Alice Neel: Hot Off the Griddle

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During the visit, Neel asked the agents whether they would sit for a painting, to which they politely declined. The vibrant blue of the cover and the laid texture of the paper nods to the infamous striped chair that Neel regularly used in her sittings, debossed with three true-to-size photographs of the artist showing her characteristic playfulness. Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. There have been multiple major exhibitions on the artist’s work over the last few years, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2021 and last year at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Guggenheim in Bilbao and the de Young Museum in San Francisco. It is a go-to place for museum lovers whether they want to read up on an exhibition they are about to visit; read more about an exhibition being held far afield or revisit an old favourite show.

Her painting of her ex-partner’s brother recovering from tuberculosis highlighted the New York epidemic caused by overcrowding. From photographs of her time in Cuba and Harlem, through to FBI investigation documents* and imagery of Neel reading the newspaper in her living-room, surrounded by her work. But for Neel, having once been a single mother raising her children off welfare, Marxism was ‘her way of understanding her own life’; it’s how she understood the lives of her sitters, too. Sticking with these portraits for so long shows that Neel knew that one day society would value these sorts of paintings and understand the power that portraiture holds to spark conversations around social issues.They are a stark insight into struggle, vulnerability and pain, where the material conditions of living are inscribed on the bodies she paints. All along the exhibition, quotes from Neel help fathoming the living conditions of these characters. She focused her energy on making portraits of neighbours and friends which are remarkable for their depth of empathy, as she set out to ‘reveal the inequalities and pressures as shown in the psychology of the people I painted’.

For some, Neel’s depictions of the boy can be seen as a sense of foreboding, from the cheerful little character seen standing with his leg pressed up against the chair in a painting from 1953 to the more pensive personality that comes later . Largely unrecognised for her work during her lifetime, Neel has since come to be championed for the candour with which she looked at the world. They managed to live a “nice lifestyle” nonetheless, Neel’s son Hartley told a journalist after her death. Born on 28 January 1900, “four weeks younger than the century”, as she liked to say, Neel is perhaps the most astute and penetrating people-watcher of that tumultuous century of American history. Each week, we send newsletters and communication featuring articles, our latest tickets invitations, and exclusive offers.She still looked for subjects with traumatic stories, even if it meant exclaiming to strangers across the park. Neel was a dedicated communist when that was a very dangerous thing to be in the USA (even getting her some unwelcome visits from the FBI), so she painted leftwing intellectuals like Harold Cruse and her future partner Sam Brody. In Pregnant Julie and Algis, pictured above, there is a tension in the angle of her head to match the disquiet in her eyes. It was here, surrounded by sticky heat, colonial villas and salsa music, that Neel found her stride; she was embraced by the Cuban avant-garde, exhibiting alongside proponents of the national Vanguardia Movement. Crowned the "court painter of the underground,” her canvases celebrate those who were too often marginalised in society: labour leaders, Black and Puerto Rican children, pregnant women, Greenwich Village eccentrics, civil rights activists and queer performers.

His eyes are shut, as if whatever he is cannot be seen or known through appearance alone, skinny pins in brown trousers, feet dangling in old men’s brogues. These are people allowing themselves to be painted, and each picture represents a letting-in, a moment of intimacy. Among others, they rub shoulders with Life magazine editor David Bourdon (purring like “the cat that’s got the cream”, according to Neel) and Gregory Battcock, the legendary secret-keeper of Manhattan’s queer gossip (whose stern expression resembles, oddly, “an Asturian miner”). She painted her first self-portrait at the age of 80; she’s fully nude – her breasts and belly sag and she stares at the viewer with an expression that is both disgruntled and defiant. Born in 1900 and active until her death in 1984, she does not always appear on the lists of the greatest painters of the century in the United States, but she certainly deserves it.Her tumultuous love life then led her to live in Spanish Harlem, where immigrant communities abounded, and where she produced breath-taking portraits of characters from her daily life.

People Come First, the largest Neel retrospective yet staged in New York, monopolised the Tisch Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last summer.The artist’s second portrait of Frank O’Hara, the poet laureate of Abstract Expressionism and the movement’s most unflinching supporter at the Museum of Modern Art, is depicted here warts—or rather pallid freckles—and all.