted in Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 135. 2. Ibid., 208. 3. Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1962), 10, 12. 4. Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man (1952) (New York: Vintage International, 1990), 3, 14. 5. See Joseph P. Fitzpatrick, Puerto Rican Americans: The Meaning of Migration to the Mainland (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1971), and Dan Wakeƒeld, Island in the City: The World of Spanish Harlem (Boston: Houghton Mif„in, 1959). 6. “Not accepted as white, reluctant to be classed as Negroes, they were clinging to ev- erything that gave them identity as Puerto Ricans . . . The colored Puerto Rican is identiƒed primarily as Puerto Rican, not as a Negro.” Fitzpatrick, Puerto Rican Americans, 108–109. 7. Guillen provided the following example: “Much of what we know about a great Negro woman [‘La Bayamesa’] who was in charge of well-functioning ƒeld hospi- tals during our War of Independence, we owe to a Yankee journalist.” Nicholas Guillen, “Havana to New York,” Masses & Mainstream 2/6 (June 1949), 61–62. 198 / Notes

8. Meyer Schapiro, “Race, Nationality and Art,” Art Front 2/4 (March 1936), 10–11. 9. Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltƒsh, “The Races of Mankind” (1943), reprinted in Ruth Benedict, Race, Science and Politics (New York: Viking Press, 1947), 171. 10. Ibid., 188. Because it praised the Russian nation for outlawing prejudice by “wel- coming differences while refusing to treat them as inferiorities,” the House Military Affairs subcommittee charged in early 1944 that the text was ƒlled with “all the techniques . . . of Communistic propaganda” (167). 11. Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 99. 12. Gerald Meyer, “Puerto Ricans,” in Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georga- kas, Encyclopedia of the American Left (New York: Garland, 1990), 614. 13. Ibid. 14. Patricia Cayo Sexton, Spanish Harlem: An Anatomy of Poverty (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 106. 15. Oscar Lewis, La Vida (New York: Random House, 1965), xliv. 16. Ibid., xlvi. 17. Sexton, Spanish Harlem, 176. 18. Meyer, “Puerto Ricans,” 614. 19. Jesus Colón, “José,” in A Puerto Rican in New York (New York: Mainstream Pub- lishers, 1961), 89. 20. Lewis, La Vida, xlvi, lii. 21. Langston Hughes’s play The Mulatto (1935) is a prominent example. 22. Cyril Burt, The Backward Child (1937), quoted in Stephen Jay Gould, The Mis- measure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 281. 23. Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of White- ness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 54. 24. After 1974, when Arce was in jail for the murder of his business partner, he main- tained a regular correspondence with Neel, calling her his second mother and reg- ularly sending Hallmark cards for birthdays, Christmas, and Mother’s Day. Neel kept all of his letters on her mantel. The sentimental tone of his notes—“My love and regards to the whole family and as always may God keep you in his care and Bless you with Happiness always!”—is in jarring opposition to the action that led to his incarceration. Arce taught himself law, in order to try to assist in his own de- fense, but he was still imprisoned at the time of Neel’s death. Neel’s comments on one of his notes requesting that she send him law books indicates that she felt “reasonable doubt” about his guilt: “when he realized that American Airlines paid $20,000 to a lawyer to defend an overweight stewardess case, Georgie’s appeal lawyer appeared even more inadequate when one realized it was a jail sentence of from thirty years to life, Bellvue and Islip.” Letter from Georgie Arce to Alice Neel, Dec. 30, 1974, Neel correspondence, Neel Arts, New York City. 25. Piri Thomas, Down These Mean Streets (New York: Signet Books, 1967), 145. 26. Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 303. 27. Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: Morrow, 1961), 221. 28. Ibid., 213. Notes / 199

29. Morris Dickstein, Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties (New York: Pen- guin Books, 1977, 1989), 156. 30. Idem. 31. Patricia Hills, Alice Neel (New York: Abrams, 1983, 1995), 116. 32. Andrew Hemingway, “The Critical Mythology of Edward Hopper,” Prospects 17 (1992), 384–85. 33. Guy Pène du Bois, Edward Hopper (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, American Artists Series, 1931), 12. 34. Hemingway, “The Critical Mythology,” 396. 35. Ibid., 399. 36. Schapiro, “Race, Nationality and Art,” 10, 12. 37. Michael Gold (Irwin Granich), “Towards Proletarian Art,” Liberator 4 (February 1921), 20–21. 38. Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream (Berkeley: University of Cali- fornia Press, 1985), 238. 39. Raymond Ledrut, “Speech and the Silence of the City,” in The City and the Sign: An Introduction to Urban Semiotics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 133. 40. Quoted in Bloom, Left Letters, 79. 41. Jane Jacobs, Death and Life of the Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), 37. 42. “The New York I Love: Seventeen New Yorkers Tell Us What Makes Them Most Love This Big, Bad, Beautiful Town,” New York Magazine, October 20, 1980. 43. Raymond Williams, “Metropolitan Perspectives and the Emergence of Modern- ism,” The Politics of Modernism (London: Verso, 1989), 35.

Chapter 7. A Gallery of Players (pp. 111–26)

1. For a discussion of the Club, see Irving Sandler, The New York School: Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 31–32. 2. Alice Neel, “A Statement,” in Alfred Leslie and Robert Frank, eds., “The Hasty Papers: A One-Shot Review” (New York: 1960), quoted in Patricia Hills, Alice Neel (New York: Abrams, 1983, 1995), 105 3. Diana Crane, The Transformation of the Avant-Garde: The New York Art World, 1940–1985 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 2–3. 4. Lawrence Alloway, “Women’s Art in the Seventies,” in Network: Art and the Com- plex Present (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984), 273, 285. 5. Alloway, “Network: The Artworld Described as a System,” in ibid., 3–4. 6. Emily Genauer, “Art & the Artist,” New York Post, March 2, 1994. 7. David Lehman, “A Poet in the Heart of Noise” (review of Brad Gooch, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara), New York Times, June 20, 1993. 8. Valerie Peterson, “U.S. Figure Painting: Continuity and Cliché,” ARTnews 6/4 (summer 1962), 51. Certainly it made as much sense to group together Larry Rivers, Philip Pearlstein, Fairƒeld Porter, Robert Beauchamp, and Neel as it did to group Jackson Pollock with Mark Rothko. 200 / Notes

