Alice Neel

In a time of highly abstract American artists in the 1950’s and 60’s dominated by men like Rothko, Pollock and Still, Alice Neel (1900-1984) painted figurative work in a style reminiscent of the early modernist German Expressionists.  Using color and caricature in a primitive technique, Alice captured the essence of her subjects with their unapologetic gazes at the viewer, using bold colors and expressive brushwork to paint “humanity”.

Eventually, after decades in the wilderness with paintings stacking up four deep against the walls of her Manhattan flat, Neel summoned sufficient courage to approach art-world figures. Their response appears implicit in each portrait. The art critic Gregory Battock takes the opportunity to come out in bright yellow underpants. Frank O'Hara, poet and curator at the Museum of Modern Art, shows his discolored teeth in nervous laughter.

Since Alice’s works did not conform to art world fashions of the times, her early work received little attention or recognition. When the culture of art changed from abstract expressionism and realism to minimalism of the 1970s, Alice remained a figurative artist. She was criticized she went against the social theory that women should or could not be artists and on top of that, a significant number of her paintings were nudes, highlighting individual appearance and real emotions. Many of Neel’s subjects were people she knew or friends. It wasn’t until the 1960’s that significant attention was paid to her work, well over half of which were created after the start of the 1960s, even though she’d been painting continuously throughout her whole life. The decades following her bloom of popularity and attention resulted in many exhibitions, public appearances - even on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and many art reviews.

In 1969, Alice received an Arts and Letters award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in New York. The following year she was to paint the now famous portrait of Andy Warhol, now to be considered a masterpiece. Depicted with eyes closed and clothed only from the waist down, the painting exposing scars on his body from recent gun shots fired at him, this was one of Neel’s only subjects painted this way. In 1971 Neel was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Moore College of Art and was elected to the American Academy and institute of Arts and Letters in 1976. Then in 1979, President Jimmy Carter presented Neel with a National Women’s Caucus for Art award for outstanding achievement in art. Famous for asking her sitters to pose nude, in 1980, Neel painted her own self portrait at eighty years old, unsurprisingly in the nude, showing the reality of her body at her age.

Through the later years of Alice’s life, she spent time with her family, traveling to many countries and continents with her sons and also created some paintings which were shown in exhibitions. Then on October 13, 1984 Alice passed away at the age of 84. To this day, her paintings created throughout her lifetime are being exhibited in galleries around the country and world.

Since her death Neel has continued to loom large, and her influence is apparent (if not always immediately obvious) in the work of many contemporary figurative painters. Take the atmosphere of innuendo in Eric Fischl’s suggestive, sexually fraught narratives. Like Neel he is a master of depicting that which is palpable but unspoken.

Neel had a unique way of capturing life in the little moments. Viewers of Neel’s work can feel that they have always known these portraits. This is partly to do with their freight of universal truths and partly to do with Neel's influence, subject of a show of contemporary art at Victoria Miro, “In the Company of Alice”

Some painters – Chantal Joffe, Elizabeth Peyton – have been inspired by the gawky, wry and caricatural aspects of her work; others by the expressiveness and mystery. Peter Doig's painting of his teenage daughter, white legs gleaming in a jungle of dark shadows, shows the influence of Munch on Neel, as much as Neel on Doig. It is not wrong to see her legacy all over the current art scene.

Neel’s approach  presaged the Neo-Expressionist movement by almost 20 years, and after long decades of failure and obscurity finally became regarded as a visionary painter towards the end of her career.  While some categorize her work as “feminist” her life experiences played a formative role in her painting style in a field dominated by men.

By the time of her death in 1984 Neel had won national acclaim as a leading American painter winning awards of recognition in the arts,  a retrospective at the Whitney Museum, and illustrating the cover of Time Magazine. 

Today Neel’s paintings hang in major museums all over the world, along side her early Post Modern contemporaries like Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and Chuck Close.  Her bold portraits have influenced painters and illustrators for years.  Mother, Wife, Activist, Iconoclast and Artist, Alice Neel was as unique a person as the characters she chose to illustrate.

Beggars 1926 oil painting

Mayor Koch 1981 oil painting

Frank O'Hara 1960 oil painting