"Thanksgiving," 1965. Oil
on canvas from the collection of Jonathan and Monika Brand,
Portland, Ore.
PHILADELPHIA, PENN. - Organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art
to celebrate the centennial of the artist in her native city,
"Alice Neel" is the first full-fledged retrospective of the work
of one of Twentieth Century America's most provocative and
interesting painters. Its 75 paintings and watercolors feature
the direct, insightful portraits for which Neel is best known,
along with rarely seen still lifes and street scenes that expand
appreciation for the breadth of her achievements.
Finally out from under the shadow of abstract art, which
dominated the art world for much of her career, Neel's figurative
oeuvre comes across as unfailingly unflinching and candid. It is
easy to understand why her no-holds-barred images are greatly
admired by some and detested by others. Few will deny that Neel's
work is intriguing and powerful.
In the course of a spicy and adventurous life, Neel (1900-1984)
created audacious, uncompromising likenesses of people and places
that are as fascinating as her unconventional saga - and are
among the most disturbing and potent images in our national
portraiture. As the artist once said, "I decided to paint a human
comedy - such as Balzac had done in literature."
An unswerving realist in the era of modern abstraction, a
portraitist at a time when such work was out of fashion, Neel
painted in virtual obscurity for most of her life. To some extent
she rode the rise of the women's movement to fame in the 1970s
and '80s. She died in 1984.
"Nazis Murder Jews," 1936. Oil on canvas courtesy of Robert
Miller Gallery, New York City.
In recent years there has been widespread interest in her work.
Neel's unconventional life and idiosyncratic subjects have
combined to make her almost a cult figure among feminist artists
and art historians intrigued by the manner in which she viewed
her subject matter - portraits, nudes, streetscapes - in terms of
the female experience. The current exhibition ought to enhance
her standing among mainstream observers as well.
After opening at the Whitney Museum of American Art last summer,
"Alice Neel" was seen at the Addison Gallery of American Art at
Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. this winter. It will be on
view in Philadelphia through April 15 and concludes its tour at
the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, June 10 to September 2.
The exhibition was curated by Ann Temkin, The Muriel and Philip
Berman Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia
Museum. Underscoring the significance of showing Neel's art in
her home town, Temkin observes that the painter "brought an
innate ability to capture character and a wholly modern sense of
urgency to the genre preferred by her Philadelphia forebears,
Charles Willson Peale, Thomas Eakins, Cecilia Beaux and Mary
Cassatt."
The feisty artist began life in the most prosaic circumstances.
She was born and brought up in towns outside Philadelphia,
notably Colwyn, which she later described as puritanical and
stifling. Her rather passive father was a railroad clerk of Irish
extraction, her strong-willed mother a descendant of a signer of
the Declaration of Independence.
Knowing early on that she wanted to be an artist, Neel enrolled
at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College
of Art and Design) in 1921. She spent four years there mastering
her craft, drawing from plaster casts and learning about anatomy.
Neel found that painting gave her a sense of freedom, a feeling
that endured throughout her long and complicated life.
During a summer session run by the Pennsylvania Academy of the
Fine Arts, she fell in love with and married a fellow student
from a wealthy, aristocratic Cuban family, Carlos Enríquez. While
living for a time in Havana, she had a baby girl and turned out
canvases of beggars and poor mothers with children that
foreshadowed her later interests.
Returning to New York, Neel and Enríquez lived an impoverished
existence, punctuated by a series of tragedies for Neel. Soon
after her daughter died of diphtheria, in 1927 her husband took
their second child, Isabella (Isabetta) to his family in Cuba and
began a new life without his wife in Paris. She rarely saw her
daughter thereafter.
Neel suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized. While
recovering with her family, she attempted suicide and was
hospitalized again, this time in the suicide ward of Philadelphia
General Hospital.
During a year of recovery, a social worker convinced Neel to
resume her art as a means of releasing her feelings. Painting
became not just a career but, literally, a means of survival.
"The minute I sat in front of a canvas," Neel observed years
later, "I was happy. Because it was a world, and I could do as I
liked in it." In that spirit, she persevered, recording the
tragedies of her life and her hospital experience in a series of
graphic, often disturbing watercolors, filled with raw emotion.
Her daughter-in-law, Nancy Neel, recalled that "Alice loved
interesting people, poetic people, intellectual people,
out-of-the ordinary people, ones who were down on their luck."
Indeed, the painter called herself "a collector of souls," and
lived the life she depicted.
