Alice Neel: Undead and Loving It

Installation view of the exhibition Alice Neel: People Come First , Photograph by Iris Krasnopolski — Installation view of the exhibition *Alice Neel: People Come First* , Photograph by Iris Krasnopolski

By Irina Sheynfeld

Alice Neel (1900-1984) was a New York-based artist, a feminist, a communist, and a self-proclaimed collector of souls. The artist first gained recognition in her ‘60s. At the beginning of her career, Neel’s main audience was a limited group of friends and her work was seen in very few places except for the ACA Gallery, which was at the time a center of socially concerned and politically oriented art. The lack of interest in Neel’s oeuvre could be partially explained by the fact that she was a committed realist – a style that was seen as secondary during the 40s and 50s in the wake of the exploding Abstract Expressionism. Also, Neel’s brand of realism was closely related to social realism – a state-sanctioned style in Soviet-bloc countries, which still bore an unsavory association for a wide swath of the American public during the Cold War. Neel became a member of the United States Communist Party in 1935, and the connection between her politics and the chosen mode of artistic expression is not accidental.

Today, either realism managed to escape its political associations with socialism, or such dubious bedfellows are no longer problematic for Alice Neel: People Come First is currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art until August 1. It is Neel’s first major retrospective in twenty years, and this recognition elevates the artist to the pantheon of the great American Art of the 20th century. The exhibition presents more than one hundred pictures of people, as Neel liked to call them. Met’s curators Randy Griffey and Kelly Baum are responsible for making the uneasy connection between Neel’s work and current events, even though her output was never considered revolutionary or avant-garde during her lifetime. The show manages to revive the ghost of the communist past and to dress it up in the new outfit of social justice.

Like many other “American Communists” Neel was mostly concerned with the idealist, humanist, and utopian side of the Communist movement, ignoring the practical outcomes that were taking place in USSR. One of the earliest paintings in the show Nazi murder Jews (1938), depicts a 1938 May Day parade that took place in NYC and in which Neel participated. While most news organizations were silent, USCP was calling the wider public’s attention to the events that were taking place at the time in Nazi Germany, calling the wider public’s attention to the rising antisemitism. Nazi murder Jews is a dark, claustrophobic painting; its simplistic treatment of the composition and figures recall Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry Murals (1932-33). Rivera’s larger-than-life personality and work influenced almost every visual artist of his generation. Similar to Rivera’s, Neel’s figures are roughly drawn, and their faces are only partially realized, forming a dark, masculine, and proletarian whole. Curiously there are no women at this parade, when Communists, in theory, liked to emphasize gender equality. One of the front figures is an African American man who highlights early USCP’s aspirations for racial equality, aspirations that were never realized in practice.

One of the most striking paintings in “People Come First”, is The Spanish Family (1943). The painting depicts a mother, the artist’s sister-in-law Margarita, and her three children. The figures are drawn with heavy black outlines that echo the simple ironwork in the background so typical of the Spanish Harlem where Neel resided at the time. They look detached from each other, each in their own world. The wrought iron fence behind the little family pushes them toward the viewer, separates them from the world, and unites the little family. The fence is an integral part of the composition, every line is reflected in its movement: the curls of Margarita’s and her daughter’s hair, the stripes of the boy's shirt, and the folds of the baby diaper. The mother is looking straight at the viewer with a mixture of irony and disdain. She is the matriarch of her little kingdom: simultaneously a captive, trapped in the shallow space, and its ruler. A mother and a child is a recurring motif in Neel’s work and the father’s absence doesn’t seem unnatural, but rather as a matter of fact. Neel was keenly aware of the problems in the Latino community, and she always portrayed her subjects’ dignity and humanity, without sentimental glossing over poverty, hunger, and unemployment. The Spanish Family also reflects the artist’s biography since Neel’s partner, at the time, José Santiago Negrón left her for another woman shortly after the birth of their son, Richard, in 1939.

Alice Neel, The Spanish Family, 1943 — Alice Neel, *The Spanish Family*, 1943

When Neel became better known in the 70s, she started painting commissioned portraits of art critics and other intellectuals that admired her work. In his article “Alice Neel: Portraits of an Era”, art critic Henry R. Hope described how in 1977, Hope and his wife Sally Hope were among the lucky few to be painted by the artist. Hope recalled that Neel was, “exuding vitality and good spirits, she gives the impression of a happy, slightly zany grandmother, a sort of Julia Child, rambling on about painting instead of cooking.” Up until that point Neel preferred to choose her subjects and to pose them according to her own wishes. Therefore, the person portrayed was not under any obligation to acquire the painting.

I don't want to do what will please a subject. The persons themselves dictate to a certain extent the way they are done – if they are very liberated people, I, in turn, feel very liberated and can paint them in a more liberated way.

But people who commissioned their portraits had a little more say in how they wanted to be positioned. The double portrait of Hopes took Neel five days to paint, each session was about four hours long. According to Hope, Neel talked the whole time, sharing her family affairs and opinions on contemporary art. The portrait turned out to be a poignant rendering of two distinguished New York intellectuals. Both look equally important, smart, well dressed, their inner life brimming just behind the colorful surface. Like so many other Neel pictures of people, this painting to some extent is a collaboration between the artist and her models. Some anatomical details are not fully realized: Henry’s foot is too small, one of Sally’s legs is missing, and something strange is happening to Henry’s right arm; these imperfections result in the unfinished almost clumsy look that makes Neel’s portraits feel fresh and spontaneous. Incidentally, Henry and Sally Hope (1977) just sold at Sotheby’s day sale for 1,593,000 USD.

While Neel’s early work is hard to extrapolate from the politics of her time in her mature period she retains the roots of a red feminist but becomes first and foremost a humanist painter. Throughout her 70-year career the artist painted those that were closest to her: her lovers, husbands, sons, and later their wives and children. In 30’, when she lived in Greenwich Village, she painted her fellow leftists and communists such as Kenneth Fearing (1935) and Pat Whalen (1935). When the artist moved to Spanish Harlem/El Barrio in 1938 she painted local people A Spanish Boy (1955) and Puerto Rican Girl on a Chair (1949), and finally when Neel gained recognition among wider intellectual circles, she painted prominent critics, painters and writers – Linda Nochlin and Daisy (1973) and Kate Millet (1970). In the interview with the art historian Patricia Hills, Neel argued, “People’s images reflect the era in a way that nothing else could. When portraits are good art they reflect the culture, the time, and many other things… Art is a form of history… Now, a painting is [a portrait of a person], plus the fact that it is also the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age.”

Bibliography

Garrard, Mary D. "Alice Neel and Me." Woman's Art Journal 27, no. 2 (2006): 3-7. Accessed June 9, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20358083.

Neel, Alice, Kelly Baum, Randall R. Griffey, Meredith A. Brown, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Susanna V. Temkin, and Anne Blood Mann. Alice Neel: People Come First. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2021.

Hope, Henry R. "Alice Neel: Portraits of an Era." Art Journal 38, no. 4 (1979): 273-81. Accessed June 9, 2021. doi:10.2307/776378.

Schor, Mira. "Alice Neel as an Abstract Painter." Woman's Art Journal 27, no. 2 (2006): 12-16. Accessed June 9, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20358085.

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