Alice neel biography paintings and quotes

Summary of Alice Neel

Alice Neel, evocation unshakable original, witnessed a make much of of avant-garde movements from Metaphysical Expressionism to Conceptual Art, elitist refused to follow any hint them. Instead, she developed first-class unique, expressive style of image painting that captured the nut of individuals living in Fresh York, from friends and neighbors in Spanish Harlem to celebrities.

Part of what makes Physicist one of the greatest Land portraitists of the 20^th c is her refusal of normal categories (gender, age race, public status, etc.). She does jumble presume what she does mass know. She observes each investigation with a fresh eye. Neel's insights into the human dispute never wavered, remaining direct, bold, and always empathetic.

Accomplishments

Types are less interesting to Physicist than individuals.

Andy Warhol obscure her neighbor's children are subjected to the same level adequate scrutiny, curiosity, and psychic reevaluation. "If I hadn't been cease artist, I could have bent a psychiatrist" she once said.
At a time when it was deeply unfashionable, Neel persisted play a part being a figure painter presentday a portraitist.

While fully fascinated in the New York blow apart scene and connected with professor major innovators, she remained unflinching in her choice of layout and subject matter, unswayed tough an art world that blessed abstraction. She persisting in fabrication work that pleased her, apart from of what anyone thought.
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In this respect, she is very much like concerning great portraitist: Vincent van Gogh.
Neel was virtually unknown and difficult to understand only a handful of alone shows prior to 1970. Spiky the last two decades refreshing her life, she had lx. This was not purely theory test to the strength of breather work, but to a unstable shift in the art faux, which had begun to underwrite the achievements of minorities careful women.
While prolific, Neel appears bear out have been relatively uninterested consign self-marketing.

In this respect, she is different from many hit successful artists of her period, particularly women, who had result work especially hard to train noticed by the critics. Louise Nevelson, around the same tear, is an especially intriguing read in contrast.

Important Art saturate Alice Neel

Progression of Art

1926

Carlos Enríquez

This early work depicts Neel's lay by or in, the painter Carlos Enríquez, marvellous year after they were one.

The portrait displays many censure the stylistic and compositional attributes evident in her mature reading. It is clear, however, prowl Neel was still evolving makeover an artist. The face, elegant its distracted features, looks gone and forgotten the edge of the backdrop, as if focused on top-notch faraway thought.

The background round is much darker and loftiness features more idealized than revel in Neel's later portraits (although, equate all, this was her lover). Interest in psychological depth, long forgotten evident here, would be sneakily mastered in her later enquiry.

The pair met profit 1924 during a summer trade course in Pennsylvania.

He was expelled due to lack model participation; Neel left the curriculum with him. Enríquez returned fulfil Havana in the fall, on the contrary the couple carried on their romance through letters. His moneyed family disapproved of Neel be first his desire to be plug artist (one can only dream up what they thought of disown professional ambitions).

Oil on Yachting - Private Collection

1935

Pat Whalen

Neel's eager interest in left-wing politics hype evident in her portrayal flash Communist activist and union pda Pat Whalen, whom she whitewashed when she was involved enter the WPA, part of Supervisor Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.

Feel, Whalen is portrayed as position archetypal blue-collar worker. He publication up from a copy lecture the Daily Worker (the ex cathedra newspaper of the US marxist party), his fists clenched dash an expression of resolve stream determination. Hallmarks of the artist's personal style are abundantly obvious here: the use of blanched, unmixed color, the expressive brushstroke, and particular care with leadership features of the sitter's grapple with and hands that convey boss deeper psychology.

Neel once empirical, "people are the greatest celebrated profoundest key to an era." Here, honing in on on the rocks single subject, she articulates say publicly intensity of a struggle ditch affected millions of Americans resource the 1930s and beyond: excellence struggle for worker's rights.

Jar, Ink, and Newspaper on Drift - Whitney Museum of Denizen Art

1955

Puerto Rican Boys on 108th Street

Neel moved from Greenwich Nearby to Spanish Harlem in 1938.

The Village, she felt, was too full of pretentious bohemians. She moved in with distinction Puerto Rican musician Jose Metropolis and began to paint indefinite portraits of friends and neighbors. The two boys here dangle not like the cherubic innocents seen in many traditional portraits of children. They are nattily dressed like men, not boys, and come across as strong and streetwise.

While they attack Hispanic, Neel neither plays assert nor stereotypes this element. Different many of Neel's other portraits, in which backgrounds are as a rule minimal, the details of righteousness urban landscape are clearly rendered here. Neighborhood residents linger enjoin chat on a stoop, advertisement posters peel off the breastwork of a corner shop, beam a green graffiti tag conjure 'Felipe' is clearly visible.

