“I don’t paint like a woman is supposed to paint.
Thank God, art doesn’t bother about things like that.”
Alice Neel (January 28, 1900 – October 13, 1984) was an American visual artist, known for her portraits depicting friends, family, lovers, poets, artists, and strangers. Her paintings have an expressionistic use of line and color, psychological acumen, and emotional intensity. Her work depicts women through a female gaze, illustrating them as being consciously aware of the objectification by men and the demoralizing effects of the male gaze. Her work contradicts and challenges the traditional and objectified nude depictions of women by her male predecessors. Neel was called “one of the greatest portrait artists of the 20th century” by Barry Walker, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which organized a retrospective of her work in 2010.
Early life
Alice Neel was born on January 28, 1900, in Merion Square, Pennsylvania. Her father was George Washington Neel, an accountant for the Pennsylvania Railroad, and her mother was Alice Concross Hartley Neel. In mid-1900 her family moved to the rural town of Colwyn, Pennsylvania. Alice was the fourth of five children with three brothers and a sister. Her oldest brother, Hartley, died of diphtheria shortly after she was born. He was only eight years old. She was raised into a strait-laced middle-class family during a time of limited expectations and opportunities for women. Her mother had said to her: “I don’t know what you expect to do in the world, you’re only a girl.”
In 1918, after graduating from high school, she took the Civil Service exam and got a high-paying clerical position to help support her parents. After three years of work, taking art classes by night in Philadelphia, Neel enrolled in the Fine Art program at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art & Design) in 1921. In her student works she rejected impressionism, the popular style at the time, and instead embraced the Ashcan School of Realism. It is believed this influence came from one of the most prominent figures of the Ashcan School, Robert Henri, who also taught at Philadelphia School of Design for Women.
At Philadelphia School of Design for Women (Moore College of Art and Design), she won honorable mention in her painting class for the Francisca Naiade Balano Prize two years in a row. In 1925, Neel received the Kern Doge Prize for Best Painting in her life class. She graduated from Philadelphia School of Design for Women in 1925. Neel often said she chose to attend an all-girls school so as not to be distracted from her art by the temptations of the opposite sex.
Cuba
In 1924, Neel met Carlos Enríquez, an upper-class Cuban painter, at the Chester Springs summer school run by PAFA. The couple married on June 1, 1925, in Colwyn, Pennsylvania. Neel soon moved to Havana to live with Enríquez’s family. In Havana, Neel was embraced by the burgeoning Cuban avant-garde, a set of young writers, artists and musicians. In this environment Neel developed the foundations of her lifelong political consciousness and commitment to equality. Neel later said she had her first solo exhibition in Havana, but there are no dates or locations to confirm this. In March 1927, Neel exhibited with her husband in the XII Salon des Bellas Artes. This exhibition also included Eduardo Abela, Victor Manuel García Valdés, Marcelo Pogolotti, and Amelia Pelaez who were all part of the Cuban Vanguardia Movement. During this time, she had seven servants and lived in a mansion.
Personal difficulties, themes for art
Neel’s daughter, Santillana, was born on December 26, 1926, in Havana. In 1927, the couple returned to the United States to live in New York. Just a month before Santillana’s first birthday, she died of diphtheria. The trauma caused by Santillana’s death infused the content of Neel’s paintings, setting a precedent for the themes of motherhood, loss, and anxiety that permeated her work throughout her career. Shortly following Santillana’s death, Neel became pregnant with her second child. On November 24, 1928, Isabella Lillian (called Isabetta) was born in New York City. Isabetta’s birth was the inspiration for Neel’s “Well Baby Clinic”, a bleak portrait of mothers and babies in a maternity clinic more reminiscent of an insane asylum than a nursery.
In the spring of 1930, Carlos had given the impression he was going overseas to look for a place to live in Paris. Instead, he returned to Cuba, taking Isabetta with him. During the time of Enriquez’s absence, Neel sublet her New York apartment and traveled to work in the studio of her friends and fellow painters Ethel V Ashton and Rhonda Myers.
