Alice Neal: Discovering a great 20th century painter

New York is experiencing a resurgence of interest in painter Alice Neel, with art enthusiasts flocking to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to appreciate her work. As critic Roberta Smith noted in the New York Times, “it’s time for her to take her rightful place in the pantheon.”

Born in 1900, Neel was never swayed by the Impressionist movement that was prevalent in art schools at the time. She had a deep love for America and dedicated her career to painting one subject: people. The title of her exhibition, “People Come First”, aptly captures the essence of her work for those unfamiliar with it.

In her career, Neel not only battled against social discrimination but also sought to represent women in her artwork. She was an advocate for gay rights and persistently voiced her opposition to racial and social oppression.

Neel’s subjects were diverse and included people of color, the poor, the elderly, children, immigrants, gay and trans individuals, laborers, artists, and political activists. Throughout her career, she painted them with conviction, both clothed and unclothed, sick and healthy. Her work spanned from Greenwich Village in the 1930s, later to Spanish Harlem, and from 1962, in West Harlem. The attention and love she showed these individuals continue to resonate in her artwork today.

Neel painted women in a way that not only empowered them but also gave them a distinct identity. The psychological intensity of her female nudes was later recognized in the works of Lucian Freud, decades after her time.

While the 1930s were her most productive years, Neel only gained significant recognition four decades later. It was during this period that she began painting women differently, transitioning from portraits of family, friends, and strangers, to her first nudes. After surviving the grief of her husband’s abandonment – who took their daughter and returned to Cuba – and a year in a psychiatric hospital, Neel began painting women as no one had done before.

This was a time when a vulnerable Neel recognized the power of women beyond the confines of mere portraiture. She liberated them from their clothes, their roles, the passive attitudes they were subjected to, and even the history of art itself.

Neel’s approach to painting women was transformative, bestowing them with power and, more importantly, identity. The psychological intensity she brought to her depictions of the female nude was something that people only recognized decades later as a grand gesture in the works of Lucian Freud.

In her art, the idealized representation of bodies is discarded; instead, they are depicted as suffering and perishable, subject to time and circumstance. There is nothing passive in her approach. She captures and amplifies the inner attitudes of women, producing work that is both genuine and honest.

She was ahead of her time. Her work was controversial because she challenged the conventional portrayal of women and defied her own traditional role.

Today, with the benefit of hindsight, we are less concerned with the physical attributes of her models, such as their weight, sagging breasts, or drooping limbs. Instead, we see the intensity of their gaze as a sign of strength. If Neel had heeded the art critics of her era, she might have stopped painting. She rejected the distortion in her portraits, both in the appearance of the models and their surroundings. This was a stark departure from the accepted norms of depicting female nudity.

In 2010, the legendary modern and contemporary art curator Barry Walker, renowned for his focus on works by Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso, and Arshile Gorky, and for elevating the reputation of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, mounted a retrospective of Alice Neel’s work. Titled “Alice Neel: Painted Truths”, this landmark exhibition and reference catalogue reignited the debate about her work and positioned her as one of the greatest portrait artists of the twentieth century.

“My life would be empty without painting,” Alice Neel says in a video. “If I didn’t paint, maybe I wouldn’t be alive. I wanted to capture life as it passes by. I didn’t think of my painting as feminist.” In today’s terms, what she means is that the faces she painted and the stories they tell transcend gender, age, and race. They are imbued with humanity and dignity.

Among the 100 works on display is her most revealing portrait of Andy Warhol. Painted in 1970, two years after Valerie Solanas shot him, seriously wounding him. Warhol was declared clinically dead, but after a tremendous struggle, doctors managed to revive him. The bullets had torn through his lungs, spleen, stomach, and liver, and for the rest of his life, he had to wear a surgical corset to keep his organs in place.

In Neel’s portrait, Warhol – the master of image management, especially his own – appears almost blindfolded, vulnerable, and seemingly unconcerned. It’s a moment of calm in his tumultuous life, a pause in his self-creation. His scars are visible above the corset he wears. He is depicted naked from the waist up, sitting like a schoolboy with his arms crossed over his knees and his polished brown shoes on display.

Neel created a unique image of Warhol that bears no resemblance to the legend we know today, nor to his public persona in the 1970s. In revealing herself, Neel “persuades” her models to feel a sense of closeness and trust.

In the nakedness of their interaction, there are no models and artists, just individuals standing opposite each other, unshielded and intimate. This rawness is embodied in the opening portrait of the exhibition, “Margaret Evans Pregnant.” The painting captures a pregnant woman gazing intently, her image mirrored subtly in the background, presenting the before and after of pregnancy. It’s a layered work of art, fusing elements of expressionism, pop art, and minimalism.

Neal excelled in crafting sublime portraits of pregnant women, masterfully capturing the intricate and ever-evolving state of women during a unique phase of their lives, devoid of any fictional pretense.

Alice Neal rose to fame when she painted Kate Millett for TIME magazine’s August 1970 special issue, The politics of sex. That’s when the world took notice of this bohemian woman and activist, and so did the Whitney Museum of American Art. After years on the periphery, Neal was finally acknowledged for the complex realities her works portrayed, spanning political, feminist, and deeply personal themes, including the decay of the human body and old age.

Her most profound portrait, not in terms of skill or technique, but in passion, bravery, and honesty, is her self-portrait, a testament to her insatiable and relentless curiosity about human nature. Four years before her death in 1980, she painted herself nude, seated in a blue and white striped armchair, holding a brush in one hand and a cloth in the other. She gazes earnestly, fully exposed, into the lens through which we, the viewers, scrutinize faces, sending a message to a sexist society that tends to revile aging bodies.

She conveys, as she does throughout her work, that life is deeply contradictory and transient, unpredictable, often cruel, yet immensely enjoyable.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York chose the perfect moment after the closure and quarantine due to the pandemic to spotlight a painter who challenged the concept of identity and personal history. Neal highlighted individuals from all walks of life and social strata like few others, while narrating a single story – that of the immense desire and passion of people to exist.