{"id":605,"date":"2021-04-27T13:38:06","date_gmt":"2021-04-27T05:38:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/?p=605"},"modified":"2021-04-27T13:38:06","modified_gmt":"2021-04-27T05:38:06","slug":"radical-realist-alice-neel-helped-redefine-portraiture-in-postwar-new-york","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/artist\/radical-realist-alice-neel-helped-redefine-portraiture-in-postwar-new-york\/","title":{"rendered":"RADICAL REALIST ALICE NEEL HELPED REDEFINE PORTRAITURE IN POSTWAR NEW YORK"},"content":{"rendered":"

During the 1940s and \u201950s, from her modest studio in New York,\u00a0Alice Neel<\/a>\u00a0saw the heyday of Abstract Expressionism come and go. Then, during the \u201960s, Pop art passed by, and soon, Minimalism did, too. All the while, Neel continued working, producing figurative paintings decidedly out of step with what was popular at the time in the art world.<\/p>\n

The artists associated with Abstract Expressionism, Pop, and Minimalism were interested in defamiliarizing the human form, reducing and reconstructing individuals to color and line. Neel, a painter apart from her time, was curious about people just as they were. She worked in a mode known as social realism, confronting humanity forthright with no irony to spare the viewer. It\u2019s a style best glimpsed in a self-portrait made in 1980, four years before her death. Neel painted herself seated in an armchair and wearing only her glasses. One of her hands holds a paintbrush, and in the other, she clutches a rag. She peers out unassumingly at the viewer with a gaze that almost suggests a hint of judgement, as if she\u2019s trying to say: \u201cYes,\u00a0and<\/em>?\u201d<\/p>\n

An early feminist and a dedicated Communist, her social realism was meant to communicate socioeconomic inequities. She painted her dying mother, addicts, strangers, the civil rights leader James Farmer, and denizens of the psych ward where she recovered from a nervous breakdown, among others. During their painting sessions Neel talked and talked, drawing out the life stories of her sitters. (In spite of this, one of her more famous remarks disparaged chats: \u201cArt is not as stupid as human conversation.\u201d) Many of these portraits are now on view at the\u00a0Metropolitan Museum of Art<\/a>\u00a0in New York, in her first retrospective in the city in 20 years.<\/p>\n

The works included in that show attest to the fact that Neel was a visual archivist of New York City, in particular Spanish Harlem, where she lived for 20-odd years. Strangers and lovers were depicted with the same care as luminaries of New York\u2019s postwar \u201970s creative landscape. Andy Warhol appears in one famed Neel work stripped to the waist and showing off the scars Valerie Solanas\u2019s assassination attempt left on his sunken chest. During her lifetime,\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0critic John Russell wrote: \u201dTo be painted by Miss Neel is not simply the equivalent of a body search. It is the equivalent of a body-and-soul search.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Despite the fact that she is now seen to have revolutionized portraiture, Neel struggled to earn institutional acknowledgement for her early work. \u201cI may have done a few abstractions in my time and I could have done more except that I have this obsession with life,\u201d she once told an interviewer. She then suggested her critics try holding her paintings upside down.<\/p>\n

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\"People<\/div>\n<\/div>
An image of artist Alice Neel at \u201cPeople Come First\u201d at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.<\/span>ANTHONY BEHAR\/SIPA USA VIA AP<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

A Restless Beginning<\/strong><\/p>\n

Alice Hartley Neel was born in 1900, in Merion Square, Pennsylvania, a quaint, sleepy town. ( \u201cI came out of that little town the most depressed virgin who ever lived,\u201d she said in a 2008 documentary directed by her grandson). She was a sensitive, anxious child. Her paintings and drawings became a way to negotiate into life, even as life resisted her ambitions. According to Phoebe Hoban\u2019s biography 2010 biography\u00a0Alice Neel: The Art of Sitting Pretty<\/em>, when Neel told her grandmother that she wanted to be an artist, the woman replied, \u201cI don\u2019t know what you expect to do in the world, Alice. You\u2019re only a girl.\u201d<\/p>\n

Neel, thankfully, was resilient. In 1921 she enrolled in the Philadelphia School of Design (later renamed the Moore College of Art), where she studied the work of the American modernism Robert Henri, whose Ashcan School of art-making maintained that painting should be \u201cas real as mud, as the clods of horse-shit and snow, that froze on Broadway in the winter.\u201d<\/p>\n

Neel was frustrated by her upper-class classmates. \u201cThere were all these rich girls who went there as a finishing school,\u201d she said. \u201cI realized that wasn\u2019t what I was there for\u2026. For three years I worked so hard because I had a conscience about going to art school.\u201d She was disquieted by the \u201cold grey-haired women\u201d who scrubbed the academy\u2019s floors while she studied Greek statues.<\/p>\n

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\n
\"In<\/div>\n<\/div>
Alice Neel,\u00a0Linda Nochlin and Daisy<\/span><\/span><\/em>\u00a0(1973).<\/span><\/span><\/span>AP PHOTO\/ELISE AMENDOLA<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