Mourning the loss of her husband and daughter, Neel suffered a massive nervous breakdown, was hospitalized, and attempted suicide. She was placed in the suicide ward of the Philadelphia General Hospital.
Even in the insane asylum, she painted. 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.
Ginny Neel, Alice’s daughter-in-law.
Deemed stable almost a year later, Neel was released from the sanatorium in 1931 and returned to her parents’ home. Following an extended visit with her close friend and frequent subject, Nadya Olyanova, Neel returned to New York.
Depression era
In New York. Neel painted the local characters, including Joe Gould, whom she depicted in 1933 with multiple penises, which represented his inflated ego and “self-deception” about who he was and his unfulfilled ambitions. The painting, a rare survivor of her early works, has been shown at Tate Modern.
During the Depression, Neel was one of the first artists to work for the Works Progress Administration. At the end of 1933, Neel was offered $30 a week to participate in the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) during an interview at the Whitney Museum. She had been living in poverty. While Neel participated in the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) and the Works Project Administration (WPA)/Federal Art Project, her work gained some recognition in the art world. While enrolled in these government programs, she painted in a realist style and her subjects were mostly Depression-era street scenes and Communist thinkers and leaders. Some of these sitters included Mother Bloor, the poet Kenneth Fearing, and Pat Whalen. She had an affair with a man named Kenneth Doolittle, who was a heroin addict and a sailor. In 1934, he set afire 350 of her watercolors, paintings and drawings. At this time, her husband Carlos proposed to reunite, although in the end the couple neither reunited nor officially filed for divorce.
Her world was composed of artists, intellectuals, and political leaders of the Communist Party, all of whom became subjects for her paintings. Her work glorified subversion and sexuality, depicting whimsical scenes of lovers and nudes, like a watercolor she made in 1935, Alice Neel And John Rothschild In The Bathroom, which showed the naked pair peeing. In the 1930s, Neel gained a reputation as an artist, and established a good standing within her circle of downtown intellectuals and Communist Party leaders. While Neel was never an official Communist Party member, her affiliation and sympathy with the ideals of Communism remained constant. In the 1930s, Neel moved to Spanish Harlem and began painting her neighbors, specifically women and children.
Female nude portraits
The summer of 1930 was a period she described “as one of her most productive” of her life because that was when she painted her earliest female nudes. It was during the time when she felt most vulnerable because of the loss of her children and separation from her husband. That autumn she suffered a nervous breakdown and had to be institutionalized. Neel’s subject matter changed; she went from painting portraits of ordinary people, family, friends, strangers, and well-known art critics to female nudes.
The female nude in Western art had always represented a “Woman” as vulnerable, anonymous, passive, and ageless and the quintessential object of the male gaze. However, Neel’s female nudes contradicted and “satirized the notion and the standards of the female body.” By this sharp contrast to this prevailing idealistic idea of how the female body should be portrayed in art, art historians believe she was able to free her female sitters from this prevailing ideology that in turn gave them an identity and power.
Through her use of “expressive line, vibrant palette, and psychological intensity”, Neel did not depict the human body in a realistic manner; it was the way she was able to capture and dignify her sitters’ psychological and internal standpoint that made the portraits realistic. For this reason, many art critics today describe Neel’s female nudes as truthful and honest portraits, although at the time the works were controversial in the art world because they questioned women’s traditional role. Neel often painted women in social interaction or in public spaces, starkly challenging the “Spheres of Femininity” within which most 19th-century women artists existed and worked. In other words, with her art Neel challenged the norms of women’s role in the household and in everyday life.
One of Neel’s best known early female nude portraits is of Ethel V. Ashton (1930; in Tate Modern, London). Neel depicted her school friend, Ethel, as many art historians described as “nearly crippled with self conscious by her own exposure”. Ethel’s body was exposed in a crouched seated position, where she was able to look the viewer directly in the eye. Ethel’s eyes were commonly described as “soulful” and expressing a sense a fear. Neel painted her friend through a distorted scale that added to the idea of “vulnerability and fearfulness.” Neel said of the image: “She’s almost apologizing for living. And look at all the furniture she has to carry all the time.” By furniture, the artist “referred to her heavy thighs, bulging stomach, and pendulous breasts.”
