Alice Neel

Among the most innovative figurative painters of the twentieth century, Neel refused to follow trends and changes in art aligned with the popular Modernism and Abstraction movements of her time. Instead, she depicted her family and friends (some famous, some anonymous to history) as their most raw, honest and, at times, confronting selves, through expressive colour and psychological depth that captures their vulnerability and resilience.

To help financially support her parents after graduating high school, she took a clerical position where she worked for three years while taking art classes at night in Philadelphia and, in 1921, enrolled in the fine art program at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women to begin her formal training. Here, she rejected the popular Impressionism and Post-Impressionism styles in favour of Realism, and won honorable mention for the Francisca Naiade Balano Prize two years in a row before receiving the Kern Doge Prize for Best Painting in 1925.

After graduating in 1925, Neel married Cuban painter Carlos Enríquez and settled in Havana where she gave birth to a daughter, Santillana, in 1926. In Havana, Neel was embraced by Cuba’s burgeoning avant-garde scene and developed the foundations of her figurative style informed by her political consciousness and lifelong commitment to equality. She had several exhibitions in Cuba, including at the twelfth annual Salon des Bellas Artes and possibly her first solo exhibition. After Santillana died of diphtheria in 1927 and Enríquez left for Paris with their second daughter in 1930, Neel suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalised for six months. Once released, she began a relationship with drug-addicted sailor Kenneth Doolittle, which ended in 1934 when he slashed more than 60 of her paintings and burned approximately 250 watercolours and sketches.

After beginning figurative work in the 1930s, she was one of the first to sign up for the Works Progress Administration program that provided artists with work in public spaces during the Great Depression. Through her WPA projects, she painted scenes of urban life and the marginalised communities of New York, developing a style rooted in empathy and social realism. Her early experiences of personal hardship, mental health struggles and the death of her first child and loss of her second, deepened her understanding of human complexity and emotional resilience which, in turn, informed her art.

Describing herself as a “collector of souls”, she was unafraid of exposing the vulnerability of her subjects – Andy Warhol is depicted scarred and sewn after his near-assassination, her son appears apathetic and melancholic in his first year of medical school as the Vietnam war raged on, even in her first self-portrait painted at the age of eighty, she is untempted by vanity and instead looks directly into a culture that continues to decry signs of aging. Neel approached portraiture not as an act of flattery, but as a profound engagement with human experience.

Often forced to apologise for the psychological nature of her work, she remained committed to the idiosyncratic structure of line, colour and composition she invented early in her career and continued to collapse the divide between public and private and the social and political undercurrents of her time while maintaining an intimate immediacy.

Finally, in 1974, Neel received her first major retrospective at the Whitney Museum and shortly after, in 1979, then President Jimmy Carter awarded her the National Women’s Caucus for Art’s award for outstanding achievement. Since her death in 1984, her work has continued to challenge the notions of vanity and public personas, remaining undeniably relevant today.