9. Hubert Crehan, “Introducing the Portraits of Alice Neel,” ARTnews 61/6 (October 1962), 45. 10. K.L. “Alice Neel at the Graham Gallery (October 1–26),” ARTnews 62/6 (October 1963), 11. 11. He stated bluntly that “this series fails to give any idea of the importance of the agony of Sacco and Vanzetti.” Walter Gutman, “The Passion of Sacco-Vanzetti,” The Nation, April 29, 1932, quoted in David Shapiro, Social Realism: Art As a Weapon (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1973), 289. 12. John Gruen, “Art: ‘Collector of Souls,’” Herald Tribune, January 9, 1966; Jack Kroll’s “A Curator of Souls” was published several weeks later in the January 31 issue of Newsweek. 13. John Gruen, The Party’s Over Now (New York: Viking Press, 1972), 62. 14. In discussing his well-known parody of Emmanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware, Rivers claimed to have painted it as a deliberately provocative ges- ture: “I did it the year Joe McCarthy was at his height. I even have some letters somewhere saying that Joe McCarthy would take me as a patriot. I mean, the absur- dity of history is that I might be seen as a kind of loyal, patriotic person although I took drugs and engaged in homosexual activities. In other words, what I was saying is that America as you know it wasn’t true.” Sam Hunter, Larry Rivers (New York: Rizzoli, 1989), 18. 15. Jonathan Weinberg, Speaking for Vice: Homosexuality in the Art of Charles De- muth, Marsden Hartley and the First American Avant-Garde (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 205–206. See also my Ph.D. dissertation, “The Watercolor Illustrations of Charles Demuth,” Johns Hopkins University, 1970. 16. Ann Sutherland Harris, Alice Neel Paintings, 1933–1982 (Los Angeles: Loyola Marymount University, 1983), 14. 17. Nancy Neel has recounted that, when Kuyer died in 1981, the family decided not to keep the portrait. 18. John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 41, 42. 19. Ibid., 59. This is true as well of revisionist histories, which continue their inexplica- ble silence. See for instance, Michael E. Brown, et al., eds., New Studies in the Pol- itics and Culture of American Communism, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993). 20. Such attitudes were slow to change. In 1964, shortly after the election of Lyndon Johnson, Walter Jenkins, the president’s chief of staff, was arrested for making “in- decent gestures” with another man in the men’s room of a YMCA two blocks from the White House. Jenkins was dismissed from his government post, but an exten- sive FBI investigation nonetheless ensued in order to assure that his actions had in no way compromised the security of the United States. For a brilliant account of the scandal, see Lee Edelman, “Tearooms and Sympathy: The Epistemology of the Water Closet,” in Henry Abelove, Midnele Aina Barale, David M. Halperin, eds., The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 553–75. With the spirit of McCarthyism still at large in the U.S. government, Neel’s Notes / 201

portrait of the boyish , a former advisor to President Kennedy who often escorted Jackie to ofƒcial events in the mid-1960s, is likely to have been painted as a political comment. To Neel, Walton’s rolled up sleeves and large watchband were coded signals. 21. Judy Grahn, Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), 14. 22. Emile De Antonio and Mitch Tuchman, Painters Painting: A Candid History of the Modern Art Scene, 1940–75 (New York: Abbeville, 1984), 21. 23. Quoted in Thomas Hoving, Making the Mummies Dance (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 207. 24. David C. Berliner, “Women Artists Today: How Are They Doing Vis-à-Vis The Men?” Cosmopolitan (October 1973), 219. 25. Geldzahler was curator at the Dia Center for the Arts gallery in Bridgehampton, L.I., when he conducted the last interview with Neel. In 1991, several years before his own death, he curated an exhibition of Neel’s Spanish Harlem work at Bridge- hampton. “Alice Neel,” Dia Center for the Arts, Bridgehampton, New York, June 29–July 28, 1991. The text contains Geldzahler’s 1984 interview. A more compre- hensive exhibit was held at the Robert Miller gallery in 1994. “Alice Neel: The Years in Spanish Harlem, 1938–1961,” February 14–March 19, 1994. 26. Gail Gelburd, Introduction to “Androgyny in Art” (Hempstead, N.Y.: Emily Lowe Gallery, Hofstra University, 1982), n.p. 27. Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1966), 279. 28. Ibid., 289. 29. Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers (New York: Grove Press, 1943, 1963), 295–96. 30. Two important essays on Warhol’s construction of a gay identity are Kenneth E. Sil- ver, “Modes of Disclosure: The Construction of Gay Identity and the Rise of Pop Art,” in Russell Ferguson, ed., Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition 1955– 62 (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1992), 179–204; and Trevor Fair- brother, “Tomorrow’s Man,” in Success Is a Job in New York: The Early Art and Business of Andy Warhol (New York: The Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, New York University, 1989), 56–76. 31. Deborah Kass, whose use of the silkscreen technique is directly indebted to Warhol, told Holland Cotter in 1994 that “I ƒnd Andy so fascinating because he was the ƒrst queer artist—I mean queer in the political sense we mean queer. While some of his homosexual contemporaries were into coding and veiling and obscuring, Andy re- ally made pictures about what it was like being a queer guy in the ’50s.” Holland Cotter, “Art After Stonewall: 12 Artists Interviewed,” Art in America 82/6 (June 1994), 57. 32. Fairbrother, “Tomorrow’s Man,” in Success, 56. I am grateful to Trevor Fairbrother for reading and offering suggestions on this chapter. 33. Ibid., 72. 34. Calvin Tomkins, “Raggedy Andy,” in John Coplans, et al., Andy Warhol (Green- wich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1970), 14. 35. Robert Rosenblum states that Warhol “was a daily visitor to the church of St. Vin- 202 / Notes

cent Ferrer at Sixty-sixth Street and Lexington Avenue”; in Kynaston McShine, ed., Andy Warhol: A Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989), 36. 36. Diana Loercher, “Alice Neel,” The Christian Science Monitor, March 4, 1978. 37. For his part, Andy was sufƒciently ecumenical to permit Neel to interpret him as a modernist martyr, offering his standard empty cliché in perfunctory praise of Neel’s portrait: “I thought it was wonderful.” Interview with Andy Warhol, 6 November 1978,” in Patrick S. Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films (Ann Arbor: UMI Re- search Press, 1986), 513. The art historian Ellen Johnson, a contemporary of Neel’s, shared her modernist point of view: “I always felt . . . that beneath all the glit- ter and ironic sophistication was a fundamentally innocent person . . . Alice Neel captured that paradoxical truth . . . in her portrait of him: he exposes his wounded body, but keeps his eyes closed. His life is public, but he remains hidden.” Athena Tacha, ed., Fragments Recalled at Eighty: The Art Memoirs of Ellen H. Johnson (North Vancouver, B.C.: Gallerie, 1993), 75. 38. Quoted everywhere, e.g. McShine, ed., Andy Warhol, 13. 39. Hills, Alice Neel, 138. 40. Peter Schjeldahl has argued the case differently: “Whatever attitude one takes to- ward the commodity-based logic of current capitalism, it ought to be possible to view such an extreme and subtle extension of it as Warhol’s in a positive light, as art that says something about a culture and an era . . . Art with conscious, fully inte- grated social content is arguably a category transcending political lines . . . And by such a standard Warhol must be judged to rank as high as the best Socialist Real- ism, for instance.” Peter Schjeldahl, “Warhol and Class Content,” Art in America 68/5 (May 1980), 118. 41. Audiotape of lecture by Alice Neel, “Learning from Performers” series, The Car- penter Center, Harvard University, March 21, 1979. Neel ƒles, Archives of Ameri- can Art, Washington, D.C. 42. Michael Bronski, Culture Clash: The Making of a Gay Sensibility (Boston: South End Press, 1984), 99. 43. Ellen H. Johnson, “Alice Neel’s Fifty Years of Portrait Painting,” Studio Interna- tional 193 (March 1977), 175. 44. According to Judy Grahn, this typiƒes cross-dressing. “[O]ur point was not to be men; our point was to be butch and to get away with it. We always kept something back: a high-pitched voice, a slant of the head, or a limpness of hand gestures, something that was clearly labeled female. I believe our statement was ‘Here is an- other way of being a woman,’ not ‘here is a woman trying to be taken for a man.’ The fairies also held something back that prevented them from passing over into the female gender . . .” Judy Grahn, Another Mother Tongue, 31. 45. Both men enjoyed prominence in the artworld at the time, Bourdon for his writings on Calder and Christo (and, in 1987, on Warhol), and Battcock for his important critical anthologies. 46. Battcock was stabbed to death by thugs. Neel saved the newspaper accounts of the Christmas eve murder in Puerto Rico. Neel correspondence, Neel Arts, New York City. 47. After Battcock’s death, Bourdon dismissed the painting as little more than “art Notes / 203

world gossip.” David Bourdon, “Women Paint Portraits on Canvas and Off,” Vil- lage Voice, February 20, 1976. 48. Taped interview with Karl Fortess, Boston University, 1980. Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C. 49. John Perreault, “I’m Asking—Does It Exist? What Is It? Whom Is It For?” Artforum 19/3 (November 1980), 74–75. 50. John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, 237.

