ABSTRACT
Women artists have turned to realism since the nineteenth century, through force of circumstance if not through inclination. Some women realists are distinguished precisely because of their choice of unevocative motifs. Artists like Sylvia Mangold, Yvonne Jacquette, Susan Crile, or Janet Fish are really pictorial phenomenologists. In the field 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. One thinks of van Gogh's Neunen period portraits of peasants, weavers, railway workers and also of his intention to be an "illustrator of the people" when confronted by the dark, brooding, unrelenting, intensities of Alice Neel's early representations of the people of Spanish Harlem, where she lived during the forties.