"Isabetta" (1934-1935) shows her second daughter by Enríquez at
about the age of six, in a stark, confrontational pose, when she
came from Havana to visit her mother in New York. The little
girl's assertive pose contrasts sharply with Nineteenth Century
depictions of childhood innocence. "The galleries would not show
it, as they said it was indecent," Neel recalled, "by the time
they showed it, they said it was Lolita." Mother and daughter met
again for the last time in 1939, although Isabetta lived until
1982.
When Neel became romantically involved with John Rothschild, a
wealthy travel business operator, Doolittle slashed many of her
paintings and drawings and came at her with his curved Turkish
knife. Neel and Rothschild remained close friends and occasional
lovers through his marriages to three other women, until his
death in 1975. A 1958 portrait, "John in a Striped Shirt,"
suggests the brooding demeanor of this long-time companion.
In the 1930s Neel survived on work for the Federal Art Project.
Like many other artists, writers and intellectuals during this
period she became involved in numerous left-wing organizations
and causes. As a member of the Artists Union, she joined picket
lines, and she was briefly a member of the Communist Party.
She was a member of the Party when she painted "Nazis Murder
Jews" (1936), a recollection of a prescient Communist torchlight
parade. When shown at the A.C.A. Galleries, a critic said it was
an interesting picture but the "sign is too obvious." Responded
Neel: "If they had noticed that sign, thousands of Jews might
have been saved."
Reflecting her Depression-era political and social concerns, she
satirized activities of a venerable social-services organization
in "Investigation of Poverty at the Russell Sage Foundation" in
1933. Recreating a scene she had witnessed, Neel depicted a
weeping woman with seven children who were living under an
overturned automobile, being questioned by a battery of
well-dressed do-gooders. The foundation, said the artist, "never
gave a penny to the poor, but they investigated the poor. Out of
that came social security and welfare, but before that, you just
starved to death."
In 1935 Neel became romantically involved with a young Puerto
Rican musician, José Santiago, and moved with him to Spanish
Harlem. Before splitting up with Santiago in 1939, he fathered a
son, Richard Neel. The painter remained in Spanish Harlem for a
quarter century, painting neighbors and residents of that rundown
area, whose courage and dignity she admired. "I love to paint
people mutilated and beaten up by the rat race in New York," she
said.
Neel's occasional views of buildings in the area, such as "Rag in
Window" (1959), showed jutting fire escapes and drab, somber
facades.
Soon after Santiago took off, Neel began a relationship with Sam
Brody, a radical filmmaker and photographer, with whom she lived
off and on for the next two decades. In 1941 she gave birth to
another son, Hartley, who like his brother Richard was given the
Neel name. Raised essentially by a single mother, the boys were
educated in a private school into which they were talked by Neel,
and attended prestigious universities and graduate schools. One
ended up a doctor, the other a lawyer. Richard and Hartley, their
spouses and children became subjects of numerous candid, but
affectionate, Neel portraits.
After her father died in 1946, Neel painted a rather strange view
of him in his coffin, reflecting both her grief and her
resentment at his passive approach to life. "The format of this
painting," says curator Temkin, "recalls portraits of the dead in
the art of Hispanic cultures."
Neel did several likenesses of her doughty mother, the most
touching of which was executed after Mrs Neel came to live with
her daughter in New York. Pictured in 1953, a few months before
she died of cancer, white-haired, frail and wrapped in a flannel
bathrobe, the 86-year-old woman projects both the strength and
depth that her daughter admired, and the weariness and fear that
marked her last days. It is, says Temkin, "a portrait so searing
that the most private of relationships becomes a public one...Mrs
Neel could be not only Alice's but anyone's elderly mother."
From time to time Neel created still lifes, which she regarded as
a "rest" from doing more trying portraits. "It's just composing
and thinking about lines and colors, and often flowers," she
said. An unusual example is "Thanksgiving" (1965), depicting a
frozen capon thawing in a sink. The adjacent Ajax bottle, Neel
joked, was her contribution to Pop art.
Laboring in relative obscurity for years, Neel continued to paint
in her unswervingly candid and realistic manner. She had several
shows at New York's A.C.A. Galleries and elsewhere, but they
attracted little attention.
Then, in the early 1960s, after she moved across Central Park
from East 108th Street to West 107th Street, she began to benefit
from the resurgence of figurative art and the onset of the
women's movement. "A rich constellation of circumstances that
included the dawning of the women's movement and the art world's
rekindled interest in representation and the human figure focused
the spotlight on Neel and her work," writes Temkin in the
exhibition catalogue. Neel's unusual lifestyle and sassy
personality enhanced interest in her work, and helped open doors
to celebrity sitters.