The formal elements of the painting, light and shadow, the brushstrokes, and the color are suggested to add pathos and humor to the work but they are done in a precise manner to convey a certain tone, which is vulnerability. The painting was exhibited 43 years later at the Alumni Exhibition, where it was severely criticized by many art critics and the general public. The painting received was firmly negative as it was thought to contradict the norms of how female nudes were supposed to be depicted. Ethel, the female nude, saw it on display and “stormed out of rage.” The particular painting of the female nude was neither sexual nor flattering to the female form. However, Neel’s aim was not to paint the female body in an idealistic way, she wanted to paint in a truthful and honest manner. For this reason she thought of herself as a realist painter.
Post-war years
Neel’s second son, Hartley, was born in 1941 to Neel and her lover, the communist intellectual Sam Brody. During the 1940s, Neel made illustrations for the Communist publication, Masses & Mainstream, and continued to paint portraits from her uptown home. However, in 1943, the Works Progress Administration ceased working with Neel, which made it harder for the artist to support her two sons. During this time Neel would shoplift and was on welfare to help make ends meet. Between 1940 and 1950, Neel’s art virtually disappeared from galleries, save for one solo show in 1944. In the 1950s, Neel’s friendship with Mike Gold and his admiration for her social realist work garnered her a show at the Communist-inspired New Playwrights Theatre. In 1959, Neel even made a film appearance after the director Robert Frank asked her to appear alongside a young Allen Ginsberg in the Beatnik film, Pull My Daisy (1959). The following year, her work was first reproduced in ARTnews magazine.
Pregnant female nudes
By the mid-1960s, many of Neel’s female friends had become pregnant, which inspired her to paint a series of these women nude. The portraits highlight instead of hiding the physical changes and emotional anxieties that coexist with childbirth.
When she was asked why she painted pregnant nudes, Neel replied,
It isn’t what appeals to me, it’s just a fact of life. It’s a very important part of life and it was neglected. I feel as a subject it’s perfectly legitimate, and people out of a false modesty, or being sissies, never show it, but it is a basic fact of life. Also, plastically, it is very exciting … I think its part of the human experience. Something that primitives did, but modern painters have shied away from because women were always done as sexual objects. A pregnant woman has a claim staked out; she is not for sale.
Neel chose to paint the “basic facts of life” and strongly believed that this form of subject matter is worthy enough to be painted in the nudes, which was what distinguished her from other artists of her time. The pregnant nudes suggested by the art historian, Ann Temkin, allowed Neel to “collapse the imaginary dichotomy that polarizes women into the chaste Madonna or the specter of the dangerous whore” as the portraits were of ordinary women that one sees all around, but not in art.
One of her works that depicted a pregnant female nude is Margaret Evans Pregnant (1978), now in a private collection. Margaret was painted while sitting on upright chair that forced her to expose her pregnant stomach even more, which became the central point in the canvas. Right behind the chair a mirror was placed which allowed the viewer to see the back of her head and neck. However, the mirrored reflection did not look anything like Margaret’s frontal portrait. The motive behind this particular section of the painting remains unknown, but art historian Jeremy Lewison says the image is “an uncanny double of the sitter and the artist, presaging older age”, and suggests that the reflection is of an older and wiser woman and perhaps a combination of Margaret and Neel’s reflection. Pamela Allara says Neel has been accurately characterized as a “sort of artist–sociologist who revived and redirected the dying genre of ameliorative portraiture by merging objectivity with subjectivity, realism with expressionism. In visually interpreting a person’s habitus, Neel understood that she could not be an objective observer, that her depictions would of necessity include her own response.”
