The Unblinking Eye of Alice Neel

Alice Neel, An Engaged Eye, Centre Pompidou

Figure 1. Poster for Alice Neel at the Centre Pompidou

Alice Neel on Art & Life

*In politics and in life, I always liked the losers, the underdogs.”

“For me, people come first, I have tried to assert the dignity and eternal importance of the human being.”

“One of the reasons I painted was to catch life as it goes by, right hot off the griddle….I was born in 1900, and I’ve tried to capture the zeitgeist.”

“Like Chekhov, I am a collector of souls…if I hadn’t been an artist, I could have been a psychiatrist.”

“The place where I had freedom most was when I painted. I was completely and utterly myself.”

“All experience is great providing you live through it. If it kills you, you've gone too far.”

In one week I saw two exhibitions. About two 20th century American artists, both women, both currently experiencing a ‘moment.’ (Figures 1, 2)

Figure 2. Joan Mitchell & me at the Fondation Louis Vuitton

One was a figurative artist, one was an abstract artist, one struggled financially, one was financially secure, one lived her entire adult life in New York City, one initially split her time between New York City and Paris and eventually moved to the French countryside. One artist was born with the century itself, in 1900. The other was 25 years her junior. The first lived to be 84 years old. The second died only 8 years after the first, at age 67. Finally, one was intensely involved in the political and social movements of her time, one wasn’t at all.

My preference is for figurative and engaged, I’ll try not to let it show.

Alice Neel was born in 1900. She was a figurative painter who painted portraits at a time when figurative painting was not appreciated and portrait painting was ignored. When women artists weren’t taken seriously, if they were noticed at all. And, as one reviewer notes, while her peers were fighting over the future of abstraction, she opposed abstraction at every opportunity. She thought it dehumanizing and destructive.

The exhibition I saw at the Pompidou is called ‘Un regard engagé,’ (The Engaged Eye), follows on the heels of the exhibition in the U.S., Alice Neel: People Come First the phrase is a direct quote from Alice Neel (see above). The focus is the same, of course. You can’t talk about Alice Neel without talking about her engagement with the world around her. From 1927 when she got to New York until she died there nearly 60 years later, she was socially and politically engaged. She used her voice to condemn the mistreatment of anybody who was marginalized. And her brush to celebrate those same people. (Figures 3, 4)

Figure 3. Nazis Murder Jews, Alice Neel, 1936

Figure 4. Save Willie McGee, Alice Neel, 1951 (black man accused of raping white woman, electrocuted)

Alice said, “In politics and in life, I always like the losers, the underdog.” She supported women’s rights and workers’ rights. She defended people of color and the poor. And she painted them all, and interracial couples and gay couples and transgender women, too. (Figure 5)

Figure 5. Rita and Hubert, Alice Neel, 1954 (Loving vs Virginia legalizing interracial marriages, 1967)

Alice did not have an easy life, it was a toxic mix of poverty and personal problems mostly related to her unfortunate attraction to some truly awful men. She grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia and attended art school there. It’s where she met the wealthy Cuban man who became her husband. After a year in Cuba and the birth and death (from diphtheria) of their daughter, the couple moved to New York where Alice gave birth to their second child, another daughter. Her husband and their daughter left for Cuba. Alice thought the separation was temporary. It was not. In the immediate aftermath, she had a breakdown and became suicidal. A year in a psychiatric hospital followed. So, unfortunately did a love affair with a heroin addict who set fire to 350 of her watercolors, paintings and drawings. To quote Alice, “All experience is great providing you live through it. If it kills you, you've gone too far.” Alice had two more children, two sons by two different men. She met the father of her first son in 1934. José Negron was a Puerto Rican nightclub singer and guitarist. He and Alice lived together until 1939, until he left her and their infant son. Neither saw Negron again until 1966 when they traveled to Mexico to see him. Alice painted him twice, the first time in 1936, the second, 30 years later. (Figures 6, 7) Negron is dressed more or less the same, but the vibe is completely different. In between those two dates, he had abandoned the guitar and picked up the bible. In 1966, he was an Episcopal priest.

Figure 6. José Negron, Alice Neel, 1936 (father of Neel’s son Hartley)

Figure 7. José Negron, Alice Neel, 1966 (same man, 30 years later - she & Hartley hadn’t seen him those 30 years)

Two months after Negron left, Alice met Sam Brody at a Works Progress Administration (WPA) meeting. Brody was a member of the Workers Film and Photo League (WFPL) an organization of filmmakers, photographers and writers dedicated to using film and photography for social change. In 1941, their son was born. Alice and Sam had an on and off again affair for 15 years, even though Sam was married and had two children with another woman. And worse (to me) despite the fact that Sam apparently mistreated Alice’s first son. Alice and Sam separated in 1955, but they remained friends. I guess compatible politics make strong bonds.

