Throughout her intense and independent life, Neel painted candid portraits of the famous and not-so-famous, and always maintained her true artistic vision.
Alice Neel was born on January 28, 1900 and grew up in Colwyn, Pennsylvania. Her middle-class, conservative parents weren‘t enthused about their daughter‘s desire to become an artist, but Alice enrolled in the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now known as Moore College of Art) and told her mother and father that she would be taking the more pragmatic commercial design courses. In reality she was studying traditional art, and she graduated in 1925.
Philadelphia to Cuba
Following graduation, Neel married fellow artist Carlos Enriquez and moved back with him to his native Cuba. She developed her talent for portraiture by painting pictures of the Cuban poorer classes and soon began to exhibit her work in Havana. Although her initial career looked promising, the death of her eldest daughter from diphtheria greatly saddened Alice. Additionally, following a return to the United States, her husband abandoned the marriage and took their other daughter back to Cuba, leaving Neel despondent and alone. Overwrought, she tried to kill herself and was hospitalized for a brief period.
Distinctive Portraits
While Neel’s personal life continued to be tumultuous--particularly her various romantic liaisons and her having two more children with different fathers--artistically, she did well during the 1930s and received funding from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA). Though she did not have great commercial success, Neel kept her artistic integrity by choosing subjects that intrigued her. Her paintings included further portraits of the poor and unfortunate, as well as artistic or intellectual friends like poet Kenneth Fearing and Greenwich Village eccentric Joe Gould. She was also an excellent painter of city scenes, and through her own maternal experience and those of others often depicted the unique bond between women and children--from pregnancy on.
Neel’s work has a fascinating, colorful candor, her interpretive portraits skillfully combining likeness with psychological insight. Neel’s politics were radical and her paintbrush was her means of portraying what she perceived to be unjust or hypocritical. She did not exhibit often during the 1940s and 1950s and no longer had a regular source of funding, and she also was under the stress of raising two sons as a single mother--at a time when unmarried mothers were not as well-accepted by society. However, after painting a portrait of poet Frank O’Hara in 1960, her work was featured in Art News and she began to receive some deserved attention.
Later Years and Legacy
With the coming of Pop Art and a renewed interest in artistic realism in the late 1960s and 1970s, Neel’s fame continued to grow. She also continued to paint her distinctive portraits, most notably at this time of artist Andy Warhol and feminist Kate Millett, the Millett portrait featured on the cover of Time magazine. Neel had a 1974 retrospective at the Whitney Museum and was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1976. In 1980, she completed a portrait of herself--aged 80, naked and unabashed--allowing the viewer to see exactly what she saw, with no vanity or embarrassment whatsoever.
Although cataracts and then eventually cancer slowed Neel down, she painted for as long as she could until her death in 1984. Her work can be found at various museums, including The National Portrait Gallery and The Museum of Modern Art. Neel can also be seen in the 1959 Beat Generation film Pull My Daisy, and in 2007, her grandson Andrew Neel’s documentary about his artist grandmother made its debut to introduce the vision and memory of Alice to the 21st century.
Sources
- Alice Neel -- Answers.com
- Alice Neel, Hard Won Innocence -- Daisy Fried, Threepenny Review
- Documentary Alice Neel, Critics’ Pick -- New York Times, April 20, 2007