Chapter 8. The Women’s Wing (pp. 127–43)

1. Thomas Hess, “Art: Sitting Prettier,” New York, February 23, 1976, 62. 2. Lawrence Alloway, “Art,” The Nation, March 9, 1974, 318. 3. Marsha Miro, “A Lifetime of Raw, Biting Art,” Detroit Free Press March 12, 1981. 4. Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” ARTnews (Jan- uary 1971), 22–39, 69–71; reprinted in Women, Art and Power and Other Essays (New York: Icon Editions, 1988), 145–77. 5. Ann Sutherland Harris, “Alice Neel: 1930–1980,” Alice Neel Paintings, 1933–1982 (Los Angeles: Loyola Marymount University, 1983), 54. 6. Within feminist art history, a dispute developed between historians who applied tra- ditional art historical models to the study of women and those who developed new methodologies based on poststructuralist criticism. 7. Transcript of editorial description of Time cover, August 31, 1970, Neel ƒles, Regis- trar’s ofƒce, National Portrait Gallery. 8. As Neel told Nemser, “When I met her at the Art Students League I said to her, ‘Why didn’t you pose for me? After all you believe in Women’s Liberation. I’m a woman.’ She said, ‘Because the Daughters of Bilitis of which I am a member do not believe in having a leader.’” Cindy Nemser, Art Talk: Conversations with Twelve Women Artists (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975), 134. 9. Neel received a second honorary doctorate from the Kansas City Art Institute on May 9, 1981. 10. The text of the doctoral address was ƒrst reproduced in the Feminist Art Journal (April 1972), 12–13. It is also included in the Georgia Museum of Art catalog (1975) and excerpted in Patricia Hills, Alice Neel (New York: Abrams, 1983, 1995), 131–36. 11. Quoted in Sandra Dijkstra, “Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan: The Politics of Omission,” Feminist Studies 6 (summer 1980), 299–301. 12. Barbaralee Diamonsteen, Inside New York’s Artworld (New York: Rizzoli, 1979), 258. 13. Alice Neel, statement, Daily World, April 17, 1971. At the time of the United Na- tions World Conference of Women in 1975, the parochialism of feminists’ posi- tions became obvious. According to Lawrence Alloway, the disparity between the lives of Third World women and those of the middle-class–based women’s “lib- bers” was absolute. “Those women for whom homemaking was no longer a full- time occupation . . . and who thus have time to produce art, appeared suddenly, in a jolting perspective, as the concubines of imperialism.” Alloway, “Women’s Art in 204 / Notes

the Seventies,” Network Art and the Complex Present (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984), 278. 14. Peslikis would leave the editorial board by the end of 1972. 15. Cindy Nemser, “The Whitney Petition,” Feminist Art Journal, 1/1 (April 1972), 13. 16. For a full account of the activities of feminist arts organizations in the 1970s, see Mary D. Garrard, “Feminist Politics: Networks and Organizations,” in Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, The Power of Feminist Art (New York: Abrams, 1994), 88–101. Redstocking Artists and the Ad Hoc committees are discussed on pp. 90–91. 17. The museum’s selection was The Family, one of the few paintings not to be repro- duced in the catalog for the exhibition. 18. “Open Hearing at the Brooklyn Museum,” Feminist Art Journal 1/1 (April 1972), 6. Neel’s remarks have not been recorded. 19. Alloway, “Art,” 318. The New Republic critic Kenneth Everett was effusive, calling Neel “one of the few original and signiƒcant painters of the past 30 years.” “Ken- neth Everett on Art,” New Republic, May 4, 1974, 27–28. 20. Hilton Kramer, “Art: Alice Neel Retrospective,” New York Times, February 9, 1974. 21. Hilton Kramer, “Art View: Why Figurative Art Confounds Our Museums,” New York Times, January 2, 1977. 22. Kramer continued his diatribes in his review of the ARTnews 75th anniversary is- sue: “My favorite entry in the foolish sweepstakes is that given by Ann Sutherland Harris, who solemnly pronounces Alice Neel, who is said to be underrated, as the ‘ƒnest portraitist that America has produced since 1900.’ More party chatter of course . . .” Hilton Kramer, “Art View: Reporting the Fashions—and the Ideas—for 75 Years,” New York Times, December 4, 1977. In his catalog statement for her 1951 exhibition at the ACA gallery, “Paintings by Alice Neel” (December 16, 1950–January 31, 1951), Joseph Solman had praised her “great intensity.” On Neel’s copy he added the sentence, “I can say, that without any doubt, Alice Neel is the best portrait painter in America today,” thus presaging Harris’s opinion by a quarter of a century. 23. Robert Hughes, “Art: Myths of Sensibility,” Time, March 20, 1972, 77. 24. Ibid., 72. 25. Garrard, “Feminist Politics,” 92. 26. David C. Berliner, “Women Artists Today: How Are They Doing vis-à-vis the Men?” Cosmopolitan 175/4 (October 1973), 216. 27. Neel’s two sons and daughter-in-law Ginny were also very supportive of Neel’s career. 28. Interview with May Stevens, New York City, March 1991. 29. Patricia Hills, “Remarks” at Alice Neel Memorial Service, February 7, 1985, 1–2. Typescript in Neel ƒles, Whitney Museum of American Art. 30. Cindy Nemser, “The Women’s Conference at the Corcoran,” Art in America 61/2 (Jan.-Feb., 1973), 90. 31. Unavoidable disagreements did undermine the movement’s unity over the course of the decade. For example, in 1980, Neel participated in a second conference in Washington, D.C., the Women’s Caucus for Art and the Coalition of Women’s Arts Organizations. The event was organized by a splinter group of the WCA, Notes / 205

