Alice Neel

“Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”—the bold title of a 1971 Art News article by Linda Nochlin—made artists, critics, curators, and others pay attention to a deep-rooted dilemma. Written at the height of the women’s movement, it attempted to explain the dearth, and was also an outspoken cry to reassess contemporary women artists. By then, Alice Neel (1900–1984) was in her seventies, and had received critical acclaim for only a decade.

Neel had a conventional childhood in Colwyn, Pennsylvania, a small town southwest of Philadelphia. After taking a typing course, she worked for three years as a secretary with the Army Air Corps, studying art in the evening at the Pennsylvania—now Philadelphia—Museum of Art. In 1921, she enrolled in the fine art program of the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, which became the Moore College of Art and Design; she graduated in 1925. She then married fellow artist Carlos Enriquez, a well-to-do Cuban, and spent several years in Cuba. Upon her return to the United States, she moved to New York, but her unsettled personal life—including the death of a daughter and Enriquez’s virtual desertion of her, with their second child—led to several suicide attempts followed by hospitalization.

Her health restored, Neel moved to Greenwich Village in 1932 and began to participate in art exhibits. Her paintings from this period exemplify social realism; they are dark, heavily rendered, and reflect a gritty urban lifestyle. She worked for the Public Works of Art Project, and then for the Works Projects Administration until 1939. In 1938, she moved to Spanish Harlem, where she lived for the next twenty-five years. Later, musing on her paintings from this period which featured her neighbors and her family, Neel commented: “Of course it was foolish to paint [Spanish Harlem subjects] because that doesn’t get you anywhere in the art world. Painting the decadent intellectuals, the real world, that’s what you’ll get noticed for. That’s why I painted them, but nevertheless it’s more apt to get you somewhere than painting unknown Spanish people.” [1]

The “decadent intellectuals” Neel was referring to were members of the New York art world—critics, fellow artists, collectors, historians—whom she began to paint around 1960. They came to her apartment near Columbia University, where she regaled them with stories while she captured their likenesses. These were far from flattering portraits, as Neel did not consider herself a portraitist, but rather a “collector of souls.” Her renditions were psychological assessments of the individuals, many of whom were awkwardly posed in the nude on Neel’s couch. She often employed garish colors, and defined her figures with wavering outlines. Limbs, especially hands, are frequently ungainly and always expressive, and eyes are generally large and directed at the viewer.

One of her most notorious images was of Pop artist and portraitist of the rich and famous, Andy Warhol, 1970, Whitney Museum of American Art. In it, he sits uncomfortably, with a straight back, hands on his knees, and feet flat on the floor. He is nude to the waist, revealing sagging breasts and scars from the attempt on his life. He also wears an elastic girdle. As if in utter embarrassment, his eyes are closed—a trait most unusual for Neel. Of her famous subject, Neel proclaimed: “As a person, Andy was very nice. As an art world personality, he represents a certain pollution of this era. I think he’s the greatest advertiser living, not a great portrait painter.” [2]

When success finally arrived, Neel, age sixty, was very much in demand in feminist art circles. She lectured extensively—forty times between 1972 and 1984—and was acknowledged in numerous exhibitions, including a retrospective in 1974 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She credited her ability to capture personalities to empathy: “I become the person for a couple of hours, so when they leave and I’m finished I feel disoriented. I have no self. I don’t belong anywhere. I don’t know who I am. It is terrible, this feeling, but it just comes because of this powerful identification I make with the person. But that’s what makes a good portrait.” [3] Curiously, Neel did not paint her Self-Portrait, 1980, National Portrait Gallery, until she was eighty years old. She sits stark naked in the striped chair she had used so often for others. Holding a paintbrush and rag and wearing large eyeglasses, she gazes knowingly at the observer, finally confident in herself and in her art.

Notes:

[1] Neel, quoted in Judith Higgins, “Alice Neel and the Human Comedy,” Art News83, no. 8 (October 1984), 77.

[2] Neel, quoted in Patricia Hills, Alice Neel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1981), 138.

[3] Neel, quoted in Higgins, “Alice Neel,” Art News, 78.