All day I crave my son’s body: his warmth and weight, his skin like a petal. I want him to be still long enough to settle his head on my collarbone or to lie heavily in the arc of my torso. He does this so rarely, busy as he is in discovery. Five times a day, though, like a terrier, he returns: at six and nine in the morning, at one and five in the afternoon, eight at night. When he nurses, he softens into my flesh. It’s the closest we come, now, to the interdependence we knew at the start. I give him nourishment and rest. He gives me relief, that good burn in the breast, like bourbon in the throat. When he pulls away and I place him in the crib at the end of the day, I feel bereft of an organ of my own body. In the strange logic of motherhood, I also feel, finally, free.
When Alice Neel made portraits of women and children—and she made many—she often painted the pair as a single figure. Infant at mother’s breast, toddler on mother’s lap, child’s temple pressed to mother’s cheek—if you were to outline their form, they would appear a single person.
Neel’s studio was her living room. She sat her subjects in armchairs, pushed her puffy hair from her pale forehead, and gripped a long brush in her left fist. The brush hovered and wobbled over the canvas and placed its marks, coarse, sloppy, and deliberate. I imagine the babies squirmed or needed to be set to rest, and she’d ask the mothers to return to the chair, to hold the pose. She talked through the hours-long sitting, telling stories of her colorful, complicated life, inviting subjects to share their own.
Late in Neel’s career, she often asked her daughters-in-law, Nancy and Ginny, to sit with their babies. In Ginny and Elizabeth (1975), a black-haired white woman holds a child who looks to be three months old. The infant rests on her mother’s lap, enfolded within the boundaries of Ginny’s form. Ginny’s eyes are glassy, the skin beneath them dark, her long face yellowed. Beside her is a pitcher, and she looks as though she is all poured out.
The following year, Neel painted Ginny and Elizabeth again in a work by the same name. On the floor, the toddler sits between her mother’s legs, neatly contained within the outline of her mother’s body save for her protruding shins and feet. One year old, she begins to push forth into the world. Ginny has a little more color in her cheeks now; her pink sweater casts its blush, replacing the sickly chartreuse of the year before. Still, this mother is tired: though postured for play, she stares blankly at the floor, longing, perhaps, to be elsewhere.
Neel’s mother and child paintings complicate the classical trope of Madonna and Child. She painted mothers the way she painted all of her subjects: exposing the complexity of their inner lives. Neel’s career spanned the mid-twentieth century, when abstraction dominated the New York art scene and portraiture was passé. She clung to this form, substantiating it with emotion, ever fascinated by the human creature. With mothers and children, she was not interested in the Marian archetype—serene submission to the call of motherhood—nor in any archetype at all. She was interested in the individual, in the mix of emotions evinced in each’s face, shoulders, hands. And what she often captured between mothers and children was intimacy battling the mother’s desire for independence.
Early May. Torrance will be one this month, and I intend to wean him. I hope to be pregnant again by summer’s end, and the thought of giving of my body endlessly to another—nursing Torrance until I conceive, growing sick and swollen with a second child, then nursing another twelve months—makes me want to bolt from my own frame.
When my body had recovered from pregnancy and delivery, I took up running. Never have I so enjoyed leaving my home in a sprint. Running, my body is possessed only by my own breath, my own strength. I run through the parks behind the museum. Sometimes I throw my arms in the air, feeling victorious and independent. Sometimes I lie in the clover. A chestnut tree stretches a hundred feet high, blossoming all the way to the top, its flowers fragrant for no one but the hummingbirds.
One of the most acute paradoxes of motherhood is the bliss and smother of being nearly one flesh with another creature. Postpartum doulas make no distinction between the mother and baby in the first months of life, instead referring to the single person motherbaby. I’m wistful for the summer afternoons of his infancy when he slept on my belly and chest for hours, when his only task was slumber, and my only task was to study his oversized lashes, the strange smile that overcame him in sleep, his occasional, mysterious laughter. The heat between his skin and mine was like the heat between my own arm and side, between my brushing knees. When we went out, I banded him to my chest, and he dozed or studied the freckles on my collarbone. When others held him, I was both relieved and jealous—grateful to stand and stretch and pee, even walk around the block, and long to snatch him back to my own skin. Nursing him feels, always, like reclaiming him as mine, all mine.