which had refused to participate in the annual College Art Association in New Or- leans, La., a state that had not ratiƒed the ERA. The majority of WCA members chose to attend the CAA, where they held a major protest march. Garrard, “Femi- nist Politics,” 99. 32. Cindy Nemser, “Alice Neel—Teller of Truth,” in Alice Neel: The Woman and Her Work (Athens, Ga.: The Georgia Museum of Art, 1975), n.p. 33. Quoted in Garrard, “Feminist Politics,” 93. 34. Nemser, Art Talk, 121. 35. Douglas Davis, “Women, Women, Women,” Newsweek, January 29, 1973, 77. 36. Among Blum’s exhibitions are: “Unmanly Art,” in the fall of 1972, and “Three Realist Painters (Neel, Flack and Blum),” in Valencia in February 1978. 37. The three artists had been included in Cindy Nemser’s exhibition “In Her Own Image” at the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial in Philadelphia that spring. 38. Judith Vivell, “Talking About Pictures,” Feminist Art Journal 3/2 (summer 1974), 14. 39. Published in Heresies in 1978; reprinted in Arlene Raven, Cassandra C. Langer, and Joanna Frueh, eds., Feminist Art Criticism (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988), 71–86. 40. In his essay on the women’s art network, Lawrence Alloway provided an apt analogy between the great goddess trend and the 1940s mythmakers: “The mythologies of Gottlieb and Mark Rothko were a patchwork of ideas from Frazer, Freud, Jung, and Nietzsche. Portentousness lurked behind the poetic symbols of these artists because their access to myth rested on the idea of the artist as seer, gifted beyond other peo- ple. What has feminism to gain from the revival of these affected attitudes? . . . To compare the improvised myths of the seventies with the male equivalents of the for- ties shows that the mother-goddess is as intellectually disreputable as the hero- king.” Alloway, “Women’s Art in the Seventies,” 283. 41. “Newsmakers,” Newsweek, February 12, 1979. 42. Her concern was justiƒed, for Abzug, who had been elected to Congress in 1970, would become a victim of the backlash of the 1980s. When she ƒrst got to Washing- ton, Abzug requested a seat on the House Armed Services Committee, offering as her rationale: “Do you realize there are 42,000 women in the military? do you real- ize that about half the civilian employees of the Defense Department are women, 290,000 of them at last count? And, as if that isn’t enough, there are one and a half million wives of military personnel.” June Sochen, : A Woman’s View of American History, vol. 2 (New York: Alfred Publishing Co., 1974), 404. 43. Laurie Johnson, “The ‘Sister Chapel’: A Feminist View of Creation,” New York Times, January 30, 1978. The exhibition was held from Jan. 15 to Feb. 19, 1978, at P.S. 1, Long Island City. 44. In 1968, on the occasion of their wedding, Nochlin and her husband, the late archi- tectural historian Richard Pommer, commissioned Philip Pearlstein to paint their portrait. The constrast between Pearlstein’s image and Neel’s provides a sort of proof of one postulate of Nochlin’s writings: that realism in art is never simple verism. Neel’s Linda Nochlin and Daisy and Pearlstein’s Portrait of Linda Nochlin and Richard Pommer occupy opposite ends of the spectrum of realist portraiture in this 206 / Notes

period, a spectrum that ranged from formalism to expressionism. See Linda Noch- lin, “Portrait of Linda Nochlin and Richard Pommer,” Artforum 32/1 (September 1993), 142, 204. 45. Linda Nochlin, “The Realist Criminal and the Abstract Law, Part II,” Art in Amer- ica 61/6 (November-December 1973), 98. The quote is from J. P. Stern, “Re„ec- tions on Realism,” Journal of European Studies 7 (March 1971). 46. Nochlin, “The Realist Criminal and the Abstract Law, Part II,” 102–103. 47. Nochlin, “Introduction,” Women, Art and Power, xiv. 48. Linda Nochlin, “Some Women Realists,” Arts (April-May 1974), reprinted in Women, Art and Power, 98–99. 49. It was precisely this historical perspective that Nemser’s writings on Neel, by con- centrating on her biography and her sitters’ biographies, had ignored. The potential of biography for commercial exploitation by the artworld celebrity system was soon recognized by other feminist art historians. Carol Duncan’s review of Nemser’s Art Talk, which she titled, borrowing a phrase from Neel, “When Success Is a Box of Wheaties,” pointed out that Nemser’s interviews framed the work of women artists according to traditional male criteria of greatness—originality, for instance—rather than taking into account the artists’ own, quite different criteria as developed in their work. The result, in her opinion, was not criticism but publicity. “Artists as professionals must compete, but they must not appear to compete. They need pub- licity, but must seek it in a form that is not publicity . . . Publicity alone—or, as in Art Talk—barely disguised publicity—distorts their seriousness and renders them exploited objects.” Carol Duncan, “When Success Is a Box of Wheaties,” Artforum (October 1975), reprinted in Carol Duncan, The Aesthetics of Power (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 121ff. 50. The ceremony, accompanied by a small exhibit of her work, was held on May 19. 51. Joanna Frueh, “The Body Through Women’s Eyes,” in Broude and Garrard, The Power of Feminist Art, 207. 52. June Singer, Androgyny: Toward a New Theory of Sexuality (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977), 278. 53. An incisive summary of this debate is provided in Kari Weil, Androgyny and the De- nial of Difference (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1992), ch. 6: “Androgyny, Feminism, and the Critical Difference.” 54. Ibid., 152. As the concept of androgyny began to be detached by feminist writers from its origins in the Platonic ideal of unity, it continued nevertheless to represent a way beyond binary male-female oppositions. Summarizing Toril Moi, Kari Weil has argued that in Woolf’s Orlando (1928), the story of a man who, over the course of three centuries of life, becomes a woman: “sexual identity loses its claim as a given, appearing, rather, as an effect of the cultural codes of desire and of changing relations to ‘others’ . . .” Ibid., 157. 55. Johnson, in her autobiography, Fragments Recalled At Eighty: The Art Memoirs of Ellen H. Johnson (North Vancouver, B.C.: Gallerie, 1993), 145–50, wrote a witty account of sitting for Neel. 56. Fat became a feminist issue in the 1980s. see Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa (1988); Kim Chernin, The Hungry Self: Women, Notes / 207

Eating and Identity (1985); Susie Orbach, Hunger Strike: The Anorectic’s Struggle as a Metaphor for Our Age (1986); Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (1986). 57. At a panel sponsored by the New Museum of Contemporary Art in 1982, “Ex- tended Sensibilities: The Impact of Homosexual Sensibilities on Contemporary Culture,” Kate Millet suggested rephrasing the question to ask, “‘What is the im- pact of lesbian sensibility on Contemporary Culture?’ I would respond right off hand without even shifting gears, that it’s zilch.” Harmony Hammond, “A Space of Inƒnite and Pleasurable Possiblities: Lesbian Self-Representation in Visual Art,” in Joanna Frueh, Cassandra L. Langer and Arlene Raven, eds., New Feminist Criti- cism (New York: Icon Editions, Harper/Collins, 1994), 99. 58. See Hammond, ibid., for a thorough discussion and chronology of the lesbian art movement, 1970–1990. 59. Roberta Smith, “Sari Dienes, 93, Artist Devoted to the Power of the Found Ob- ject,” obituary, New York Times, May 28, 1992. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Archives, Smithsonian Institution. 60. Simone de Beauvoir, The Coming of Age (New York: Warner Paperback Library, 1973), 733. 61. Hills, Alice Neel, 184. 62. Neel used this phrase to describe her portrait of Walter Gutman in her interview with Judith Vivell in Feminist Art Journal in 1974.

