Last month, I visited the Barbican to see the large and impressive retrospective of the work of Alice Neel. It is the first exhibition dedicated to her life and work in this country, following hot on the heels of acclaimed shows at the Met in New York and the Pompidou in Paris. A far too little known American figurative artist of the mid to late 20th century, Neel drew upon her curiosity about and compassion for the real lives lived by those around her.
Alice Neel’s extraordinary life was an example of meeting both triumph and disaster and dealing with them much the same. She refused to settle for her lot - whether that was the comfortable, privilege of her early upbringing and schooling or her life as a single mother of 2 boys living in Spanish Harlem during the Great Depression.
She referred to herself as “a collector of souls” and she certainly had a wonderful collection. The people and places she painted radiate with warmth and empathy at a time when human kindness was often a rare commodity.
Neel, although born in Pennsylvania, had a life long engagement with New York City and the residents of the boroughs in which she lived, including Greenwich Village, The Bronx and Spanish Harlem. She said her goal was to capture life “hot off the griddle”. She lived through a time of the most bone-numbing poverty which she was witness to every day. But her sitters, from whatever side of the tracks they hail are always treated with dignity by her brush.
She painted children with great directness, with the same intensity and engagement as adults - keenly aware of their struggles growing up against a backdrop of poverty, illness and under-investment. She joined the Federal Art Project in 1933. An initiative of President Roosevelt’s New Deal which saw the production of art as having equal value with construction and transportation. A life-long Communist when it was really dangerous to be one, she joined street protests and painted Civil Rights Activists and leaders such as Harold Cruse, as well as underground New York celebrities. Touching and intriguing portraits of Jackie Curtis and Andy Warhol are some of the many highlights in the exhibition.
Her work is characterised by an enduring humanism. She saw herself as a buffer against the various dehumanising forces in society, incl. capitalism, sexism, racism, homophobia. Her paintings of the people that came in and out of her home are suffused with a real desire to understand their stories and experiences. Vanity or conceit were of no interest to Neel. She talked non-stop while she painted, disarming the sitter so that she could study them more closely, a process that often left her exhausted after a session, “like and untenanted apartment”.
There was never enough money for a separate studio so she worked within her domestic space which is reflected in her pictures. The bare bulb in the sitting room throws a frequent pool of blue light in her portraits and the blue and white striped armchair appears time and again, like an old friend. It must have been a place in which people felt safe and at their ease
Neel was a great student of the History of Art, but fiercely guarded her autonomy and independence, possibly because she was a woman in what was still a man’s world. She was ambitious as an artist but she kept faith with figurative painting at a time when abstraction was the smart career choice.
“ I’m not against abstraction” she said, “Do you know what I am against? Saying that Man himself has no importance."
There are stylistic similarities with Gauguin, deep colour hues and that indigo outline around the body. An intensity of gaze to match Van Gogh’s and the directness and defiance of Suzanne Valadon - another overlooked artist of the early 20th century who engaged with motherhood and identity in ways which echo Neel’s.
She saved her first self portrait until she was 80 years old and again, broke the taboos surrounding the female nude and the absence of the older nude in art history - drawing attention to long-held stereotypes that still persist. Sitting in the familiar blue and white striped armchair, in her gold-rimmed glasses and she fixes us with a knowing glance which says, as she would often telephone friends to announce, “Guess what? I’m alive!”
Alice Neel: Hot Off The Griddle at the Barbican Gallery runs until May 21.
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