Still, I’m ready to be freed of nursing’s tether. I dream of my life without it: I drink gin and tonics with abandon, take a beach day by myself, sleep whenever I please. I suppose I could do these things now if I pumped and left Torrance in good hands. But strapping into that machine does not make me feel free. What I’m after is the sense of autonomy over my body and mind again. More important than the leisure of my dreams is my intent to return to predictable writing habits. I want to feel rested and sharp. I want to leave the apartment and write uninterrupted for an entire Saturday. My mind is spent from my body’s generosity, and I’m ready to be greedy again.
So when Torrance is eleven months old, I begin by omitting the 9:00 a.m. feeding. He doesn’t seem to notice. The same day, I cut the 1:00 p.m. feeding, satisfied by how easy this is. The next day, he groans all morning, skips both naps, wakes at midnight, cries in his father’s arms, and settles only when I feed him an unusual middle-of-the-night meal. Is he hungry? Does he miss me? I feel his body lying parallel to mine, hear the sound of his breath through his nose, see his eyes closed or dazed, the way he paws at the air, and I can’t imagine our life together without this. I need to be near him, and I need to be freed from him, and these desires lie side by side, warming each other in the night.
“I always had this awful dichotomy,” said Alice Neel of her own child. “I loved Isabetta, of course I did. But I wanted to paint.” Neel knew the tension I’m speaking of—tragically so. But let’s start at the beginning.
At twenty-five, Neel was wispy haired, light eyed, and smitten. She was two days shy of graduation from art school in Philadelphia when she married a Cuban art student with a narrow face and thin mustache. Theirs was a small wedding in the summer of 1925. In February of ’26 she and Carlos moved to Cuba to live with his wealthy family. It was always hot, and her wavy hair was wild as she left his parents’ estate each morning, crossed town to the Havana slums, and asked people to sit for her.
She was committed to portraiture from the start. While her art school contemporaries were painting impressionistic landscapes, she took her cues from professor Robert Henri, a leader in the Ashcan School of Realism that pursued “art for life’s sake,” probing the inner lives of urban people. Of her rejection of Impressionism, Neel remembered, “I didn’t see life as a picnic on the grass. I wasn’t happy like Renoir.” In Havana, she sought out the poor whose joy and sorrow could be discerned on their faces, and she painted them.
She learned she was pregnant in spring. By December she was ruddy-cheeked and ballooning beneath a maternity smock in the Cuban heat. Santillana del Mar was born the day after Christmas, with her mother’s round face and her father’s dark eyes.
“In the beginning I didn’t want children, I just got them,” Neel remembered. She got them, and then she lost them.
Diphtheria was known as the strangling angel of children. In adults it manifested only as a sore throat. But in kids it was often fatal, as thick, gray phlegm spread over the airway and obstructed breath. New York City was trying to get a handle on the epidemic when Alice, Carlos, and the baby left Cuba for an apartment on West 81st Street in 1927. They’d moved to New York to paint. They were poor, and the apartment was cold, with no oil stove to warm them. The autumn nights grew damp and foggy and Neel caught a sore throat. “It should be constantly borne in mind that the kissing of children at such times is most dangerous,” a public notice on the disease cautioned. But what mother can keep from pressing her lips to a ten-month-old’s temples? Santillana died in December 1927, just before her first birthday.
The same month, a Canadian physician wrote for The Public Health Journal about attending to a farmer’s ill daughter. The methods available for treating diphtheria were futile. “I felt as did every physician of that day,” he reported, “as if my hands were literally tied, and I watched the death of that beautiful child, feeling absolutely helpless to be of any assistance.”
Neel painted The Futility of Effort in 1930, one of many works of that period that expresses her maternal grief. Its tone is grayscale. Its composition is simple: a baby is gowned in white; above her, an arch suggests both a crib and a gravestone.