Chapter 9. Truth Unveiled (pp. 147–61)

1. Marcia Pointon observes that “The nude is everywhere, yet has no place; it is ‘difƒcult to handle,’ yet wholly familiar; it is the least known and the most familiar of art forms. Above all it is understood to be Art.” Marcia Pointon, Naked Authority: The Body in Western Painting, 1830–1908 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 12. 2. Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1992), 6. 3. Idem. 4. Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (New York: Cam- bridge University Press, 1993), 261. 5. In her study of the social signiƒcance of fashion, Dress Codes, Ruth P. Rubinstein notes that the new ideal also suited the demands of photographic reproduction. “The boyish look was considered beautiful, for it accommodated the demands of the camera for long legs and a hipless body . . . Fashion photographers such as Baron Adolph de Meyer, Cecil Beaton, and Edward Steichen helped to style this new ideal of feminine fashion in accordance with the tastes and values of Vogue ed- itors.” Ruth P. Rubinstein, Dress Codes: Meanings and Messages in American Cul- ture (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), 105. 6. Ibid., 182. 7. Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature (New York: Columbia Uni- versity Press, 1981), 24. 208 / Notes

8. Nadya became a very prominent graphologist. Her book The Psychology of Hand- writing: Secrets of Handwriting Analysis (North Hollywood: Wilshire Book Com- pany, 1960) included a glowing introduction by Harmon S. Ephron, M.D., who praised her “profound sense of devotion to graphology as a clinical tool” that has “stimulated psychiatrists and psychologists to study and use graphology as an impor- tant clinical indicator of trends in their patient’s progress” (8). The book contained her analysis of the handwriting of Albert Einstein, Mary Baker Eddy, Ted Williams, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and others. 9. Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969; 1990), 179. 10. Ibid., 188. 11. Ibid., 189. 12. Raphael Soyer, Self-Revealment: A Memoir (New York: Random House, n.d.), 103. Pascin’s work was shown at the Daniel, Weyhe, and Downtown galleries. 13. The art historian Emmanuel Cooper has argued that the motif of lesbian prostitute couples in modernist art has been a means of relieving homoerotic impulses by transferring them onto women: “The scenes these artists painted are titillatory and also serve a function in relieving the tensions of repressed sexuality within the male viewer. By transferring the homosexual content onto members of the opposite sex, it makes the subject safe and non-threatening.” Emmanuel Cooper, Homosexuality and Art in the Last 100 Years in the West (London and New York: Routledge, 1986; 1994), xx. 14. According to the Neel family, Nadya always insisted that she and Nona were not lesbian lovers. 15. The parallels between Eakins’s and Neel’s male nudes warrants further discussion. 16. Jerry Tallmer, “On the Town,” New York Post, November 15, 1980. 17. Quoted in Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory and Psycho- analysis (New York: Routledge, 1991), 66. 18. Idem. Neel’s portrait of Annie Sprinkle can be seen as a modern Baubo. 19. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover; À Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Cam- bridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 221. 20. Idem. 21. Lawrence, “À Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” 310–11. 22. Quoted in James T. Patterson, America in the Twentieth Century (San Diego: Har- court, Brace, Jovanovich, 1989), 150. 23. In Sexual Politics (1969) Millet summarizes the book as follows: “Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a quasi-religious tract recounting the salvation of one modern woman . . . through the ofƒces of the author’s personal cult, ‘the mystery of the phallus’” (238). 24. For a summary of the feminist debate over this text and pornographic images in general, see Susan Gubar, “Representing Pornography: Feminism, Criticism, and Depictions of Female Violation,” in Susan Gubar and Joan Hoff, eds., For Adult Users Only: The Dilemma of Violent Pornography (Bloomington: Indiana Univer- sity Press, 1989), 47–67. Susan Suleiman supplies a strong counterargument in “Transgression and the Avant-Garde,” Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics and the Avant-Garde (Harvard University Press, 1987). Notes / 209

25. Georges Bataille, The Story of the Eye (1928) (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1987). 26. Quoted in Gubar and Hoff, For Adult Users Only, 57. 27. Quoted in Susan Stanford Friedman, “Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor,” in : An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism (New Brunswick: Rut- gers University Press, 1991), 386. 28. For a fuller discussion of the pregnant nudes, see my “Mater of Fact: Alice Neel’s Pregnant Nudes,” American Art (spring 1994), 7–31. 29. Quoted in Carolyn Keith, “Alice Neel: Portraits of Souls,” “Cityside” Milwaukee Journal, October 23, 1978. Clipping in Neel ƒles (unmicroƒlmed), Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C. Neel was in Milwaukee to address the annual conference of Wisconsin Women in the Arts. 30. G. D. Searle marketed Enovid in 1960. By 1963, the birth control pill was available at clinics in all states except Massachusetts and Connecticut. In 1965, the year after Pregnant Maria was painted, the Supreme Court overturned the 1873 Comstock Law, which prohibited interstate transportation of contraceptives. Patricia Gossel, “A Hard Pill to Swallow: American Response to Oral Contraceptives,” paper pre- sented at the National Museum of American History, October 19, 1993. Gossel notes that this legislative activity took place “independently of the women’s move- ment” (14). 31. Mary Jane Sherfey, The Nature and Evolution of Female Sexuality (New York: Vin- tage, 1976), quoted in Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976; 1986), 183. 32. “Rape Has Many Forms,” (review of Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape), in The Spokeswoman 6/15 (November 15, 1975), quoted in Rich, Of Women Born, 14. 33. Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” in The Female Body in Western Culture, ed. Susan Suleiman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 99. 34. Dr. Stuart Asch, quoted in Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women (Garden City: Anchor/Double- day, 1978), 278. 35. In January 1973, Neel submitted the painting to the “Women Choose Women” ex- hibition at the New York Cultural Center. Douglas Davis published a deprecatory review of this unwieldy gathering of 109 artists in Newsweek magazine: “The drama unfolding is a historical drama,” he wrote, “a drama of women trying to integrate their nature as women into their art, which is no simple matter.” Douglas Davis, “Women, Women, Women,” Newsweek, January 29, 1973, 77. 36. Quoted in Geoffrey G. Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 11. Nancy was suf- fering from toxemia at this point in her pregnancy, and this condition provides the literal (as opposed to the metaphorical) explanation of the painting’s coloration. 37. Rich, Of Woman Born, 13. 38. Michel Auder’s video-portrait of the artist, “Alice Neel, 1976–1983,” records the permutations of this “sitting.” Neel ƒrst seated Evans on the couch, then on the tub 210 / Notes

chair, then ƒnally on the armless side chair, which provided the least amount of support and emphasized her instability. 39. Douwe Tiemersma, Body Schema and Body Image: An Interdisciplinary and Philo- sophical Study (Amsterdam: Swets and Zeitlinger, 1989), 67–68. 40. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: University of Califor- nia Press, 1978), 202. 41. Anne Sexton, “The Double Image,” in Selected Poems (London: Oxford Unversity Press, 1964), 36–37. 42. Luce Irigary, “Et l’une ne bouge pas sans l’autre” (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1974), 14–15, quoted in Jane Gallop, The Daughter’s Seduction (Ithaca: Cornell Univer- sity Press, 1982; 1989), 116–17. 43. Margaret Miles, Carnal Knowing (New York: Vintage, 1991), 153. 44. Linda M. Whiteford and Marilyn L. Poland, New Approaches to Human Reproduc- tion: Social and Ethical Dimensions (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989), 4. See also Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 45. Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1991), 212.