The final love of Alice’s life was John Rothschild. (Figure 8) Unbelievably, he was a wealthy man who left his wife and children hoping that Alice would marry him. Which she wouldn’t. Too easy, I guess. They remained close until he died in 1975.

Figure 8. John Rothschild, Alice Neel (lithograph after portrait, 1980)

Neel painted her mother four times. Looking at ‘My Mother, 1930’ and ‘My Mother, 1953,’ you note two things. (Figures 9, 10) One is that Neel did not shy away from painting the aging process. The other, as one author noted, is that as hard as the artist is looking at her subject, her subject is looking just as hard at her. Neel said in an interview that reading her mother’s expressions had been essential to her well-being. ‘My psychiatrist told me I got interested in painting portraits because I liked to watch my mother’s face… It had dominion over me. Since she was so unpredictable, he (the psychiatrist) thought I watched her face to see whether she approved of things or not.’

Figure 10. Last Sickness, Alice Neel (mother) 1953

Neel also painted pregnant women, lots of pregnant women. (Figure 11, 12) And women with their babies. (Figure 13) And women with their children. (Figure 14). Motherhood was never very far from Alice’s thoughts. How to do it, how to do it right. Alice’s portraits: of family, or friends, of strangers, reveal as much about Alice as they do about her sitters. Four pregnancies, one child’s death, another’s abandonment. Deserted after the birth of one son, worried about how the father of her second son was treating the child that was not his own. What torture that must have been. No wonder the obsession with pregnancy and motherhood, with fathers and their children. Defining features of her life, of her art (Figure 15).

Figure 11. Margaret Pregnant, Alice Neel 1978 (there is also a video of Alice painting Margaret)

Figure 12. Pregnant Julie and Algis, Alice Neel, 1967

Figure 15. Algis, Julie and Bailey, Alice Neel, 1968 (couple Figure 12, with their baby)

‘Black Draftee, James Hunter’ is a portrait she painted in 1968, (Figure 16) of a young man she met on the street. He had just been drafted to flight in Vietnam. He never returned for his second sitting. Did he make it through the war? Is this the only record of his life? Alice declared the unfinished painting, done and dedicated it to a generation of young men who never came back from war, whose lives were unfinished.

Figure 16. Black Draftee, James Hunter, Alice Neel, 1965 (his name is NOT on Vietnam Memorial Wall)

One critic explains why Neel’s portraits have such an insistent presence this way, it’s “their puffed-up eyes and heads, which are invariably about a tenth bigger than they should be.” (Figure 17) To this critic, Neel’s sitters “resemble feral children in an adult’s world…” We become interested in these people because it is obvious that Neel was. “If Neel loved her sitters briefly or for a lifetime, and loved them for their insecurities, imperfections, beauty … then we (love) them a little too.”

Figure 17. Black Spanish Family, Alice Neel, 1950 (Neel’s specialty = big heads, big eyes)

Alice also painted well known people, even celebrities. Like Andy Warhol. (Figure 18) Her portrait of him is shocking, even weird. Warhol sits, slumped, half naked. His torso stitched, his organs held in place by a surgical corset. Channeling Frida Kahlo, who, although she was surely in as much pain as Andy, found a way to make art out of her suffering (Figure 19) Warhol’s stitches and corset were the result of the attempt on his life two years earlier. This is no artist at the height of his career. This is a tired and frail human being, (although only 40 at the time). Much, much the worse for wear.

Figure 18. Andy Warhol, Alice Neel, 1970

Figure 19. Frida Kahlo wearing her plaster cast which she painted.

In 1960, Alice Neel, the anti-abstraction artist, painted the portrait of the apologist for abstract expressionism, the poet Frank O’Hara. In fact, she painted him twice. Neel reflected that in the first portrait, which took five lengthy sittings, O’Hara resembled “a romantic falcon-like profile with a bunch of lilacs”. ‘When he came in the door the fourth time he looked different… And do you know, there’s still another I see. I could paint him again.’ Which she did. Of this second portrait, which took only one half-day sitting, she said, “I feel that it expressed his troubled life more than the first.” Smiling through teeth, that she compared to ‘tombstones,’ he looked, according to Alice, “beat.” Evidently easier to paint, at least for Alice. (Figures 20, 21)

The exhibition has two videos. In one of them, Alice is painting the portrait of a nude, pregnant woman. (Margaret, see above, Figure 11) In the other, she is making small talk with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. Those two got along splendidly. She flirted a little and so did he. Four years before her death, Neel painted a self-portrait. She sits, nude, holding a paintbrush in one hand and a rag in the other. (Figure 22) The portrait showed, she said, her own “flesh falling off her body,”

Figure 22. Self portrait, Alice Neel, 1980 (four years before her death)

Alice was called a ’painter of modern life,’ an artist who shared Baudelaire’s vision of modernity, who created ‘a visual history of her time’ with her own 'Comédie Humaine’.

You know, now that I think about it, maybe it’s better if we talk about Joan Mitchell and abstraction next week.

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