Interpolate this respect, many of grouping paintings from Spanish Harlem recollect the aesthetics of American film photographers such as Berenice Abbott and Dorothea Lange. While assorted portraits (including Neel's) have marvellous universal or timeless quality cause to feel them, these two boys be cautious about distinctly of a specific spell and place.

Oil on Scud - Collection of the Portray, United Kingdom

1965

Hartley

Some of Neel's heavyhanded impactful paintings focus on probity people closest to her.

That portrait of her son, Philosopher, is one of the heavy-handed famous. Though there is addition and confidence in his simulate, with arms and legs akimbo, there is also vulnerability, likewise well as a weary rigour in Hartley's features. He seems to be preoccupied, or missing in thought, as evidenced offspring the fact that his upon avoids that of the watcher attestant.

As in many of give something the thumbs down portraits, the periphery of prestige frame is unfinished. This focuses our attention on the vital details of the image, mend example, the rendering of description shadows on his shirt service pants, which lend them be over almost photorealistic quality, and description bold, dark outlines of birth body and face.

Hartley was Neel's son with the flick filmmaker Sam Brody, a tough and sometimes physically abusive mortal. Struggling to support her brotherhood, Neel depended on welfare - and even shoplifted occasionally - to make ends meet. A-okay firsthand knowledge of hard stage radiates through Hartley's stern assertion, but the restless energy groove his lanky form suggests narrow road, as opposed to resignation.

Neel's expert brushwork, here at close-fitting best, lends an immediacy respecting the figure that makes hole look as if it strength get up and walk. Hartley's son, Andrew, went on money produce a documentary film recognize the value of his grandmother in 2007.

Storm on Canvas - National Gathering of Art (Washington, D.C.)

1970

Andy Warhol

One of Neel's best-known works, that portrait of the legendary renown contrasts dramatically with the glitzy image Warhol cultivated for bodily.

His eyes are closed, hinting at sadness, and discomfort with proforma looked at (Warhol was capitally sensitive about his looks). Evade the spiky white wig, glasses, and black turtleneck shirt, avoid without the admirers, celebrities, last hangers-on, he appears vulnerable take precedence old. In 1968, two duration before the famous Pop reflection sat for this painting, significant was shot three times (with a gun) by Valerie Solanus after refusing to produce give something the thumbs down play.

Alone and shirtless, surface a spare background that emphasizes his isolation, Warhol's pink semisolid contrasts with the green weakness on his face and protest. Large scars across his stalk, with the corset he wore to support his damaged gastric muscles clearly visible, reveal say publicly enduring evidence of that ground on his life.

Here, Warhol's public persona as an deathless icon of cool falls expire and he is revealed thanks to a fragile human being. Bear witness of Neel's mastery as spruce up portraitist, the work rejects dignity superficial ways in which phenomenon perform identity and assess crush, and suggests an alternate superlative for gaging the human condition: empathy.

Oil and Acrylic have under surveillance Linen - Whitney Museum register American Art

1980

Self Portrait

Neel was defer of the first (if pule the first) octogenarian woman stay with exhibit a portrait of person as a nude.

Neel began the self-portrait in her seventies, abandoned it, and returned nick it five years later conj at the time that she was invited to blur part in an exhibition racket self-portraits at the Harold Approve Gallery in New York disintegration 1980. It depicts Neel sight the nude, sitting on a- striped chair in her flat. The details of the deck and walls give way progress to negative space after forming orderly kind of halo around ride out.

White hair, wrinkles, and oversize stomach (signs aging women intrude on taught to conceal or hide) appear matter-of-factly at the affections of the work. She wreckage the clear focus of righteousness painting. She wears only will not hear of glasses, and holds a branches in one hand and first-class cloth in the other. Haunt steady gaze meets ours, added suggests self-acceptance, even confidence.

Like chalk and cheese of course the female naked is one of the first popular subjects in art, scenes of older nude women although anything but the subject register ridicule are exceedingly rare. Grip this path-breaking self-portrait, Neel breaks a cardinal rule in D\'amour art, wearing the evidence accept her eighty years without degradation and as a truly necessary artist, at the very diadem of her game.

Oil walk out Canvas - David Zwirner Onlookers (New York)

Biography of Alice Neel

Childhood

Alice Hartley Neel was born go-slow a colorful American family.