Other works painted the same year depict motherhood with ghoulish surrealism. Degenerate Madonna (1930) pictures a child seated on her mother’s lap, gowned in white. Neel might have been familiar with Mrs. Peale Lamenting the Death of Her Child, painted in 1772 by Philadelphian Charles Willson Peale. Both allude to the European tradition of Madonna Doloroso, the grieving Madonna. Both employ ghostly tones, rendering the infants’ skin a sickly gray, Neel’s tinted blue and Peale’s green. But while Peale depicts a child in repose, almost smiling, Neel’s is jolted upright, her face a silent reckoning. Peale’s Madonna has rosy cheeks and eyes peering heavenward over three controlled, luminous tears, while Neel’s has yellowed skin and downcast eyes. Mrs. Peale wears a silk dress and tidy hair; Neel’s Madonna is half nude, her bare breasts spent and sagging, her hair a puff of black smoke. Behind Mrs. Peale the wall is somber slate, but a lamp out of the frame casts a hopeful glow. Behind the Degenerate Madonna swarm red, black, purple, orange, and green—chaos.
No sooner had her marriage begun to crumble under the weight of grief than Neel found herself pregnant again. Her second, Isabetta, was born in November 1928, dark-haired like her father and light-eyed like her mother. This birth might have brought moments of gladness, but, as any parent would expect, Neel’s mourning for her firstborn persisted. “You know what he said?” she remembered of her husband Carlos. “He thought he married a rabbit, and it turned out to be a lion.” There is nothing like the cry of a lion who’s lost her cub. In despair of loss, the stress of early parenting, the shortage of money, and the ambition to paint, the couple ruptured. Carlos took Isabetta to Cuba to ask his family for money before joining Neel for a trip to Paris. Instead, he left the eighteen-month-old in the care of his parents and went on to Paris alone.
Neel considered going after her daughter. She asked permission to move into her mother’s house in Pennsylvania and raise the child there. But she worried that caring for her daughter as a single mother would force her to give up her work. And so the awful dichotomy of love for her child and love for painting tore through her.
Everything became foggy. She forgot all the Spanish she knew. She couldn’t read. She painted feverishly. Then the fog turned black; she imagined ending her life, and tried to. She spent the next year in and out of hospitals. “Even in the insane asylum, she painted,” her daughter-in-law later told an interviewer. “Alice loved a wretch. She loved the wretch in the hero and the hero in the wretch. She saw that in all of us, I think.” She was deemed unfit to raise her second child, and Isabetta remained in Cuba, where she would be brought up by Carlos’s family. Neel was, at once, free to paint, and nearly ruined.
All of my life with Torrance will be a severance. It began at the rupture of birth, when our absolute union—his body contained within mine—was sundered. To wean him is to release him a little further into the world, to concede to that inevitable separation, a concession I am slow to make. His birthday has come and gone, and I’m still feeding him five times a day. Looking squarely at my reluctance to stop nursing, I see that it’s rooted in a primal maternal fear of loss—the kind of loss that Neel experienced twice over.
My mother lost her firstborn to overdose, and while he lived she lost him to addiction. This is the legacy into which I am born a mother, though I think any woman who bears a child carries her own precautionary grief. How many times have I imagined my son’s death? In the weary dream of the fourth trimester, how often did I lie awake listening for his breath? How many flashes of fear have come over me driving on the highway, lighting the stove, holding him on the second-floor balcony waving to the neighbors? One false move—
But my rational mind takes over most of the time, assuring me that he is living and will live. His growth beyond our union is a healthy and joyful maturation. And to pursue his independence is to pursue my own. So beginning today, at one year and one week, I replace his 5:00 p.m. feeding with a bottle of whole milk. My husband feeds him, and I can do as I please. I sit on the balcony where, after an early-June rain, the sun has come out, and I write a few good paragraphs.
Three days later, I give him a bottle both at 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. He doesn’t mind. He gulps down the whole milk greedily, his head resting heavily beneath my chin. We’re two feedings down, and I’m energized by our achievement.
“She got on with her life as she got on with painting,” said her daughter-in-law. Neel gave birth to Richard first, in 1939, and Hartley next, in 1941. They had different fathers, neither of whom she married. Nine years after Carlos left with Isabetta, Neel settled into the armchair of motherhood and seemed to become comfortable in it. But she didn’t let it keep her from painting.