She began to create portraits of New York artists, poets, critics
and performers she knew, documenting the vibrant cultural milieu
of which she found herself an increasingly well-known member. Her
regeneration was reflected in larger canvases with livelier
brushwork and brighter, more intense colors, making for energetic
likenesses often further animated by an acerbic wit. Neel's work
documented her dictum that "When portraits are good art they
reflect the culture, the time and many other things."
Among her prominent art-world subjects were fellow artists Benny
Andrews, Isabel Bishop, Red Grooms, Duane Hanson, Marisol, Moses
and Raphael Soyer, Faith Ringgold, Robert Smithson and Andy
Warhol. There were curators John Baur, Tom Freudenheim, Henry
Geldhzler and Frank O'Hara, and art historians Ann Sutherland
Harris, Cindy Nemser and Linda Nochlin. While some of Neel's
likenesses of ordinary people tended to be over the top, she
painted these well-known figures with respect and perception.
Neel started in 1960 by depicting poet Frank O'Hara, who was also
an influential curator at the Museum of Modern Art. Over the
course of five posing sessions she showed him in what she termed
"a romantic falconlike profile with a bunch of lilacs" in the
background, very much the image of an admired poet and curator.
A second, this time frontal, portrait is much less flattering,
suggesting some conflict had erupted between the painter and
sitter. In the latter likeness, as Neel described it, "His teeth
looked like tombstones; the lilacs had withered." Neel biographer
Pamela Allara calls it "a visualization of pure hysteria, a man
in the throes of a nervous breakdown....[O'Hara] is less a man
creatively inspired than one living on the edge." (Within six
years O'Hara was dead, at the age of 40.)
As Richard Flood observes in the catalogue, this "is a cruel
portrait....a violently assaultive representation," which makes
"one wonder what transpired between the first sitting and the
last." Neel felt the second likeness "expressed his troubled life
more than the first," but O'Hara was not thrilled by it. He never
wrote about her and never included her work in an exhibition at
MoMA.
Neel's vigorously brushed portrait of then-youthful painter
Robert Smithson in 1962 showed an intense, serious artist with a
bad case of acne. Eight years later Smithson startled the art
world with "Spiral Jetty," an enormous environmental sculpture
made of earth, rocks and salt crystals in the Great Salt Lake,
Utah.
Perhaps the most sympathetic and warm art-world likeness is that
of African-American painter, sculptor and performance artist
Faith Ringgold (1977), strong and regal in a flowing red, white
and black dress. Neel met Ringgold, famed for her vivid story
quilts, through the National Women's Caucus.
One of Neel's most memorable portraits, of Pop art star Andy
Warhol, was painted in 1970, two years after Valerie Solanis had
tried to kill him with a handgun. A wan, androgynous figure with
drooping breasts, his vulnerability is underscored by the corset
he wears to support stomach muscles injured in the shooting. This
graphic depiction is decidedly at odds with the chic glamour of
the Warhol myth. "Imposing on the portrait a sympathy Warhol
never sought, Neel makes the artist the victim of the alternative
life-style he so visibly embraced," says Allara.
The flamboyantly heterosexual Neel befriended a number of
homosexual artists, including Warhol, whose lives and art were so
different from her own. "Andy is nice. Considerate and rather
quiet," she said. "But as an art-world personality he represents
a certain pollution of this era."
Among those whom Neel portrayed from the periphery of the art
scene was Jackie Curtis, who had been born as a man, but became a
transvestite star in Warhol's 1968 film, Flash. Neel first
painted a double portrait of Curtis in drag with her partner,
Ritta Redd. In "Jackie Curtis as a Boy" (1972), she depicted
Curtis wearing a St Louis Cardinals baseball shirt and jeans.
"David Bourdon and Gregory Battcock" (1970) shows art critics
Bourdon, resplendent in his underwear and red socks, in contrast
to his companion, Battcock, in a suit and tie. Both men, who were
active in New York's avant-garde art scene, appeared in Warhol's
underground productions.
"Linda Nochlin and Daisy" (1973) is a particularly tense and
penetrating portrait, reflecting the unusual situation in which
the artist engaged a famous art historian as subject. The awkward
poses of mother and daughter, exacerbated by the application of
clashing colors, add up to an uncomfortable image for viewers.
Nochlin's staring eyes seem to be challenging both the painter
and the viewer, in contrast to the more open, welcoming gaze of
the child. It is a powerful, provocative, affecting image.
