The Blue Man: Expository Essay

The chair he is sitting in is also cobalt. Deep, royal, it melts like an ice cube on my tongue, cooling the visceral heat of the painting. The chair’s stripes are prison bars, and the subject is trapped. Locked in the frame, in the idea of himself he tries to portray to the world. A constant battle against his melancholy nature, a societal obligation to display confidence and ease. Yet he blends into the chair, and once more he becomes evanescent. I hold my breath. He is still there.

I look to his hands, his face, and it is now clear they are the most polished part of the painting. It is as if the painter wanted to add more nuance to the focal points of human communication, adding layer upon layer of paint… Or perhaps so many beiges, browns and greens show an inner turmoil, all his emotions coming up to his skin like a blush. Uncertainty? Anger? Fear? None of these? We can only guess. All we know is that there is a life beyond the painting.

My first encounter with Alice Neel’s The Arab was laced with curiosity. How could a man be at once so open and so closed? By letting her subjects choose their own pose, Neel gave them room to live in her paintings. Thus, his psyche also shines through his bipolar stance: one arm relaxed, one brow furrowed, shirt open, legs closed. In a public context, these details would have gone unnoticed, but because of the nature of the painted portrait, I sat for over thirty minutes gradually getting past the wall of apparent confidence The Arab was projecting.

I then began to notice the cobalt blue lining his silhouette, in his hair and clothes, like a ghost of his inner melancholy. It was a conscious decision on the part of Alice Neel to show how this projected confidence was tinged with inner sadness. Judging by his clothing choices (fashionable boot-cut jeans and bomber jacket), The Arab was very much aware of his appearance. In a “boys don’t cry, man up!” world of hegemonic masculinity, where men were expected to interiorize their emotions, it is only natural to find these same behaviors in The Arab, a reflection of his time.

However, we cannot force a political narrative on Alice Neel’s paintings. While she spoke openly about including African American and Hispanic minorities in her portrait gallery, she has never made any reference to Arabs. Perhaps it was just a missing piece to her pictorial anthology of Zeitgeist portraits, a minority she had no yet painted. Or it was simply a friend or acquaintance she found interesting who insisted she title the painting thus. Sadly, there are no records available on this often-overlooked painting that immediately caught my eye in the Cantor art collection of Stanford.

When looking into The Arab’s eyes, echoes of a conflicted soul, it is clear that intimacy is key in the effect of the painting. It serves two purposes, and the first is to create a relationship between the sitter and the viewer, where The Arab’s psyche gradually reveals itself to us. This is what makes the painting a metaphor of the subject’s character; without this connection with The Arab I would not have been compelled to look at him for as long as I did, or want to understand him thus. The second purpose is political – through this connection, we become open to the potential message Alice Neel wishes to convey. The Arab is an equal, and suddenly we find ourselves questioning Arab stereotypes in the media.