For the duration of the boys’ childhoods, she lived and worked out of 21 East 108th Street in Spanish Harlem. To enter her studio, the south-facing living room, her subjects had to walk through her sons’ bedroom. In paraded painters, playwrights, and activists, neighbors and taxi drivers and mothers; they sat clothed or naked, of any race or class or age, wretches and heroes, all. This integration made it possible for Neel to be a single mother and to paint prolifically. This, and her dogged perseverance. She wasn’t getting attention in the New York art world, busy as she was in her bohemian version of family life in Spanish Harlem while the commercial art scene bustled in Greenwich Village. But she kept working. “Decide never to let anything make you give it up,” the older Neel urged young painters. In the early years of her boys’ lives, when the strain on the body makes mothering and artistry seem least compatible, Neel persisted.
While working, she gave herself entirely to her sitter. “I go so out of myself and into them,” she said, “that after they leave I sometimes feel horrible. I feel like an untenanted house. I feel as though I have been living in them for two hours so to go back to myself is sometimes difficult.” A mother might say the same about time with her young child. Somehow, each day, Neel gathered the energy to turn from the absorbing work in her studio to the absorbing endeavor of parenting Richard and Hartley.
In the 1940s and ’50s, she continued to paint mothers, turning away from her loss and looking instead at her Harlem neighbors. She painted The Spanish Family in 1943. Her sitters were relatives of Richard’s father. In this portrait, a mother named Margarita seems tired, even bruised. Crude brown dashes frame her eye and streak her cheek. She sits with three children whose yellowed and purpled skin suggest malady. Yet the boy clasps his hands politely, the girl sits still, though her eyes crave escape, and the infant is contented in Margarita’s lap. This mother is keeping it together. Though Margarita was married, her husband is absent from this family portrait. Neel drew him three years earlier. Suffering tuberculosis, he’s pictured in a hospital bed in T.B. Harlem. Perhaps it wasn’t violence that bruised Margarita, but self-reliance.
A father is likewise absent in Black Spanish-American Family. Here, a mother wears a clean white shirt and an expression of pragmatism and self-sufficiency. She’s flanked by two girls, their hands neatly folded in their laps, their shiny hair neatly pulled back, their dresses bright and neatly buttoned. Neel’s choice to title this work Family assertively subverts an American ideal that ruled in the year this was painted, 1950, and contends that a woman can, by herself, raise two children who thrive.
Perhaps Neel wondered whether this contention could be true in her own family. By some standards, her boys did thrive. Though Neel assumed the mythology that for art’s sake you had to give up everything, spending spare dollars on art supplies and surviving on very little, she did find ways to prioritize her sons’ education. Richard and Hartley received full scholarships to Rudolf Steiner, the first Waldorf school in the country, on the Upper East Side. They went on to graduate from Columbia. Afterwards, Richard pursued finance and Hartley medicine. But recent biographies of Neel, including a documentary film by Hartley’s own son, reveal long shadows that loom over the boys’ childhoods. Neel carried on fifteen years in a relationship with Hartley’s father, photographer and critic Sam Brody, in which both she and Richard suffered abuse. The documentary suggests that the grown Richard’s straight-laced career and financial success are acts of rebellion against the bohemian chaos of his childhood. Richard, a long-faced man in coke-bottle glasses, confesses that he feels he was put to risk by his mother’s life choices. Novelist Phillip Bonosky, a close friend to Neel, reflects, “Those two kids grew up in an environment which was rich intellectually, but also they met so many blasted lives, so many complicated lives, that they were terrified of living that way.”
What does this say about Neel as a mother to Richard and Hartley? Was she negligent? A victim? The same could be asked of the way Isabetta slipped from her life. Was her daughter taken from her, or did Neel leave? Was it enough that for Richard and Hartle she stayed? The answer to all of the questions, I think, is a complicated “Yes.” Alice the mother is the hero and the wretch.
Most mothers I know hold this tension more quietly. But we all hold it. We make choices for our children that restrict our independence. We make choices for our careers, our craft, the work that makes us feel generous and powerful, that pull us from our children. Or we find ourselves in circumstances that we didn’t choose, that seem to happen to us, that shift the balance one way or the other. Neel always wrestled with “the awful dichotomy” of mother and artist. Did the two ever reside harmoniously within her?
