Fictions of the Pose

Aye, if only Alice Neel had ever had the occasion to take Harry Berger’s measure!

With every passing year since her death in 1984, it’s becoming clearer and clearer that the painter Alice Neel was one of the century’s greatest portraitists (and I use the term century advisedly: she was born in 1900). Born in Philadelphia and felled quite early by tragedy (the death of a young daughter, abandonment by a first husband, institutionalization following a nervous breakdown), Neel had made her way to New York by the ’30s, first in Greenwich Village, and then, in order to get away from its hothouse artsy environs, up to Spanish Harlem. Perhaps owing to those early tragedies, she was sympathetic to the anxious expressionist spirit of northern European and Spanish artists—Munch, Goya. But she was also imbued with a fervent social conscience and hovered about uptown Communist circles (though apparently never becoming a member of the party itself). Those leanings may have played against her in the McCarthyite ’40s and ’50s, during which she lived a fairly marginal existence, known among artists and intellectuals but not far beyond her neighborhood. Throughout it all, she honed a distinctively sly, direct, and often quite haunting portrait style. With the upsurge of feminism in the late ’60s and early ’70s, she came to be championed as a pioneering role model, and late-career shows (especially at the Whitney) brought increasing acclaim. Toward the end of her life, she was even appearing, quite winningly, on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. This past year has seen a major touring museum show of her work, Painted Truths (Houston, Whitechapel in London, and Malmö), as well as a more focused portrait show at the L.A. Louver Gallery.

Harry Berger Jr., for his part, at eighty-five, virtually the same age and every bit as vivid as Neel ever got, continues to be one of our country’s finest, most penetrating and protean cultural critics and theorists. Originally a Spencerian out of Yale, Berger spent most of his career at Cowell College at the University of California, Santa Cruz, which is where, incidentally, I first encountered him, as the faculty leader of my subsection of the freshman core. (“What a crock!” I remember declaring categorically, two weeks into my college career, as the class was tackling The Republic. “No wonder Socrates always wins these arguments, the guys he’s arguing with are a bunch of morons—‘Yes, Socrates, you are right, it must be so’—what total bull, the game is completely rigged.” At...