Alice Neel: Hot Off the Griddle

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Neel communicates well the hardship and trauma weighing on her subjects through distracted eyes or even a slump of the shoulders.

One of her first solo exhibitions was organised by Mike Gold, founder of The New Masses , whilst she made a living lecturing at Communist-organised adult education schools; decades later, she became the first American artist to have a retrospective in the USSR. The exhibition shows a reportage style film of the area which crackles with life and personality and brings an extra dimension to the portraits of street children and neighbours that are displayed alongside. Those brownish-black eyes confront us with a glare that is vulnerable yet not uninviting, as though she is too afraid to ask: “who the hell are you? Alice Neel (1900–1984) worked in New York at a time when figurative painting was deeply unfashionable.

In quintessentially Neel fashion, the pop artist looks fleshy and defenceless; his eyes are averted and his stomach sags over the surgical corset he wore after being shot. Her commitment to a vigorous, unabashed style is manifest here in her painting of herself with her lover John Rothschild, one pissing into the toilet, the other into the sink, and her madcap portrait of Joe Gould as a manic satyr with a dangling string of penises . After being discharged almost a year later, Neel moved to New York, where she painted outcasts and oddballs like Joe Gould, a local eccentric also known as ‘Professor Seagull’, representing him with multiple penises to symbolise his inflated ego.

Isabetta’s birth was the inspiration for Well Baby Clinic (1929), a bleak portrait of a maternity ward more reminiscent of an insane asylum. These later portraits particularly are full of empathy and are at their most powerful when Neel has connected with the vulnerability of the sitter, maybe through her own experience of that vulnerability. 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 . But if there is something of the autopsy about Freud, Neel is gentler, taking real pleasure in her body in its ninth decade. Crowned the ‘court painter of the underground’, she favoured subjects who were unfamiliar in art, among them pregnant women, queer performers, and Black and Puerto Rican children.

Regardless of the profile of her sitters, the portraits never lose their raw, often uncomfortable, intimacy: Neel’s refusal to look away. She persisted with her distinctive, expressionistic style, even though it meant that for most of her life she lacked material comfort, let alone critical recognition. She grew up in a small conservative town in Pennsylvania with little culture, and her mother rebuffed her dreams of becoming an artist. People Come First, the largest Neel retrospective yet staged in New York, monopolised the Tisch Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last summer. Her personality and sense of humour shines through, along with her immense pride and beaming smile at finally being accepted.

The Galleries are a stimulating place for students to experience major artworks from some of the world’s leading visual artists and learn about contemporary and modern art. It is wounded Andy, huge scars across his torso, a corset above his waist, a man barely held together after the shooting that nearly killed him a few years earlier. Neel’s paintings are even more extraordinary given their strident commitment to figuration, all the while New Yorkers could not make up their mind over whether the future of Modern art belonged to gestural abstraction, Pop, Minimalism, the downtown happening or anything else. The heads are always slightly too large for the bodies, the brushwork is never flattering but emphatic; here and there you are looking at garrulous caricature.Regularly judged as out of fashion by art critics throughout different period of art history, portraits of regular people and street protests too often got overlooked by art exhibitions. The artist, who described herself as “the collector of souls”, moved to Harlem in the early 1940s with a nightclub owner. This isn’t art about Neel or her ego, it’s art about people, about how they’re good and kind and flawed and how they’re all quite beautiful, even the ugly ones.