Chapter 10. Shifting Constellations (pp. 162–76)

1. Arlene S. Skolnick and Jerome H. Skolnick, Family in Transition: Rethinking Mar- riage, Sexuality, Child Rearing, and Family Organization, 2nd ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977), 4. 2. Ibid., 6. 3. Caroline Farrar Ware, Greenwich Village, 1920–1930. A Comment on American Civilization in the Post-War Era (Boston: Houghton Mif„in, 1935), 406. 4. The U.S. government soon realized the political value of Rockwell’s Four Free- doms series. Reproduced in poster form, they were used part of the U.S. Treasury’s war bond drive. After the war, the O.W.I. distributed them as Cold War propaganda throughout Europe and the Far East. See Norman Rockwell, Illustrator (New York: Watson-Guptill, n.d.). “The Four Freedoms” are illustrated on p. 5. 5. James Patterson, America in the Twentieth Century (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1989), 307. 6. Neel archives, scrapbook 1, and correspondence, Neel Arts, New York City. 7. Letter to Alice Neel from Mrs. J. Chadwick Scott, May 14, 1957. Neel correspon- dence, Neel Arts, New York City. 8. Patricia Hills, Alice Neel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1983, 1995), 14. 9. Emma Goldman, “Marriage and Love,” in The Traffic in Women and Other Essays on Feminism (New York: Times Change Press, 1970), 43. Shortly before Gold- man’s deportation to her native Russia in 1919, Robert Henri painted her portrait. concludes her introduction to the reprint of Goldman’s texts with the following observation: “When she died in in 1940, only a handful of Americans recognized that she had been, in the words of journalist William Mar- ion Reedy, ‘about eight thousand years ahead of her age’” (15). Notes / 211

10. William S. Rubin, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1968), 159. The famous photograph of “Artists in Exile” (all male of course) was taken at that time. 11. Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 199. 12. I refer the reader to chapter 7 of Susan Suleiman’s Subversive Intent, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), for an analysis of a parallel revision of the Surrealist writer Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet (1976). 13. Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism, 147. 14. Jackson Pollock also had his ƒrst gallery exhibition in 1943. 15. Ibid., 343–44. 16. Marcia Epstein Allentuck, ed and introd., John Graham’s System and Dialectics of Art (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), 101–102. 17. C. G. Jung, “The Psychological Aspects of the Mother-Archetype,” in Violet Staub de Laszlo, ed., The Basic Writings of C. G. Jung (New York: The Modern Library, 1938; 1959), 334. 18. Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Year of the Ex- perts’ Advice to Women (Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1978), 221. 19. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood As Experience and Institution (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976; 1986), 12. 20. Ibid., 161. 21. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: University of Califor- nia Press, 1978), 61–62. 22. Ibid., 86–87. 23. A decade later, Jessica Benjamin would argue that “if the mother were really recog- nized in our culture as an independent subject, with desires of her own, this recog- nition would revolutionize not only the psychoanalytic paradigms of ‘normal’ child development (which have always been based on the child’s need to be recognized by the mother, not on the idea of mutual recognition,) but the actual lives of chil- dren in this culture as they develop into adults.” Jessica Benjamin, Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problems of Domination (New York: Pantheon, 1988), quoted in Susan Suleiman, Subversive Intent, 180. 24. Richard J. Gelles, “Violence in the American Family,” in J. P. Martin, ed., Violence and the Family (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1978), 170. 25. Ibid., 174. 26. By the 1980s, artists began to include the subject of child abuse in their work. In June 1981, an exhibit, “Weeping in the Playtime of Others,” at Gallery 345 in New York, curated by Karen de Gia, included Neel. 27. The interview in the New York Times Magazine in 1945 is quoted in Leja, Refram- ing Abstract Expressionism, 55–56. 28. Alice Neel, “Peggy,” October 17, 1979. Registrar’s records, Smith College Mu- seum of Art, Northampton, Mass. 29. Quoted in Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering, 79. 30. May Stevens, “The Non-Portrait Work of Alice Neel,” Women’s Studies: An Inter- disciplinary Journal (London, 1978), 64. 212 / Notes

31. Unpublished essay for ArtForum (April 1975). Neel Arts, New York City. 32. Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967). 33. E. Ann Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama (New York: Routledge, 1992), 216. 34. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1986), 37. BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Archival Sources and Interviews

A. Archives Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.: ACA Gallery papers, (#D304 + N69–98) Herman Baron papers (#3769) Jacob Kainen papers (#565) Charles Keller papers (#7–8) Daniel Koerner papers (#N70–40 + 1337) Raphael Soyer papers (#867) Lynd Ward papers (#141 + 4466–4468) Miscellaneous catalogs (#NAAA3–173–216: “Contemporary Arts, Inc.” Papers) Oral history collection: Interviews with Alice Neel (Karl Fortess, Sept. 12, 1975; De- troit Institute of Arts, March 1969; Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Har- vard, March 21, 1979); Isabel Bishop, 1987; Raphael Soyer, May–June, 1981 Unmicroƒlmed: Alice Neel Papers, Rockwell Kent Papers, Anton Refregier Papers Archives of the National Center for Jewish Film, Brandeis University: Samuel Brody ƒle Butler Library, Columbia University: Oral history collection. Richard Polsky, inter- views with Alice Neel, April 8, April 29, June 5, 1981

213 214 / Bibliography

Museum of Modern Art, New York, N.Y., Film Study Center: “Workers Film and Photo League, 1931–2”; Thomas Brandon ƒle (I-64) Neel archives, Neel Arts, W. 107th St., New York, N.Y. Neel correspondence, Neel Arts, New York, N.Y. Neel ƒles, Robert Miller Gallery, New York, N.Y.

B. Interviews Rudolf Baranik, New York City, October 12, 1993 Phillip Bonosky, New York City, November 7, 1992 Daniel Brand, Concord, Mass., October 1990 Peggy Brooks, New York City, February 1989 Arthur Bullowa, New York City, March 5, 1991 Marisa Diaz, Miami, April 1991 and January 1993 Rosemary Frank, December 12, 1993 (telephone) Lottie Gordon, Reference Center for Marxist Studies, spring 1993 Elizabeth Humesten (Mrs. Mike Gold), November 3, 1993 (telephone) Pablo Lancella, Miami, January 6, 1993 George Neel, November 20, 1993 (telephone) Nancy Neel, New York City, ongoing interviews, 1989–1995; also Richard and Hartley Neel Linda Nochlin, March 29, 1994 Harry Rand, National Museum of American Art, November 11, 1993 Annette Rubinstein, September 17, 1993 (telephone) Joseph Solman, October 5, 1993 (telephone) David Soyer, New York City, October 13, 1993 May Stevens, New York City, March 5, 1991; October 12, 1993 Robert G. Stewart, National Portrait Gallery, September 6, 1993 Farley and Virginia Wheelwright, Milton, Mass., February 2, 1993

II. Sources Focused on Alice Neel

A. Books Belcher, Gerald, and Margaret Belcher. Collecting Souls, Gathering Dust: The Strug- gles of Two American Artists: Alice Neel and Rhoda Medary. New York: Paragon House, 1991. Hills, Patricia. Alice Neel. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1983; 1995.

