• Portraits of Candor

    Date posted: November 11, 2010 Author: jolanta
    Success came late to Alice Neel. In the first 40 years of her career she exhibited only sporadically and generally in little known group exhibitions, or in small galleries allied to left-wing causes. Although outgoing and gregarious, she lacked confidence in her realist art at a time when abstraction was ascendant. Isolated in Spanish Harlem in the 1940s and 1950s, cut off from artistic and social life in Greenwich Village, struggling to bring up two boys as a single mother, she found it hard to push herself forward. Support from fellow Communist sympathizers would scarcely have endeared her to gallery directors. Nor would her choice of sitters who would remind wealthy collectors of the incipient threat of the underclass and even, for some of them, their own humble origins. But all that was to change when Neel moved to the Upper West Side in the early 1960s. 

    Jeremy Lewison and Barry Walker

    Alice Neel, Don Perlis and Jonathan, 1984. Oil on canvas. Moderna Museet, Stockholm. © Estate of Alice Neel

    Success came late to Alice Neel. In the first 40 years of her career she exhibited only sporadically and generally in little known group exhibitions, or in small galleries allied to left-wing causes. Although outgoing and gregarious, she lacked confidence in her realist art at a time when abstraction was ascendant. Isolated in Spanish Harlem in the 1940s and 1950s, cut off from artistic and social life in Greenwich Village, struggling to bring up two boys as a single mother, she found it hard to push herself forward. Support from fellow Communist sympathizers would scarcely have endeared her to gallery directors. Nor would her choice of sitters who would remind wealthy collectors of the incipient threat of the underclass and even, for some of them, their own humble origins. But all that was to change when Neel moved to the Upper West Side in the early 1960s. Her occasional forays in the 1950s to the Club, a discussion group and debating society of avant-garde, predominantly abstract painters, were now replaced by regular attendance at openings. Her sons had now left home, where she gathered sitters who were art world celebrities, curators, critics, dealers, artists, art historians, and with whom she had the opportunity to court at her leisure as she dissected their personalities and translated them into paint.

    Neel became a regular and popular lecturer on her art, and this newfound fame led to a hastily organized show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. A one-floor retrospective, crammed with paintings, was organized by the adjunct curator of prints in 1974, at the height of the Women’s Liberation Movement. The fact that no curator of contemporary art had been engaged in the project indicates that Neel lay outside the contemporary art mainstream, as a painter who was neither conceptual nor minimal, neither pop nor abstract. The catalogue that the Whitney produced was a slim pamphlet, unlike the handsome volume it published for the earlier retrospective exhibition of Raphael Soyer, a friend and contemporary of Neel’s who also espoused left-wing politics. But her show captured the public’s imagination and received warm support from artists, especially women who shared her battle for recognition.

    Twenty-six years later, the Whitney Museum, together with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, paid proper tribute to Neel when it mounted a large-scale retrospective that toured to three other North American venues in 2000 and 2001. That exhibition, arranged chronologically, included oil paintings and works on paper of portraits, genre scenes, cityscapes, still lifes, and landscape. Its popular success, particularly among young artists, indicated an appetite for Neel’s realist approach. In our post-modern era Neel’s position in the “lee” of modernism has come to be seen as a virtue rather than a hindrance. Her engagement with humanity, her bravura painting, her honesty and directness are now highly prized. She captured the hidden truths of individual existence in New York, revealing the concerns and anxieties of the immigrant community, the idealism and moral strength of left-wing activists, the aspirations and insecurities of artists and their hangers-on, the psychological indecision and vulnerability of transgressive personalities, and the gaucheness of children.

    Our exhibition, Alice Neel: Painted Truths at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is arranged thematically. It is not a full retrospective in that we have omitted landscape and still lifes, but have chosen instead to concentrate on portraits, nudes, and cityscapes executed in oil paint. These are the areas in which we believe Neel made a singular contribution. The consistency with which Neel approached these themes throughout her career not only legitimizes such a structure, but allows us to consider the changes and developments her art underwent over the 60 years or so of her career. The exhibition is divided into nine sections: Allegory, the Essential Portrait, the Psychological Portrait, Portraits from Memory, Cityscapes, Nudes, Parents and Children, the Detached Gaze, and Old Age. In many cases a painting might have been placed in more than one section, but we have endeavored to group them in such a way that interesting correspondences will emerge.

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