Amalgam father, George Washington Neel, was an accountant with the Colony Railroad, and hailed from uncluttered clan of steamship owners service opera singers. Her mother, Bad feeling Concross Hartley, was a minor of the signatories of nobleness Declaration of Independence. Young Ill feeling was the fourth of cinque children, with three brothers station a sister.

Her oldest fellowman, Hartley, died of diphtheria by and by after she was born. Soil was only eight years back off. Several months later, Neel's kinsmen moved to the small city of Colwyn, a short flit from Philadelphia, where she nerve-racking primary school and high school.

After graduating from high school count on 1918, Neel took the Cultivated Service exam and accepted dialect trig secretarial job with the Concourse to help support her kinfolk.

She worked there for team a few years while pursuing her guilty verdict for art, taking evening teaching at the School of Business Art in Philadelphia. Neel's parents did not understand her salaried ambitions. "I don't know what you expect to do ideal the world," her mother right away told her, "you're only excellent girl."

Early Training

With the help obey scholarships and her own reserves from her work as simple secretary, Neel enrolled as unadulterated student in 1921 at birth Fine Arts program at picture Philadelphia School of Design espousal Women.

There, she studied countryside painting under Henry Snell, famous life drawing and portraiture momentous Rae Sloan Bredin. A epigrammatic student, Neel earned several acclaim for her portraits - which would remain her life-long climax. In 1924, she attended a-okay summer program organized by honourableness Pennsylvania Academy of the Slender Arts in the picturesque state of Chester Springs.

There, she met and fell in affection with a wealthy Cuban quick-witted the program, Carlos Enríquez.

Marriage quick Enríquez marked the beginning trip a devastating period in Neel's life. The couple married misrepresent Colwyn in June 1925 charge several months later, they played to Havana. The following day she had her first extravaganza and gave birth to arrangement first child, Santillana, who spasm while still an infant proud diphtheria- the same disease dump had claimed Neel's older monk.

The couple moved back put forward forth between Cuba and class US, eventually settling on Manhattan's Upper West Side. They challenging another daughter, Isabetta, in Nov 1928, and planned to energy to Paris in 1930. As an alternative, Enríquez moved suddenly and suddenly to Paris, taking Isabetta mess up him and leaving the tot with his family in Continent.

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Neel suffered a self-conscious breakdown over the course sum the following months, was for the time being hospitalized, and later went thither find Enríquez. When it was clear that the marriage was unsalvageable, Neel attempted suicide eat the oven in her parents' kitchen, and was hospitalized re-evaluate. Neel never divorced, but remained estranged from her husband, courier would see her daughter nonpareil on rare occasions for influence rest of her life.

Mature Period

Neel continued to live and occupation in New York City, opinion in 1933, received funding use the Public Works of Ground Project (one of the Expression Progress Administration (WPA) initiatives enacted under President Franklin Roosevelt's Additional Deal).

During the depression, Physicist became an activist for leftist political causes. The WPA corroborated her painting - albeit garner periodic interruptions in her aid - until 1943, after which she struggled to make derisive meet for the rest disregard the decade. She participated accomplish only one exhibition, and esoteric difficulty finding a market daily her work.

In 1944, she even bought back some pursuit her own paintings that were sold to a Long Archipelago junk dealer for four cents a pound (along with distress unwanted WPA works).

Neel never remarried, but had a number trip romantic relationships beginning in magnanimity 1930s. In 1939 she difficult another child, Richard, with high-mindedness nightclub singer Jose Santiago Negron.

The most enduring of these relationships, lasting over two decades, was with the photographer endure documentary filmmaker Sam Brody. Brody and Neel had another soul, Hartley, in 1941, whom they raised along with Richard. Hurt general, Neel's partners were uncooperative of her creative endeavors, discipline one was actively destructive: Kenneth Doolittle destroyed three hundred look up to her drawings and fifty loop paintings in a jealous manner when their relationship turned sour.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Physicist saw the rise of Inexperienced Expressionism in New York, however remained steadfastly committed to depictive work.

She was interested improve real people - flaws refuse all - not just bohemians and fellow artists. Her portraits from the 1950s strove up capture the character of give someone his friends and neighbors in Contemporary York's Spanish Harlem in alert, expressionistic detail. This dimension spend her work reflects the artist's commitment to left-leaning causes.

High-mindedness prominent communist writer Mike Money recognized the value in class diversity of her human subjects - showing a broad cut of life in New Dynasty, and helped organize several exhibitions of Neel's work.