B. Exhibition Catalogs ACA Gallery. The New York Group. May 23–June 4, 1938. Statement by Jacob Kainen. ———. The New York Group. February 5–18, 1939. Statement by Kenneth Fearing. Allara, Pamela E. “Object as Metaphor in Neel’s Non-Portrait Work.” Exterior/Interior: Alice Neel. Medford, Mass.: Tufts University Art Gallery, 1991. Sources Focused on Alice Neel / 215

American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Alice Neel: Memorial Exhibition. New York, 1985. Bell, James M. Alice Neel. Fort Wayne: Fort Wayne Museum of Art, 1979. Blum, June. Women’s Art: Miles Apart. Orlando: Valencia Community College, 1983. Bonosky, Phillip. “Introduction.” Alice Neel. Moscow Artists Union, U.S.S.R. 1981. Trans. Thompson Bradley. Cheim, John. Alice Neel: Paintings Since 1970. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 1985. ———. Alice Neel: Drawings and Watercolors. New York: Robert Miller Gallery, 1986. Geldzahler, Henry. Alice Neel in Spanish Harlem. Bridgehampton, N.Y.: Dia Center for the Arts, 1991. Gold, Mike. “Alice Neel.” Foreword to exhibition catalog. New York: New Play- wright’s Theater, 1951. Harris, Ann Sutherland. Alice Neel: A Retrospective of Watercolors and Drawings. New York: The Graham Gallery, 1978. ———. Alice Neel Paintings 1933–1982. Los Angeles: Loyola Marymount University, 1983. Hills, Patricia. Alice Neel: Paintings of Two Decades, Boston: Boston University Art Gallery. 1980. Hope, Henry R. Alice Neel. Fort Lauderdale: Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, 1978. Langenstein, Michael. Alice Neel: A Retrospective Exhibition. Hagerstown, Md.: Wash- ington County Museum of Fine Arts, 1977. Nassau County Museum of Fine Arts. Alice Neel: Paintings and Drawings. Roslyn, N.Y., 1986. Paul, William D., Jr. Alice Neel: The Woman and Her Work. Athens, Ga.: Georgia Mu- seum of Art, 1975. Includes essay by Cindy Nemser; statements by Dorothy Pearstein, Raphael Soyer, and John I. H. Baur; Moore College doctoral address. Scott, Martha B. Alice Neel: A Retrospective Showing. New Canaan, Conn.: The Silver- mine Guild of Artists, with the University of Bridgeport, 1979. Solomon, Elke Morger. Alice Neel. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1974.

C. Articles and Reviews Allara, Pamela E. “Mater of Fact: Alice Neel’s Pregnant Nudes.” American Art 8/2 (spring 1994), 6–31. ———. “The City as Domicile: The Urban Art of Alice Neel.” Journal of Urban and Cultural Studies 2/2 (winter 1992), 7–27. Alloway, Lawrence. “Art.” The Nation, March 9, 1974, 318. ———. “Patricia Hills, Alice Neel” (review). Art Journal 44/2 (summer 1984), 191–92. Barrie, Leta. “Real People: Alice Neel at Linda Cathcart Gallery.” Artweek, January 23, 1992, 1, 12–13. Bass, Ruth. “A Modern-Day Collector of Souls,” ARTnews 83/3 (March 1984), 36–37. Berkman, Florence. “Who Is the Real Alice Neel?” Hartford Times, September 26, 1976, 38. 216 / Bibliography

Berrigan, Ted. “Alice Neel’s Portraits of Joe Gould.” Mother: A Journal of New Litera- ture 6. Peter Schjeldahl and Lewis MacAdams, eds. New York: 1965. ———. “The Portrait and Its Double,” ARTnews 64/9 (January 1966), 30–33, 63–64. Blair, William G. “Alice Neel Dead: Portrait Artist.” Obituary, New York Times, Octo- ber 14, 1984. Bonetti, David. “Nude Dissenting . . .,” Boston Phoenix, December 24, 1985. Bonosky, Phillip. “Social Comment of Alice Neel.” Daily World, October 30, 1970. ———. “Alice Neel Exhibits Her Portraits of the Spirit.” Daily World, October 4, 1973. Brand, Jonathan. “Putting Down Pearlstein and Kramer.” Letter to the editor. New York Times, June 29, 1969. Burstein, Patricia. “Painter Alice Neel Strips Her Subjects to the Bone—and Some Then Rage in Their Nakedness.” People, March 19, 1979, 63–64. Campbell, Lawrence. Review of group exhibition at ACA Gallery, N.Y. ARTnews 59/8 (December 1960), 13. ———. Review. ARTnews 69/7 (November 1970), 24. Castle, Frederick Ted. “Interview with Alice Neel.” Artforum (October 1983), 36–41. Cochrane, Diane. “Alice Neel: Collector of Souls.” American Artist 37/4, (September 1973), 32–7; 62–4. Crehan, Hubert. “Introducing the Portraits of Alice Neel.” ARTnews 61/6 (October 1962), 44–47, 68. ———. “Portrait of a Liberated Portrait Painter.” Sunday Post Dispatch, August 1, 1971. D.B. Review of exhibition with Captain Hugh Mulzac at ACA Gallery. Arts Digest 28/ 20 (September 1954), 26. Donohoe, Victoria. “Neel’s Portrait Art Peers into the Souls of Subjects.” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 26, 1984. ———. “Homecoming ‘Collector of Souls’ Display Portraits at Moore.” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 24, 1970. Everett, Kenneth. “Art.” New Republic, May 4, 1974, 27–28. Foss, Fanya. “Neel.” Koplin Gallery Newsletter, Los Angeles, 1985. Friedman, Jon R. “Alice Neel.” Arts 57/1 (September 1982), 23. Gallati, Barbara. “Alice Neel: Non-Figurative Works.” Arts 57/2 (October 1983), 23–24. ———. “Alice Neel.” Arts 58/9 (May 1984), 54–55. Gardner, Isabella. “For Alice Neel: Your Fearful Symmetries.” In Women Painters and Poets. New York: New York University Visual Artists Coalition, 1977, 11. Gaugh, Harry. “Alice Neel.” Arts (May 1978), 9. Geldzahler, Henry. “Alice Neel.” Interview 15/1 (January 1985), 86–88. Genauer, Emily. “Art and the Artist.” New York Post, March 2, 1974. Goldstein, Patti. “Soul on Canvas.” New York, July 9–16, 1979, 76–80. Gordon, David. “Women Choose Women.” Daily World, February 14, 1973. ———. “Alice Neel, Humanist Artist, for More Cultural Exchange.” Daily World, May 31, 1973. Gruen, John. “Art: ‘Collector of Souls.’” New York Herald Tribune, January 9, 1966. ———. “Interview with Alice Neel.” Close Up. New York, 1968. Halasz, Piri. “Alice Neel: ‘I have this obsession with Life.’” ARTnews 73/1 (January 1974), 47–49. Sources Focused on Alice Neel / 217

