Alice Neel: Hot Off the Griddle

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Her life wasn’t easy, and she was never well off, but she knew what she wanted, having discovered in herself the qualities needed to be a good artist: ‘hypersensitivity and the will of the devil. The great depression leads to some overtly political street-scene works, but they’re pretty awful: badly executed and ugly.

In another documentary about Neel’s life, Richard, sitting beneath the portrait of himself, talks about how he hates Bohemians, too. But it’s her move to New York in 1931 after a messy divorce and a nervous breakdown that gave the world the Alice Neel we know. Then followed international recognition with an exhibition in Moscow in 1981, which was close to her heart. An artist with such force of personality she could cajole Andy Warhol into sitting half-naked before her, even though he regarded nudity as “a threat to my existence”. In her diary, she wrote: “I love you Harlem for the rich deep vein of human feeling buried under your fire engines.In Pregnant Julie and Algis, pictured above, there is a tension in the angle of her head to match the disquiet in her eyes.

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. Sure, artists had painted people for centuries, millennia even, but in a time of wild, gestural, emotional artistic experimentation, Neel’s portraiture dragged the focus back down to earth, back to the homes, the bedrooms and the streets of everyday people. Superstar poet and artist Gerard Malanga’s practised pout is a part of his slightly dim performance (and his vanity).Hall and Sprinkle, Carmen and Judy, Frank O’Hara, Georgie Acre, the Spanish family sitting on the stoop: in Neel’s rendering, they are both the products of their moment and its agents of change. 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. An 80-year-old woman looks back at us wearing nothing but a pair of glasses and a “screw you if you don’t like it” expression. Before leaving, visitors could see a film of Neel being recognised by and inducted into the American Art establishment.

The exhibition displays these paintings incuding the powerful ‘Nazis Murder Jews’ (painted from memory) alongside large photographs of the streets of New York which have a successful effect of positioning the viewer looking into that world.

He was also, though, a Moscow-man through and through, and it’s fair to say, a devoted Party functionary and not exactly a reflective man. She poured her trauma into her paintings, depicting themes of motherhood and loss and developing her signature anxious, frenetic style while on the suicide ward of the Philadelphia General Hospital.

During the 1960s, she delved deeper in her feminist ideas, in favour of the civil rights movement, the rights of homosexuals, and more. One picture in this section of the exhibition is of a magistrate’s court, painted from memory after she was arrested for picketing. Her personality and sense of humour shines through, along with her immense pride and beaming smile at finally being accepted.Up to this point, Neel had mainly depicted men, but at some point during the 1930s, her focus switched to female nudes. When Hunter did not come back to her studio for a second sitting, Neel declared the work complete: a testament to the possibilities of youth, of what was started with attention and purpose but could not be finished. The Art Gallery is located on Level 3 and can be accessed by stairs and lifts from Level G or via the Sculpture Court if coming from outside. We abide by the Editors’ Code of Practice and are committed to upholding the highest standards of journalism.