Hartley on the Rocking Horse, painted in 1942, suggests that there were days when they did. This painting, like the others, draws on the mother and child trope, but it doesn’t deploy the traditional composition of a baby seated on a mother’s lap. Instead, the child is in the foreground, rocking on his toy, while in the background, a woman is framed in a mirror. She is Neel, arm raised as if lifting brush to canvas. After losing her daughters, Neel wrote a poem that read, “Oh I was full of theories / Of grand experiments / To live a normal woman’s life / To have children—to be the painting and the painter.” As critic Denise Bauer observes in the essay “Alice Neel’s Portraits of Mother Work,” in Hartley on the Rocking Horse, Neel is both artist and mother: she paints while enjoying her child’s pleasure, finally integrating the identities that felt so often at odds. I wonder if, as her boys grew, Neel looked back on this painting, a memorial to a moment of the integration that always felt just out of reach. I wonder if it spoke to her: Keep reaching.
When Torrance was born, I had written a book, a collection of essays exploring my grief over the deaths of my father and my brother in my twenties. I was working to sell the book, publishing in journals, and taking on freelance projects. I’d finished graduate school, which I’d undertaken while working full days at an art museum, forcing me into extraordinary discipline in my creative labors. I woke early and wrote as if from dreams. The writer’s block that had riddled me through college was long gone. I pushed through the slog of first drafts because I’d come to expect that persevering in revision would turn my rough starts into work I was proud of. I reread my words and enjoyed the sound of them. In short, at thirty-one, I was trained and ready for the serious work of writing. And then I had a baby.
In Torrance’s first months, I resolved to give myself over to the demands of the season. To show up with my body was all I required of myself; I allowed my mind to rest. I kept a journal, an act of resistance against the repetition of each day. Each day was quite different from the next, but the differences were subtle. To attend to these quiet shifts brought me into the present moment and kept the time, those precious first weeks, from slipping away too quickly. Otherwise, I didn’t write, and I didn’t mind.
But when my elected hiatus had ended, when I reached the moment at six months postpartum when I expected to return to writing, I struggled to find the discipline that had tilled the ground of my artistic work. As hard as I tried to instill routine in Torrance’s sleep, he was erratic, crying in the night, waking at different times each morning. I could no longer count on the solitude I’d enjoyed at sunrise before he was born. The mornings he did sleep and I managed to rise early to write, I felt foggy all day, and in my fatigue I resented my mother work. Since then, I’ve begun to wonder about the compatibility of motherhood and artistry, particularly in the earliest years of parenting. Without routine to foster discipline, and as my child demands so much of my body, will I be able to create? Will my desire for achievement lie dormant in order for me to enjoy caregiving? These are the very years that feel ripe for creative achievement, for there was such momentum before the baby came. Will it be stalled? I love being the mother of this child, and I know that life is rich when lived in relation to others. Still, I long to be sovereign unto myself, possessing bodily strength and creative force for my own sake.
Finally, I’ve omitted Torrance’s lunchtime feeding, which frees me from early morning to eight at night. I leave our apartment for a six-hour stretch. At my mother’s house, I sit at a desk in the room where my late father’s books line the shelves. I write a thousand words and revise two thousand I’ve already written. I print them out and hold them to my chest, proud to have birthed and nurtured something out of intellect and intuition. I drive home in a hot June breeze, and I’m high on achievement when I return to feed the boy before he sleeps. If I can hoard enough days like today, perhaps I will feel like Torrance’s mother and like a person unto myself.
As the women’s movement took hold, feminist criticism pointed to two dominant strains in the painted portrayal of the female form: women are painted by male artists as objects of sexual desire, or women are painted as mothers, objects of their child’s dependence, admiration, or critique. The first is widely discussed in feminist art theory; the term male gaze has become colloquial. People don’t talk as much about the mother as object. But to be beholden to her child’s needs, to be identified in relationship to her child, and to be painted from the grown child’s perspective is to become an object in another way. There’s the trope of the “Portrait of the Artist’s Mother,” ventured by Whistler, van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Tanner, Giacometti, and Hopper, among others. There is, of course, the ubiquitous Madonna and Child, rendered every way from gilded triptychs to Matisse’s line drawings, in which Mary exists as the mother of Christ. Inherent in any portrait of a woman and child is the woman’s identification in relation to the child—mother of—rather than identification as an individual.