Harris, Ann Sutherland. “The Human Creature.” Portfolio 1/5 (December/January 1979–1980), 71–76. ———. “A Note on Alice’s Greatness.” ARTnews 75/11 (November 1977), 113. Henry, Gerrit. “The Artist and the Face: A Modern American Sampling.” Art in Amer- ica 63/1 (January/February 1975), 34–35. ———. “Elaine De Kooning and Alice Neel.” ARTnews 83/3 (March 1984), 54–55. ———. “New York Letter.” Art International 14/10 (December 1970), 77. Hess, Thomas. “Art: Behind the Taboo Curtain.” New York, March 4, 1974, 68. ———. “Art: Sitting Prettier.” New York, February 23, 1976, 62–63. Higgins, Judith. “Alice Neel and the Human Comedy.” ARTnews 83/8 (October 1984), 70–79. Hoffman, Marla. “Two Women Paint.” Daily World, March 9, 1974. Hope, Henry R. “Neel, Portraits of an Era.” Art Journal 38 (summer 1979), 273–81. Johnson, Ellen H. “Alice Neel’s Fifty Years of Portrait Painting.” Studio International 193 (March 1977), 174–79. Kimmelman, Michael. “Art in Review: Alice Neel.” New York Times, March 4, 1994. Keith, Carolyn. “Alice Neel: Portrait of Souls,” “Cityside.” Milwaukee Journal, Octo- ber 23, 1978. Kramer, Hilton. “Art: Alice Neel Retrospective.” New York Times, February 9, 1974. ———. “Art.” New York Times, January 20, 1968. ———. Review of the Graham Gallery exhibition. New York Times, October 24, 1970. Kroll, Jack. “Art: Curator of Souls.” Newsweek, January 31, 1966, 82. Levin, Kim. “Alice Neel at the Graham Gallery.” ARTnews 62/6, (October 1963), 10–11. ———. “Art/Alice Neel.” Village Voice, May 18, 1982. Loercher, Diana. “Alice Neel.” Christian Science Monitor, March 4, 1978. ———. “One-Man Shows Liven N.Y. Galleries.” Christian Science Monitor, October 11, 1973. Lubell, Ellen. “Alice Neel, 1900–1984.” Village Voice, October 30, 1984, 107. McGuff, Jane. “Alice Neel: Her Portraits, Herself.” Glitch2 (Chelsea, Ala., 1978), 34– 35, 43. Mainardi, Pat. “Alice Neel at the Whitney Museum.” Art in America 62/3, (May-June 1974), 107. Mellow, James R. “When Does a Portrait Become a Memento Mori?” New York Times, February 24, 1974. Mercedes, Rita. “Alice Neel.” Connoisseur 29 (September 1981), 2–3. Mitchell, Anita Velez. “A Visit with Alice Neel.” Helcion Nine: Journal of Women’s Arts and Letters (1979), 15–19. Neel, Alice. “A Statement.” in Alfred Leslie and Robert Frank, eds., The Hasty Papers: A One-Shot Review (New York, 1960), 50. ———. “Editors.” Daily World, February 2, 1971. ———. “Editors.” Masses and Mainstream 8/7 (July 1955). ———. Review of The Dream and the Deal by Jerre Mangione. Daily World, November 11, 1972. ———. “Peggy.” Archives. Smith College Museum of Art. Northampton, Mass. Octo- ber 17, 1979. 218 / Bibliography

———. “WPA Writers Project Seen as Success, Despite Rightists.” Daily World, No- vember 11, 1972. ———. “Doctoral Address.” Moore College of Art. May 1971. Reprinted in Georgia Museum of Art catalog, 1975. ———. Statement, Daily World, April 17, 1971. ———. “The New York I Love: Seventeen New Yorkers Tell Us What Makes Them Most Love This Big, Bad, Beautiful Town.” New York, October 20, 1980, 34–37. ———. “Interview.” Night 2/3 (April 1979). ———. “I Paint Tragedy and Joy.” New York Times, October 31, 1976. Nemser, Cindy. “Alice Neel: Portraits of Four Decades.” Ms. 2/48 (October 1973), 48– 53. ———. “In the Galleries .. . Alice Neel.” Arts 42/4 (February 1968), 60. Ortega, Susan. “Art for Detente.” Daily World, September 3, 1981. ———. “Alice Neel: True Artist of the People.” Daily World, November 17, 1984. “The Passing Shows.” ARTnews 42/3 (March 15–31, 1944), 20. Phillips, Deborah C. “Alice Neel.” ARTnews 81/8 (October 1982), 153. Perreault, John. “Catching Souls and Quilting.” Village Voice, Febrary 21, 1974. ———. Review of exhibition at Graham Gallery, New York. ARTnews 66/9 (January 1968), 16. ———. “Reading Between the Faces’ Lines.” Village Voice, September 27, 1973. Peterson, Valerie. “U.S. Figure Painting: Continuity or Cliché.” ARTnews 61/4, (sum- mer 1962), 36–38. Porter, E. F., Jr. “Blithe Spirit, Collector of Souls.” St. Louis Post Dispatch, December 14, 1975. Price, Aimée Brown. “Artists Dialogue: A Conversation with Alice Neel.” Architectural Digest (August 1982), 136, 140, 142. Princenthal, Nancy. “About Faces: Alice Neel’s Portraits.” Parkett 16 (1988), 6–17. Raynor, Vivien. “Alice Neel.” Arts 38/1 (1963), 58. Richard, Paul. “Alice Neel: Portraits and the Artist.” Washington Post, October 8, 1976. Rizzi, Marcia Salo. “The Human Comedy of Alice Neel.” Liberation 19/3 (May 1975), 29–33. Russell, John. “Art.” New York Times, February 7, 1976. ———. “Art: Offbeat Alice Neel: Not a Portrait Around.” New York Times, May 28, 1982. Saltz, Jerry. “Notes on a Painting: Alice Neel, Painter Laureate.” Arts 66/3 (November 1991), 25–26. Schulze, Franz, “Three Artists Defy Trend.” Chicago Sun Times, October 15, 1978. Schmitt, Marilyn. “Alice Neel.” Arts 52 (May 1978), 9. Smith, Roberta. “Art: Alice Neel Show.” New York Times, December 19, 1986. ———. “Diane Arbus and Alice Neel, With Attention to the Child.” New York Times, May 19, 1989. Stevens, Elizabeth. “She’s Court Painter to the World of Art.” Baltimore Sun, February 20, 1981. Stevens, May. “The Non-Portrait Work of Alice Neel.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisci- plinary Journal (London) (1978), 61–73. General Sources: Books / 219

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eeva-inkeri: ƒgures 2, 9, 98, 107 Lauros-Giraudon/Art Resource: ƒgures 5, 172 Scala/Art Resource: ƒgures 25, 157 Zindman/Fremont: ƒgures 11, 49, 50, 70, 76, 81, 82, 86, 88, 126, 127, 131, 166 Eric Pollitzer: ƒgures 12, 33, 38, 65, 68, 96, 99, 121, 130, 167 Geoffrey Clements: ƒgures 34, 45, 93, 173 Beth Phillips: ƒgures 36, 57, 90, 124 D. James Dee: ƒgures 44, 52, 71, 84, 108 Steven Sloman: ƒgures 61, 92, 174 Geraldine T. Mancini: ƒgures 148, 171 John Seyfried: ƒgure 132

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