Neel’s self portrait and last paintings
Neel painted herself in her eightieth year of life, seated on a chair in her studio. She presented herself fully nude. She wore her glasses and held her paintbrush on right hand and an old cloth on the other hand. The white color of her hair and the several creases and folds of her bare skin indicated her old age. As she painted herself seated on the chair her body faced away from the viewer while head was turned towards the viewer. The portrait was completed in 1980 but she had started to paint it five years earlier, before abandoning it for a period of time. However, she was encouraged by her son Richard to complete it and came back to in her early 80s as she was also invited to take part in an exhibition of Self-Portraits at the Harold Reed Gallery in New York. When Neel’s unconventional self-portrait was showcased it attracted considerable attention. Neel painted herself in a truthful manner as she exposed her saggy breasts and belly for everyone to see. Yet again in her last painting, she challenged the social norms of what was acceptable to be depicted in art. Her self-portrait was one of her last works before she died. On October 13, 1984, Neel died with her family in New York City apartment from advanced colon cancer.
Kate Millett
Alice Neel used photographs of Kate Millett in order to create this painting because Millett had refused to pose for Neel. Neel’s painting was inspired by the modern Feminist Movement in the 1960s. During this movement Kate Millett was the author of Sexual Politics. Alice Neel’s career began to blossom when the feminist art movement happened and the painting of Kate Millett represented a feminist icon. Neel considered herself, “a collector of souls” and she captured Millett’s powerful aura. At a time when women were fighting for equal opportunities and being ignored, Neel created this portrait for women who were looking for a mentor. In this unique painting, Kate Millett is directly looking at the viewer and her stare is commanding and confident. “Kate Millett” appeared as the front cover of Time Magazine in September 25, 2017.
Recognition
By the mid-1970s, Neel had gained celebrity and stature as an important American artist. The American Academy and the Institute of Arts and Letters elected Neel in 1976. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter presented her with a National Women’s Caucus for Art award for outstanding achievement. Neel’s reputation was at its height at the time of her death in 1984.
Neel’s life and works are featured in the documentary Alice Neel, which premiered at the 2007 Slamdance Film Festival and was directed by her grandson, Andrew Neel. The film was given a New York theatrical release in April of that year.
Exhibitions
In 1943, Neel’s female nude portrait of Ethel Ashton was exhibited at Alumni Exhibition for the very first time, 13 years after the painting was created, and received brutal criticisms from art critics and the general public. In 1974, Neel’s work was given a retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and posthumously, in the summer of 2000, also at the Whitney. In 1980 she was invited to take part in an exhibition of self-portraits at the Harold Reed Gallery in New York, where her self-portrait was showcased for the first time.
The first exhibition dedicated to Neel’s works in Europe was held in London in 2004 at the Victoria Miro Gallery. Jeremy Lewison, who had worked at the Tate, was the curator of the collection. In 2001 the Philadelphia Museum of Art organized a retrospective of her art entitled Alice Neel. She was the subject of a retrospective entitled Alice Neel: Painted Truths organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in Texas, which was on view from March 21 to June 15, 2010. The exhibition traveled to Whitechapel Gallery, London, and Moderna Museet Malmö, Malmö, Sweden. In 2013, the first major presentation of the artist’s watercolors and drawings was on view at Nordiska Akvarellmuseet in Skärhamn, Sweden. Moore College of Art hosted a solo exhibition of alumna Neel’s work in 1971.
In 2017, Hilton Als curated the exhibition Alice Neel, Uptown, at the Victoria Miro Gallery in London, (May 18–July 29, 2017). The Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, Germany presented the exhibition Alice Neel – Painter of Modern Life from October 10, 2017 to January 14, 2018.
A career-spanning retrospective of Neel’s work opened in March 2021 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Titled “Alice Neel: People Come First,” the exhibit features more than 100 works and is the largest-ever show of Neel’s work in New York and the first in two decades.
Source: Wikipedia.
“I do not pose my sitters. I do not deliberate and then concoct… 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.”
Alice Neel’s Portraits of Difference
A retrospective at the Met shows the artist’s deep feeling for all that she is not.
By Hilton Als for The New Yorker. Published in the print edition of the April 26 & May 3, 2021, issue, with the headline “Her American Life.”