Into this history, Neel began work on an unconventional series of mother and child paintings: the pregnant nudes. In 1964, the year after the publication of The Feminine Mystique, Neel was a veteran painter in her sixties but still on the fringe of the mainstream art scene. Her wispy hair had grayed, her boys had grown, and she’d soon be a grandmother. She observed pregnancy as an onlooker now, but one who’d carried four children of her own. Over the next fourteen years, she painted seven portraits of expecting mothers that defied expectations for the depiction of women in painting and garnered Neel commercial attention as the feminist movement latched onto the project.
Pregnancy is an uncommon subject in the art historical canon. In the convention of the Annunciation, Mary becomes pregnant but is not yet visibly pregnant. A few commissioned portraits of expecting mothers hang on museum walls, but these sitters are fully clothed in dress that often hides their growing bellies. Neel deemed the pregnant figure worthy of exploration and undressed it to discover its distortions, discomforts, and dignity.
The large paintings are striking for the ways they differ from one another. As always, Neel reckoned with her sitters as individuals, discerning each’s unique psychology. Pregnancy is felt differently by every mother I’ve met, and Neel honors this spectrum. Pregnant Betty Homitsky, completed in 1968, captures the discomforts of the expanding pregnant body. The sitter is a slender woman, her face narrow and her arms as thin as wishbones. But pregnancy swells and softens her breasts and belly. Her paunch covers her vagina, her growing child thus obscuring her sexuality. The color is drained from the painting’s background, with unfinished swatches of pigment, and Betty’s skin is pale. Her face and chest are flushed though; perhaps she’s embarrassed by the state she’s in, or just overheated. Either way, she wears a frown.
Claudia Bach, painted in 1975, pictures a much different sitter. Her face is calm and confident. Her breasts look firm. Her linea negra, the line that bisects the pregnant belly, could be confused for muscle tone, and with a fit arm perched on her hip, Claudia’s stance is at once powerful and relaxed. Her legs drape open, the sexuality of her pubic hair fully exposed.
In her essay “‘Mater’ of Fact: Alice Neel’s Pregnant Nudes,” critic Pamela Allara writes of the surrealist painting Le viol (The Rape) by René Magritte. Some critics believe this work depicts a pregnant woman. If, Allara suggests, their reading is accurate, then “Magritte’s painting may posit that pregnancy is the rape of identity, initiating in women a metamorphosis from subject into object.” We could read Neel’s Pregnant Betty Homitsky, with its tired sitter and anemic background, to posit the same. Conversely, we could read Claudia Bach to defy this suggestion with its sitter’s self-possession. But my reading, along with Denise Bauer, is that taken together, Neel’s pregnant nudes suggest it’s possible to be at once possessed by another person and possessed by oneself.
In these paintings, each woman is undeniably tenanted by another life that changes her, inwardly and outwardly. But unlike most takes on the mother and child trope, these portraits do not actually picture the child. It is the mother’s inner life, not the life within her, that is most pronounced, whether she’s overcome by pregnancy’s intrusion or emboldened by its life-giving power. In her essay “Alice Neel’s Portraits of Mother Work,” Bauer notes that in rendering these women as lone sitters, Neel dignifies them as subjects in their own right, not as sexual objects under the male gaze, nor as matronly objects defined by their relationship to their children, but as peers who are worthy as subjects unto themselves.
I’m drawn to this interpretation because it gives me hope in my ability to hold this tension: motherhood stretches my body and spirit. My breasts are deflated from daily filling and emptying. My mind is spread so thin it’s brittle. I’ve given so much to this child. But I’m hopeful that the giving expands, rather than constricts, my personhood. Having nourished my son from a seed into a twenty-pound, fleshy, year-old boy, there are days when I feel depleted, and there are days when I feel more powerful than ever before—strong and happy in the woman I am becoming.
