Alice Neel facts for kids

Dana Gordon by Alice Neel, 1972

Alice Neel (January 28, 1900 – October 13, 1984) was an American visual artist, who was known for her portraits depicting friends, family, poets, artists, and strangers. Her paintings have an expressionistic use of line and color, psychological acumen, and emotional intensity. Her work depicts women through a female gaze. She pursued a career as a figurative painter during a period when abstraction was favored, and she did not begin to gain critical praise for her work until the 1960s. Neel was called "one of the greatest portrait artists of the 20th century" by Barry Walker, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which organized a retrospective of her work in 2010.

Life and work

Early life

Alice Neel was born on January 28, 1900, in Merion Square, Pennsylvania. Her father was George Washington Neel, an accountant for the Pennsylvania Railroad, and her mother was Alice Concross Hartley Neel. In mid-1900 her family moved to the rural town of Colwyn, Pennsylvania. Young Alice was the fourth of five children with three brothers and a sister. Her siblings were named Hartley, Albert, Lillian, and George Washington Jr. Her oldest brother, Hartley, died of diphtheria shortly after she was born. He was eight years old. She was raised in a straight-laced, lower-middle-class family during a time when there were limited expectations and opportunities for women. Her mother had said to her: "I don't know what you expect to do in the world, you're only a girl." From a young age Alice wanted to be an artist, even with little exposure to art.

In 1918, after graduating from high school, she took the civil service exam and got a high-paying clerical position in order to help support her parents. After three years of work, taking art classes by night in Philadelphia, Neel enrolled in the fine art program at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art & Design) in 1921. In her student works she rejected impressionism, the popular style at the time, and instead embraced the Ashcan School of Realism. It is believed this influence came from one of the most prominent figures of the Ashcan School, Robert Henri, who also taught at Philadelphia School of Design for Women. At Philadelphia School of Design for Women, she won honorable mention in her painting class for the Francisca Naiade Balano Prize two years in a row. In 1925 Neel received the Kern Doge Prize for Best Painting in her life class. She graduated from Philadelphia School of Design for Women in 1925. Neel often said that she chose to attend an all-girls school so as not to be distracted from her art by the temptations of the opposite sex.

Cuba

In 1924, Neel met Carlos Enríquez, an upper-class Cuban painter, at the Chester Springs summer school run by PAFA. The couple married on June 1, 1925, in Colwyn, Pennsylvania. Neel soon moved to Havana to live with Enríquez's family. In Havana, Neel was embraced by the burgeoning Cuban avant-garde, a set of young writers, artists and musicians. In this environment Neel developed the foundations of her lifelong political consciousness and commitment to equality. Neel later said she had her first solo exhibition in Havana, but there are no dates or locations to confirm this. In March 1927, Neel exhibited with her husband in the 12th Salon des Bellas Artes. This exhibition also included Eduardo Abela, Víctor Manuel García Valdés, Marcelo Pogolotti, and Amelia Peláez who were all part of the Cuban Vanguardia Movement. During this time, she had seven servants and lived in a mansion.

Personal difficulties, themes for art

Neel's daughter, Santillana, was born on December 26, 1926, in Havana. In 1927, though, the couple returned to the United States to live in New York. Just a month before Santillana's first birthday, she died of diphtheria. The trauma caused by Santillana's death infused the content of Neel's paintings, setting a precedent for the themes of motherhood, loss, and anxiety that permeated her work for the duration of her career. Shortly following Santillana's death, Neel became pregnant with her second child. On November 24, 1928, Isabella Lillian (called Isabetta) was born in New York City. Isabetta's birth was the inspiration for Neel's Well Baby Clinic.

Depression era

During the Depression, Neel was one of the first artists to work for the Works Progress Administration. At the end of 1933, Neel was offered $30 a week to participate in the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) during an interview at the Whitney Museum. She had been living in poverty. While Neel participated in the PWAP and the Works Progress Administration (WPA)/Federal Art Project, her work gained some recognition in the art world. While enrolled in these government programs she painted in a realist style and her subjects were mostly Depression-era street scenes and Communist thinkers and leaders. Some of these sitters included Mother Bloor, the poet Kenneth Fearing, and Pat Whalen.

Her world was composed of artists, intellectuals, and political leaders of the Communist Party, all of whom became subjects for her paintings. In the 1930s, Neel gained a reputation as an artist, and established a good standing within her circle of downtown intellectuals and Communist Party leaders. While Neel was never an official Communist Party member, her affiliation and sympathy with the ideals of Communism remained constant. In the 1930s, Neel moved to the Spanish Harlem and began painting her neighbors, specifically women and children.

Post-war years

Neel's second son, Hartley, was born in 1941 to Neel and her lover, the communist intellectual Sam Brody. During the 1940s, Neel made illustrations for the Communist publication, Masses & Mainstream, and continued to paint portraits from her uptown home. However, in 1943 the Works Progress Administration ceased working with Neel, which made it harder for the artist to support her two sons. During this time Neel would shoplift and was on welfare to help make ends meet. Between 1940 and 1950, Neel's art virtually disappeared from galleries, save for one solo show in 1944. In the 1950s, Neel's friendship with Mike Gold and his admiration for her social realist work garnered her a show at the Communist-inspired New Playwrights Theatre. In 1959, Neel even made a film appearance after the director Robert Frank asked her to appear alongside a young Allen Ginsberg in his beatnik film, Pull My Daisy (1959). The following year, her work was first reproduced in ARTnews magazine.