Most sympathetic of all Neel's likenesses are those of her sons
and their families. "Nancy and the Rubber Plant" (1975),
measuring a substantial 80 by 36 inches, shows her
daughter-in-law, Nancy Neel, posing in the artist's apartment.
She sits under an overflowing tropical plant and a 1940 Neel
portrait of Audrey McMahon, one-time New York regional director
of the Federal Art Project.
"Andrew" (1978) depicts Neels' five-month-old grandson after his
mother laid him down to change his diaper.
"Annemarie and Georgie" (1982) is a relatively straightforward
view of her nephew, George Washington Neel, a college language
professor, and his German-born wife, seated on a colorful couch
in their home in Bloomsburg, Pa.
It was not until the 1970s that Neel's career really took off. In
1974, at the age of 74, she was finally given her first one-woman
exhibition at a major museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art.
In 1977 art historian Ann Sutherland Harris called Neel the most
underrated artist of the century, "the finest portraitist that
America has produced since 1900."
Her new-found celebrity status was confirmed by election to the
National Institute of Arts and Letters, receiving a National
Women's Caucus for the Arts outstanding achievement award from
President Jimmy Carter, and appearing twice on the Tonight
Show with Johnny Carson. At least toward the end of her life,
some of her appeal was clearly linked to her outspoken, contrary
personality, the feisty, in-your-face persona she cultivated.
Even as her health deteriorated in her last few years, Neel
maintained an active schedule of painting, lecturing and varied
public appearances. Her enthusiasm for her life and the course
she had followed never wavered. "I had a very hard life and I
paid for it," she observed in 1975, "but I did what I wanted. I'm
a high-powered person."
Receiving an honorary degree at what is now Moore College of Art
and Design, her alma mater, in 1971, she declared, "It is a great
time to be...an artist. Everything has been and is being tried
out in art and this will...enrich consciousness. Art is hard work
but it is a great way of life."
Her only self-portrait, characteristically unsparing and graphic,
was executed when she was a robust 80. It shows the artist
holding a paintbrush and cloth, wearing only her eyeglasses. This
appropriately audacious coda to a colorful and productive career
is in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery. (Also
owned by the Portrait Gallery but not in the exhibition are
likenesses of scientist Linus Pauling, composer Virgil Thomson
and author Kate Millet.)
When she died of cancer in her West 107th Street apartment in
1984, obituaries recalled her plucky life, her dedication to art,
and her struggles against the prevailing tides of the art world.
The New York Times, calling her the "quintessential
bohemian," stressed the early neglect of her work and the later
vindication of her art.
Persevering through a lifetime of reversals and depravation,
unwavering in pursuing her chosen style in the face of art-world
opposition, Alice Neel created some of the most compelling and
memorable portraits of the last half-century. An improbable star
late in life, she is bound to attract a new crowd of admirers as
a result of the current retrospective.
"Faith Ringgold," 1977. Oil on canvas from the collection of
the Exxon Mobil Corporation, Irving, Tex.
As Anne d'Harnoncourt, director and chief executive officer of
the Philadelphia Museum of Art has observed, "The Centenary
salute to Alice Neel marks a particularly opportune moment for
the first full examination of an artist who transformed the
contemporary portrait and, in doing so, influenced succeeding
generations."
The exhibition catalogue, Alice Neel, is beautifully
illustrated with 175 reproductions - 100 in full color - of the
artist's work, and photographs chronicling her life. Edited by
exhibition curator Temkin, the 198-page book contains useful
essays by Temkin, assistant curator Susan Rosenberg and Richard
Flood, chief curator at the Walker Art Center.
Reminiscences by Neel's subjects and a detailed chronology of her
life add much to the book's value. Published in softcover by the
Philadelphia Museum and in hardcover by Harry N. Abrams in
association with the Philadelphia Museum, it will be treasured by
Neel fans and those interested in Twentieth Century American art.
Also highly recommended is Alice Neel by Boston University
art historian Patricia Hills, which weaves taped conversations
with the painter, and an enlightening text and many illustrations
into a valuable survey of Neel's career and art. It was published
by Abrams in 1983 and reprinted in 1995.
Pictures of People: Alice Neel's American Portrait Gallery
by Brandeis University art historian Pamela Allara, offers
additional insights into Neel's contributions to American art,
cultural and social history. It was published by Brandeis
University Press/University Press of New England in 1998.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is at 26th Street and Benjamin
Franklin Parkway. For information, 215/763-8100.