Two feedings remain, the ones I most enjoy. At dawn and dusk, the waking or waning light dyes the room deep-sea blue. In the bed, my body curls around his, and if I hook my neck, I can kiss his milky forehead. Here, the world so full of intrigue for this bright and busy child is blotted out, and it’s just him and me, bobbing on the inky ocean. He gulps and puffs tiny breaths from his nose. Soon we’re sinking into dreams. I rouse myself and lift him. His body is heavy, limp. His cheeks and neck are warm and vital against mine. I hold him a long time before setting him down to sleep.
It’s late June. The baby is thirteen months. Tonight was one of those nights when nursing soothed us both into a long languor. After playing feverishly for three hours, he was calmed by a hot and breezy evening walk, and he sat for his bath with unusual serenity. While nursing, clean and damp and clothed, he clasped his hands, fumbling his thumbs together. He didn’t kick his feet or swat his arms, but lay with heavy limbs, surrendering to sleep. When he pulled away, he rubbed his eyes, rolled over, and pressed his nose drunkenly into the bed. I lifted his body into my lap, and he landed his forehead on mine, then slid it down to the crook of my neck where he rested his cheek for a brief infinity. He was still save for his rising breath when I placed him in his crib.
This is the last night I’ll nurse him. The next two days, he’ll be manic with exhaustion and will refuse to eat. I’ll worry that he’ll struggle to sleep, but he’ll go down easy. So we’re down to a single feeding. The decision is his, really, my independent boy. The third day, I leave bedtime to my husband. I visit a friend and we drink rosé while we stroll through the neighborhood. My long, flowered dress sways as I walk. The sky is the color of a bruised peach, but I feel effervescent, a tall flute of Bellini.
To the opening party of her 1974 retrospective at the Whitney, Neel, herself 74, wore a fur hat and a glitter dress. She drank and danced. The New York art scene had finally begun to celebrate her work in early 1970s, as feminist theorists and activists claimed the artist as their own. Women were beginning to write about the complex psychological experience of motherhood, and Neel’s portraits of mothers in all of their varied emotions spoke the language of the movement. A great un-silencing was taking place, and those finding their voice recognized that Neel had been speaking out on the canvas for decades. Neel didn’t identify herself with the libbers, as she called them, but was grateful for the attention.
Jack Bauer, the director of the Whitney and curator of the retrospective, credited her with preserving figurative painting through the era of abstraction. He gave Neel her first major museum exhibition comprising fifty-eight works, mothers and children among them. In interviews in the late seventies, she speaks of that exhibition with a girlish pride. “Did you see my show at the Whitney? I had the whole second floor.”
It changed everything for her. “I always felt that I didn’t have the right to paint,” she remembered in 1979, “because I had two sons and I had so many things that I should be doing and here I was painting, but that show convinced me that I had a perfect right to paint. I shouldn’t have ever felt that but I did feel it and after that show I never felt that anymore.” She gave this interview at age seventy-nine, self-possessed in metallic, wing-tip glasses and a fur hat, justified in her commitment to painting, and to painting portraits.
The Whitney retrospective was the first of many major solo exhibitions. Her work has been shown and acquired by major museums around the world and is still celebrated for having preserved and invigorated portraiture through the twentieth century.
One of Neel’s earliest works, dated 1926, is a mother and child in the Havana slums. In New York, she painted a mother draped in a floral sari, pregnant neighbors, fellow artists’ pregnant wives, an art critic and her little girl. Her grief as a young mother sparked an obsession that persisted throughout her career. It’s clear that, in the end, her motherhood enriched her painting. That was the only way for Neel, for she was committed that motherhood would not stop her from making art. “Keep on painting,” she said in 1979. “Women get pregnant and they give up painting for three or four years. They never go back to it. It’s finished. But you just should keep on painting no matter how difficult it is.” It was difficult for her. I imagine that the specters of its cost cast their shadows her whole life long. If I could paint her, she’d be dancing at the Whitney in that glitter dress with her silver hair. All at once she is grandmother, mother, and childless woman, she is celebrity and nobody, she is the hero and the wretch.
And how would she paint me? I’d be sprawled on the bed in the dim morning light, Torrance at my breast. For I haven’t yet given up that final feeding. My face would be shadowed, half lit and blissful, half shaded and spent. Then I’d put him back to sleep for a few hours and force myself to stay awake. I’d put on the coffee, and I’d sit to write a few good words before he stirs.