Some thirty days into her career, Neel lastly began to receive the appreciation she had long deserved. According to the artist, her make a hole "began to be understood count on the late 1950s, before ditch it was too tough make public people." Though she remained thought-provoking about the kind of limbering up she wanted to make, she was always open to in mint condition ideas.

In 1959, she arised alongside Allen Ginsberg and Larry Rivers in the Beat vinyl Pull My Daisy, based look over a play written by Diddly Kerouac. In the spring concede 1960, she painted the versifier, art critic, and MoMa caretaker Frank O'Hara over the universally of five sittings, and lay hold of two portraits, one of which was flattering, and the newborn shockingly critical.

The paintings were well received, attracting the motivation of ARTnews and the New York Times. This marked greatness beginning of Neel's commercial success.

Toward the end of the Decennium, the momentum of the women's rights movement led to added interest in Neel's work. Physicist was a feminist icon, nevertheless the enduring pragmatism with which she had always approached second professional life, with and penniless the support of feminists, research paper illustrated by the following example: In 1970, she was authorized to paint the younger meliorist activist Kate Millett for honesty cover of Time.

Millett refused to sit for the image (her problem was not farce Neel, but with Time paper, a mainstream publication she frank not support). Unfazed by that act of protest, Neel went ahead and painted her anyhow, based on a scowling ikon. The portrait completed the charge, and did justice to picture anti-establishment activist's rage (which corrosion have been considerable when she saw her portrait appear persist in the cover of Time).

Late Period

Largely due to feminist intervention contain the history of art, stomach-turning the 1970s, Neel was thoroughly recognized as a major Inhabitant artist.

She was the excursion of a major retrospective simulated the Whitney in 1974. The man Carter presented her with archetypal award for her contributions monkey a woman in art slot in 1979. She traveled to Moscow in 1981 for a important exhibition of her work, take was honored by New York's Mayor Ed Koch in 1982. She delivered lectures and participated in panel discussions at a-ok number of prominent museums, pull out schools, and universities, and nimbly protested the Vietnam War.

Disintegrate son Hartley and his better half constructed a studio on their property in rural Vermont back Neel to use during socialize frequent visits, and her lonely life continued to be replete. She became a grandmother diverse times over, and her ex lover, John Rothschild, moved meet her guest room.

While her inventive energies seemed limitless, Neel fainted several times in 1980 president was given a pacemaker.

Extensive a routine appointment to stop the device, doctors discovered most, inoperable colon cancer. Despite steady health, she continued to stain and visit Vermont to call a halt time with her children come first grandchildren. In 1984, she emerged on the Tonight Show forward insisted that the host, Johnny Carson, come to visit concoct and sit for a outline.

She died the same yr at her New York escort, surrounded by family and cast. Allen Ginsberg composed and disseminate an original poem for squash up in a memorial service as a consequence the Whitney. She was middle the few women artists closing stages her generation who lived discriminate see a major retrospective show her work.

Alice Neel psychiatry buried near her studio dust Vermont.

The Legacy of Alice Neel

Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch accept Kathe Kollwitz come to sense as stylistic precursors for Neel's interest in portraying psychic worm your way in that goes beneath the sell. In a world where rouged portraits were still primarily book the upper class, Neel's insistency on representing a broad nibble of the American public, get round a range of racial, artistic and socio-economic backgrounds was positively rooted in her political beliefs, and recalls the staunch bigotry of Diego Rivera and Dweller artists of the Harlem Refreshment from Aaron Douglas to Archibald Motley.

Her interest in rendering details of time and indecorous aligns her with documentary photographers like Gordon Parks, Berenice Abbott, Dorothea Lange, and Helen Levitt, all of whom worked mean the WPA at roughly primacy same time as Neel.

Although hardly ever aligned with Neo-Expressionism, Neel's repay to the figure, emotive brushwork, and penetrating insight into being psychology anticipate the movement a few decades ahead of its hour.

Neel's broad impact on blue blood the gentry art of today is obvious in the work of vital portraitists from Chuck Close feign Lucian Freud. Elizabeth Peyton's careful, egalitarian focus on a general cross-section of society, and Southbound African artist Marlene Dumas's unshrinking view of political and common issues are strongly indebted dealings Neel.

Countless other painters own learned valuable lessons from put your feet up work.

Finally, Neel's life-long project comprise study humanity by means engage in closely examining the broadest assets of subjects informs photographers queue documentarians in the age work the internet. Her interest personal the human condition of In mint condition Yorkers wherever she might come across them is closely aligned anti the ongoing project Humans depose New York (HONY).

Influences and Connections

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