Neel's self-portrait and last paintings

Neel painted Kate Millett in 1970, using photographs of Millett to do so, because Millett had refused to pose for Neel. Alice Neel's career was given new life by the feminist art movement, and Kate Millett was a feminist icon of the time. Neel considered herself "a collector of souls" and she aimed to capture Millett's powerful aura. Neel painted this portrait at a time when many independent women, fighting for equal opportunities and being ignored, were looking for a mentor. In this painting, Kate Millett is directly looking at the viewer, and her stare is very commanding.

Neel painted herself in her eightieth year of life, seated on a chair in her studio. The portrait was completed in 1980 but she had started to paint it five years earlier, before abandoning it for a period of time. However, she was encouraged by her son Richard to complete it and came back to in her early 80s as she was also invited to take part in an exhibition of self-portraits at the Harold Reed Gallery in New York. When Neel's unconventional self-portrait was showcased it attracted considerable attention. Her self-portrait was one of her last works before she died. On October 13, 1984, Neel died with her family present in her New York City apartment, from advanced colon cancer.

Recognition

Toward the end of the 1960s, interest in Neel's work intensified. The momentum of the women's movement led to increased attention, and Neel became an icon for feminists. In 1970, she was commissioned to paint the feminist activist Kate Millett for the cover of Time magazine. Millett refused to sit for Neel; consequently, the magazine cover was based on a photograph.

Her image is included in the iconic 1972 poster Some Living American Women Artists by Mary Beth Edelson.

By the mid-1970s, Neel had gained celebrity and stature as an important American artist. The American Academy and the Institute of Arts and Letters elected Neel in 1976. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter presented her with a National Women's Caucus for Art award for outstanding achievement. Neel's reputation was at its height at the time of her death in 1984.

Neel's life and works are featured in the documentary Alice Neel, which premiered at the 2007 Slamdance Film Festival and was directed by her grandson, Andrew Neel. The film was given a New York theatrical release in April of that year.

Her career was used in a 3-episode series of the Freakonomics podcast "The Hidden Side of the Art Market", illustrating that "the art market is so opaque and illiquid that it barely functions like a market at all".

Neel's work was included in the 2022 exhibition Women Painting Women at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

Exhibitions

In 1943, Neel's portrait of Ethel Ashton was exhibited at Alumni Exhibition for the very first time, 13 years after the painting was created, and received brutal criticisms from art critics and the general public.

In 1971, Moore College of Art hosted a solo exhibition of alumna Neel's work.

In 1974, Neel's work was given a retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and posthumously, in the summer of 2000, also at the Whitney.

In 1980. she was invited to take part in an exhibition of self-portraits at the Harold Reed Gallery in New York, where her self-portrait was showcased for the first time.

In 2001 the Philadelphia Museum of Art organized a retrospective of her art entitled "Alice Neel".

In 2004, the first exhibition dedicated to Neel's works in Europe was held in London, at the Victoria Miro Gallery. Jeremy Lewison, who had worked at the Tate, was the curator of the collection.

In 2010, Jeremy Lewison and Barry Walker presented, for Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Alice Neel: Painted Truths, on view from March 21 to June 15, 2010, which later went to the Whitechapel Gallery, London and Moderna Museet Malmö, Sweden.

In 2013, the first major presentation of the artist's watercolors and drawings, as Alice Neel: Intimate Relations, was on view at Nordiska Akvarellmuseet in Skärhamn, Sweden.

In 2015, Xavier Hufkens began representing The Estate of Alice Neel.

In 2016, the Ateneum, Helsinki presented Alice Neel: Painter of Modern Life, which later went to the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague, the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, France, and, in 2018, the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Germany, from October 10, 2017, to January 14, 2018.

In 2017, Hilton Als curated the exhibition "Alice Neel, Uptown" at the Victoria Miro Gallery in London (May 18 – July 29, 2017).

In March 2021, a career-spanning retrospective of Neel's work opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Titled "Alice Neel: People Come First", the exhibit featured more than 100 works and was the largest-ever show of Neel's work in New York and the first in two decades.

In March 2022, Alice Neel: People Come First, a retrospective of her work, opened at the de Young Museum on March 12 and running through to July 10.

In 2023, Alice Neel: Hot Off The Griddle, the largest exhibition of her work to date in the UK, opened at The Barbican Centre Art Gallery in London running from 16th of February until 21st of May 2023.

Collections

Work by the artist is represented in major museum collections, including:

• Art Institute of Chicago
• Blanton Museum of Art
• Cleveland Museum of Art
• Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
• Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
• Honolulu Museum of Art
• Jewish Museum, New York
• Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
• Moderna Museet, Stockholm
• Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
• Museum of Modern Art, New York
• National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
• National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.
• Philadelphia Museum of Art
• San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
• Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky
• St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis Missouri
• Tate Modern, London
• Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut
• Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
• Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts
• Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut

See also

In Spanish: Alice Neel para niños

• The Portrait Now that exhibited her self-portrait
• Elizabeth Neel, her granddaughter and an artist in her own right