She had no business moving uptown. Generally, nice white lady artists like Alice Neel lived among their own kind, down in the Village, or they went wherever the male painters went and helped make those guys’ stories happen first. But Neel always wanted a different kind of life, so in 1938, at the age of thirty-eight, she chose to leave what she disparagingly called the “honky-tonk” atmosphere of the Village and move to Spanish Harlem—where European immigrants were giving way to Dominican and Puerto Rican immigrants. She learned the place by observing and then painting what she saw and wanted to understand: a “new,” diverse America, populated by men of color, single mothers sitting on stoops, and children in repose. As in Chekhov’s stories, there is no “other” in her unsatirical, pointedly political work—just us, without tears. Community is the family you choose. Neel chose Harlem, and said so in an untitled poem:
I love you Harlem
Your life your pregnant
Women, your relief lines
Outside the bank . . .
What a treasure of goodness
And life shambles . . .
Neel moved to Spanish Harlem with José Santiago Negron, a working-class Puerto Rican musician, who fathered her third child, Richard, the following year. (Neel’s first and only husband was the artist Carlos Enríquez Gómez, with whom she had two children: Santillana, born in 1927, who died of diphtheria as an infant, and Isabetta, born in 1928, whom Gómez took to Cuba when she was two, to be reared by his family.) For more than twenty years, Neel’s Harlem apartment, a railroad flat filled with the stuff of life, was her studio and way station, the home where she brought up two kids on welfare—her fourth child, Hartley, the son of the volatile filmmaker Sam Brody, was born in 1941—struggled to get them into good schools, and made work that was pretty much ignored until she became a kind of feminist cause in the early seventies. (She died in 1984.) That she managed to do any of this is just one of the moving narrative threads that run through the spectacular retrospective “Alice Neel: People Come First,” at the Met, through August 1st. Another is her faith not only in the power of other people but in the power and the necessity of articulating the deepest language that makes a self. “You know what it takes to be an artist?” Neel says in Phoebe Hoban’s 2010 biography, “Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty.” “Hypersensitivity and the will of the devil. To never give up.”
Born in 1900, Neel was brought up in Colwyn, Pennsylvania, about ten miles outside Philadelphia. Colwyn was a nice enough version of the “old,” or established, America that Neel hardly ever painted. (Not every artist needs to look back in order to look forward.) Her father worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad, and her mother was said to be a descendant of Richard Stockton, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Almost from the first, Neel, a sensitive girl who was prone to anxiety, felt steadied by the act of visualizing the world; painting soon became both a gateway into life and a bulwark against people who said that she wasn’t entitled to have one. According to Hoban, when Neel told her grandmother that she wanted to be a painter, the older woman said, “I don’t know what you expect to do in the world, Alice. You’re only a girl.” Resistance can breed resilience. Talent must be protected, especially if it’s viewed as a threat. And what’s more threatening to the status quo than a visionary?
In 1921, Neel enrolled at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women. One of her early influences was the work of Robert Henri, a founder of the Ashcan School—a movement that challenged the bourgeois prettiness of the work of the American Impressionists. The Ashcan School focused on what the Impressionists left out—poverty, dereliction, ugliness. Neel’s developing realism went further. She was not Ashcan but emotional gutbucket, a miner of difficult truths.
The late art historian Linda Nochlin—the subject of a startlingly vivid 1973 portrait in the Met exhibition—describes, in her seminal 1971 essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” the nineteenth-century insistence “upon a modest, proficient, self-demeaning level of amateurism as a ‘suitable accomplishment’ for the well-brought up young woman.” A woman painter could have a place in the art world only if she knew how to keep to her place. Neel, born at the start of a new century, wasn’t having any of that. And you can feel her fury and disgust when she describes some of her classmates. “There were all these rich girls who went there as a finishing school,” she says, in Hoban’s book. “I realized that wasn’t what I was there for. . . . For three years I worked so hard because I had a conscience about going to art school.” That conscience made her aware that she could go to school while many others could not. “When I’d go into the school, the scrubwomen would be coming back from scrubbing office floors all night,” she said. “It killed me that these old gray-headed women had to scrub floors, and I was going in there to draw Greek statues.”
You can see Neel’s deep feeling for all that she is not in some of the earliest pieces in the Met show, including the remarkable “Bathing in a Furnished Room” (1927). The painting seems almost to have been rendered from below the surface of objective looking, which is to say pulled up from somewhere—the subconscious? the heart?—that is finely attuned to isolation.
