Phoebe Hoban - Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty

Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty

Phoebe Hoban

For my father, Russell Hoban

Alice Neel died more than thirty-five years ago, but the artist and her scathingly honest portraits couldnt be more of the moment. Long before the Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ movements, not to mention #MeToo, Neel incisively documented Americas remarkable and resilient diversity, from her black and brown Spanish Harlem neighbors to civil rights and feminist leaders, from the children of immigrants to transgender members of Andy Warhols coterie. As she herself put it, I have painted life itself right off the vinenot a copy of an old master with new figures insertedbecause now is now.

In many ways, 2020s unprecedented now profoundly resonates with Neels now, whether it was the Depression of the 1930s and the ensuing WPA years, or the political upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the civil rights and feminist movements came of age and Neel and her work first garnered serious attention. Always radical, Neels oeuvre has, perhaps, rarely felt more relevant.

Her stated goal was to chronicle the Zeitgeist, and Neel was, from the very start, fiercely democratic in her subjects, portraying her lovers, her children, pregnant nudes, fringe characters, and famous art-world figures. Neels art provides a vivid lens through which to view the twentieth century. It alsoto an extraordinary degreeaccurately reflects the current Zeitgeist. During a perilous period when so much of our cultures hard-won progress in accepting diversityracial, cultural, and sexualseems gravely at risk, Neels passionate visual engagement with the people and the politics of her era packs a potent one-two punch. Her canvases simultaneously convey the hindsight of historical perspective and a trenchant sense of immediacy.

Neels entire body of work, from her early Social Realist portraits of labor organizers through her signature, genre-bending nudes of pregnant women, powerfully integrates the political with the personal, transparently merging the artists radical social activism with her nakedly forthright aesthetic vision. While she was arguably Americas first feminist, multiculturally conscious artist, Neel typically coined her very own term for her life and work. As she rhetorically labeled herself, You know what I am, Im an anarchic humanist.

The roots of Neels humanism were grounded in the Social Realist movement, the 1930s genre that lionized the common man and unsparingly represented social injustice, working-class heroes, and the poor. Her lifelong affiliation with the Communist Party, along with her devotion to Social Realism, popular in the Depression but widely debunked by the 1940s, would relegate her to the margins of the art world for several decades.

Even during the peak of Abstract Expressionism, Neel, who was familiar not only with the Ab-Ex movement itself but also with many of its primary movers and shakers, never veered from portraiture, long declared dead. She did, however, banish the term from her vocabulary, preferring to call her canvases pictures of people. I just went my own way, she later said, a definitive statement that could serve as her epithet.

Over the years, Neels practice evolved into a strikingly original style. As a woman and as an artist, Neel was sui generis, carving out a distinct and unmistakable niche. Adept at transcending stereotypes in both her life and her art, Neel radicalized portraiture, turning it inside out. She famously preferred to paint her subjects naked, ruthlessly revealing both the inner and outer human. Along the way, she transformed the nude with her revolutionary depictions of both genders, from her paradigm-shifting male odalisques to her convention-defying pregnant females.

Few portrait painters besides Lucian Freud have been as unflinching in their gaze. But while Freud is a clinician, his cold dissection of his subjects often chilling, Neel is an avowed humanist, interested in not only her subjects physiognomy but in their heart and soul. And while much of Freuds work, particularly his female nudes, revels in the millennia-long tradition of the male gaze, Neels non-gendered gaze belongs to Neel alone. That is the microcosm, she said. Everything can be therethe person, his position in life, how he feels, how he thinks, what life does to him, how he retaliates, the spirit of the times, everything.

Her canvases cover the waterfront, from the young to the old, from the disenfranchised to the world-renowned. Her empathetic portrayal of gay and transgender couples is unique in art history. Neel, who from the outset of her career set out to be a veritable antiMary Cassatt, also produced some of the worlds most memorable portraits of children, painted with the artists inimitably honest vision and devoid of any sentimentality. Take her several paintings of Georgie Arce, a neighborhood boy she befriended who was later incarcerated for murder. Neel captures his mobile features, with all their innate edginess.

By the time she was thirty, Neel had endured several personal tragedies, including two suicide attempts resulting in institutionalization, the death of an infant daughter, permanent estrangement from her second-born, and abandonment by her husband. For most of her life, her financial circumstances were perilous, her domestic scene volatile and sometimes abusive, and from the mid-1940s through the early 1960s she painted in almost complete obscurity. But Neel saw herself as a survivor, not a victim. As such, almost all her canvases reflect her own identity. At the same time, Neels portraits are, in a sense, collaborative, the exchange between the artist and her subject palpable, as exemplified by her extraordinary portrait of Andy Warhol, nude from the waist up, revealing his scars and the surgical corset he wore after he was shot by Valerie Solanas. I love to see what the pressure of life does to the human psyche, she once said.

Neels life, highly dramatic in its own right, spanned the turbulent twentieth century, and its narrative arc not only traces the many major historical changes that took place between 1900 and the 1980s, but also follows the progress made (or not made) for women and for women artists. It is telling that Neels first real success came at the peak of the second wave of feminism, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The womens lib movement is giving the women the right to openly practice what I had to do in an underground way, she once said.

Neel liked to declare, I am the century, and in many ways she was. But Neels artistic legacy and cultural influence extend beyond her lifetime and continue to flourish and grow. Neels inspiration can be seen in the work of a number of contemporary painters, from Eric Fischl, with his sexually suggestive narratives, to Marlene Dumas, who, like Neel, uses the body to get to the spirit, to Elizabeth Peyton, known for her portraits of close friends and celebrities. As Peyton, who actually did a nude of Neel as an homage, has put it, Alice Neel seemed to be able to connect with all kinds of people. I feel pictures of people contain their time in an important way that communicates to other times.

And a new generation also owes a clear debt to Neel. Such millennial artists as Jordan Casteelwhose first New York City museum show opened at the New Museum in February 2020, and whose large-scale portraits of subway riders, street vendors, her own Rutgers students, and, in particular, her Harlem neighborsunabashedly emulate Neels style and subject matter. Indeed, one of Casteels favorite paintings is Neels portrait of the artist Faith Ringgold.