A Bohemian in New York<\/strong><\/p>\n

Neel attended summer art school in 1924, where she met the painter Carlos Enr\u00edquez, the son of a prominent Cuban family. The two married the following year and she followed him back to Havana. There he gave birth her first daughter, Santillana, but she was a restless housewife, and they soon moved back to New York. Tragedy struck in 1927, when their baby died of diphtheria\u2014the subject of the haunting\u00a0Futility of Effort<\/em>\u00a0(1930), in which a ragdoll-like child appears to fuse with a bed set inside a grey void.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was frantic \u2026 I was already in a trap. All I could do was get pregnant again,\u201d Neel later told biographer Patricia Hills. She soon became pregnant with her second daughter, Isabetta. But Enr\u00edquez eventually left Neel to return to Cuba, taking Isabetta with him. She would see her daughter only a few times throughout her life. As Neel recalled it, \u201cit was just the end of everything.\u201d She had a nervous breakdown, attempted suicide twice, once by eating glass, and entered a sanatorium.<\/p>\n

It was at that time that she painted\u00a0Well Baby Clinic\u00a0<\/em>(1928\u201329), a ghoulish scene of a local maternity ward. Screaming babies flail on beds unattended, and frenzied mothers implore a doctor for pills. Neel is there, painted with an expression of exhaustion or ambivalence. A young girl, bald and clad in ghostly white, stares out at the viewer.<\/p>\n

Neel returned to themes of motherhood, loss, and female interiority again throughout her career. Works such as the powerful 1972 painting\u00a0Carmen and Judy\u00a0<\/em>are in some ways the opposite of\u00a0Well Baby Clinic<\/em>: they are warm and upbeat. In that painting, Carmen, Neel\u2019s Latina neighbor in Spanish Harlem, breastfeeds a baby girl, who stares up with trust. Carmen offers a small knowing smile. A stroke of electric blue accentuates her form.<\/p>\n

While art\u2019s in-crowd hung out in the East Village, Neel worked in relative obscurity, creating unadorned portraits of her neighbors in Spanish Harlem. At the onset of the 19th century, her neighborhood had been predominantly Polish. More than a century later, the Dominican and Puerto Rican communities had come to dominate the district. Neel\u2019s art was in part a reflection of those demographical shifts, but her portraits are important for another reason, too. Her Black and Latinx sitters were captured with grace and a depth of interiority rarely afforded to them at the time.<\/p>\n

Neel never remarried, instead taking a string of lovers that led to the birth of three sons from different fathers, and she never sold much art, either. (When she died in 1984, 300 paintings were discovered in her apartment.) A\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0critic later dubbed her the \u201dquintessential Bohemian<\/a>,\u201d a moniker that she seemed to relish. \u201dMy life was pure women\u2019s lib in a way,\u201d she told Hoban, her biographer. \u201dI had a very hard life, and I paid the price for it, but I did as I wanted.\u201d It seems only fitting, then, that leftist feminists helped rescue her from obscurity.<\/p>\n

In Retrospect<\/strong><\/p>\n

Radicalized by the poverty of pre-revolutionary Havana, Neel was an outspoken advocate for the Communist cause. She was an active fundraiser for the CPUSA and an admirer of Ella Reeve Bloor, known as Mother Bloor, a leader of the American branch of the Communist Party in the \u201920s and \u201930s. (Later on, Neel memorialized her with the 1951 painting\u00a0Death of Mother Bloor<\/em>.) Coupled with her sensitive portrayals of working-class women, Neel became a cult figure for the New Left feminist movement, whose New York nexus was the Village. Feminist activists and critics championed her work\u2014and eventually led to renewed interest in Neel.<\/p>\n

Out of this fervor for her came her\u00a0<\/strong>first retrospective, at the Whitney Museum in 1974. It included 58 paintings, dating from the years 1933 to 1973. The exhibition was up for only 38 days, and not everyone was pleased. The\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0critic Hilton Kramer\u00a0wrote that her style lacked \u201cbasic competence\u201d and dismissed her as \u201cnot the kind of artist whose work can sustain such scrutiny.\u201d<\/p>\n

He seemed offended, even repulsed, but how she viewed her sitters. Their bodies were often saggy and wrinkled, and their faces were graced by surprise or contentment or despair. Women, especially, were depicted as sexual but not sexualized, sensitive but not fragile. She was onto something vital, and was willing to wait out the world.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know what it takes to be an artist?\u201d Neel asked Hoban. \u201cHypersensitivity and the will of the devil. To never give up.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Source\uff1ahttps:\/\/www.artnews.com\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During the 1940s and \u201950s, from her modest studio in New York,\u00a0Alice Neel\u00a0saw the heyday of Abstract Expressionism come and go. Then, during the \u201960s, Pop art passed by, and soon, Minimalism did, too. All the while, Neel continued working, producing figurative paintings decidedly out of step with what was popular at the time in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":606,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5,7,3],"tags":[142],"class_list":{"0":"post-605","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artist","8":"category-events","9":"category-latest-news","10":"tag-alice-neel"},"yoast_head":"\nRADICAL REALIST ALICE NEEL HELPED REDEFINE PORTRAITURE IN POSTWAR NEW YORK - Investable Art Auctioneer<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"During the 1940s and \u201950s, from her modest studio in New York,\u00a0Alice Neel\u00a0saw the heyday of Abstract Expressionism come and go.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/artist\/radical-realist-alice-neel-helped-redefine-portraiture-in-postwar-new-york\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"RADICAL REALIST ALICE NEEL HELPED REDEFINE PORTRAITURE IN POSTWAR NEW YORK - 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