A commonplace observation about great portraitists is that they are always, in some way, painting themselves. Neel’s genius was to make us understand not just her interest in her subjects but why we are interested in one another. “Alice Neel: People Come First,” was co-curated by Kelly Baum and Randall Griffey with clarity and rigor. They have organized the galleries according to eight dominant themes in Neel’s life as a woman and an artist, including home, motherhood, and the nude. Within those categories, the paintings are mostly hung chronologically, so that we can see how Neel developed and changed vis-à-vis each theme. At first, this felt a little too regimented to me, but after a second visit I saw the logic in it: Neel has too many artistic layers for a straight chronological show. There’s a profound spiritual component to the work; her intense and casual surfaces feel like a wall that she wants her subjects’ souls to walk through to meet ours. At times, her focus, her desire to understand who her subjects are and, by extension, who you might be, can have you rushing out of the galleries for a breath of air.
Neel’s paintings never let you rest, and why should they? She never rested. She seemed to be reaching for something her entire life. Love, perhaps, though never safety or security, which were anathema to her. After Santillana died, Neel broke down. There were multiple suicide attempts, and there were men, alternately feckless and controlling, some of whom left her and at least one of whom—Kenneth Doolittle, a sailor and an opium addict—destroyed some of her work. Conflict, absence, loss, humor, drama, and uneasy, temporary resolution characterized her relationships, and one gets the sense that Neel was drawn to trouble in order to test her strength, her pride at being the last one standing amid the rubble and the excitement of living.
One painting in particular underlines all this. When Neel’s daughter Isabetta was nearly six, she visited her mother—the first time they’d seen each other since the girl was a toddler. To mark the occasion, Neel made a painting of Isabetta. After Doolittle slashed the painting, Neel repainted it. In “Isabetta” (1934-35), her daughter, whom Neel knows and does not know, stands nude before her, hands on hips, gazing straight ahead; she is elegant, alien, and cold, like a figurehead on a grand vintage car or a child in a horror film. She seems unsoftened by a mother’s love; indeed, the absence of it may have closed her off. The picture is as much about Isabetta’s defiance—Who can love me? Do you dare?—as it is about Neel’s will to be an artist, to see objectively, even if that means seeing her child’s distance from her. It’s a hard painting to look at, and it’s meant to be; the hard things of life went into making it.
After more than twenty years in Spanish Harlem, Neel moved to an apartment on the Upper West Side. There, her fortunes began to change; younger art critics, including this magazine’s Harold Rosenberg, discovered her work, and praised and supported it. In the early seventies, while she continued to paint New Yorkers who wore their otherness as both a form of fancy dress and a wound—“Jackie Curtis and Ritta Redd” and “Andy Warhol,” from 1970, are masterpieces of this kind—her paintings gained in power, in part because of their simplicity. She didn’t show the room in which her subject sat so much as gesture toward it. (The patch of blue in many of the post-Harlem pictures indicates the light from the bare bulb that Neel used to illuminate her sitters.) This was less a matter of time softening Neel’s view than of her authority relaxing into itself.
These great, almost unbearable late works bear witness to a bravura without a trace of self-consciousness. You can see it in “Carmen and Judy” (1972), a portrait of Neel’s cleaning lady nursing her disabled child. The curators point out that it was unusual for a woman of color to expose her body to the artist in this way, and I can vouch for that. Privacy is one of the few defenses there is against poverty and racism. But Carmen was no doubt able to reveal herself to Neel because she knew that Neel would see what she needed to see: Carmen’s trust, Judy’s dependence, all those years of living in a difference that was not difference to the artist, who had her own years of loss, of children’s love, of trying to render this and so much more in works that would continue to live, despite the darkness of her obscurity and then the light of her fame. Looking at Carmen look at Neel, and thus at us, is like staring straight at the sun. We can’t do it, but we try anyway.
a cow, instead of a nude man, served as a model for the women students.
Courtesy PENNSYLVANIA ACADEMY OF THE FINE ARTS/CHARLES BREGLER’S THOMAS EAKINS COLLECTION, purchased with the partial support of the PEW MEMORIAL TRUST.