Benjamin, 1976. Courtesy of the Estate of Alice Neel and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Joy of Alice Neel
Words by Katy Hessel
Looking at paintings by Alice Neel is like looking into the windows of neighbours. You feel as though you know them. Their familiarity, friendliness (and, to an extent, vulnerability) evident through the expressive faces and features made up of washy brushstrokes and bound together by thick blue lines. There is intimacy and tenderness. As though we’ve just caught them off-guard, mid-conversation with Neel. At once scrutinised and loved by her.
They’re not portraits of the traditional kind. She goes beyond the surface and captures their souls. You can tell she’s speaking to them (probably at times speaking at them – she was known for her rambunctious energy), finding out about their lives and pouring those layers of memories in every stroke, in addition to her own autobiography. Capturing so distinctly the energy in the moment. Because that’s the wonderful thing about painting from life, you record reality in the actual minute.
Take Benjamin, 1976, a painting of her landlord’s son, who probably didn’t want to (or was scared to) be there at first and whose shoulders you can tell were initially tense and nervous. But the more you look, the more you can see their conversation play out. He sat for her for three or four days, and slowly his dark brown almond-shaped eyes light up, a smile emerge from the different hues of pink that make up his lips, and his small shoulders soften. A mother of two (by now grown-up) boys herself, there’s no doubt Neel projected a nostalgic longing for that magical pre-pubescent moment of youth.
“They’re not portraits of the traditional kind. She goes beyond the surface and captures their souls.”
Loyal to her distinct painterly style throughout her entire artistic career, born in January 1900, Neel’s life and artistic career ran almost concurrently with the twentieth century. Having dropped out of art school after running away with a Cuban man, Neel suffered a great deal at the start of her adulthood. Her first child died of diphtheria, her second child was taken away from her and deposited with her paternal grandparents in Cuba (who she only met a handful of times and painted in the starkest and distant ways), and by the end of the 1920s, had suffered a mental breakdown.
Spending a year in a mental health facility, Neel headed to New York, where she worked as an artist as part of the WPA (The Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project). Painting in the midst of the art scene in Greenwich Village, by the mid-1940s, Neel had swapped the avant-garde in favour of a quieter life up in Spanish Harlem, (and later, the Upper West Side), and it was here that she painted her community. People of all different races and from all walks of life: Black, white, gay, straight, young, old, in drag, in suits, and in the nude.
Full of frankness, intensity, vulnerability and humour, Neel’s work was never afraid to show the truthfulness of how she saw someone. There’s a toughness about them and they are just as much about her as they are her sitters. Whether they be a weighty pregnant woman with a straining bulbous-belly protruding off a spindly body, the idealised and highly sexualised male (as seen in the portrait of her gay friend, John Perreault) or the celebrities she lived near on the Upper West Side towards the end of her life, Neel’s subjects were at once intimate, fragile, unguarded, but most of all, hers.
We see joy through her paintings: someone who loves to look and loves to paint. Catching real energy in the stillness of an image, they look back at us with love and familiarity, imperfections and flaws. They are open to a conversation and allow us to read into them. Because she immortalised those who deserved to be remembered in the story of art: people for the sake of people, Neel’s portraits will always be relevant. And at times like these, reassuring. Like neighbours whose physical presence is everlasting and who there is always more to learn.
Katy Hessel is the founder and host of The Great Women Artist podcast.
Alice Neel, People Come First, a retrospective of the artist’s work is on now until 1 August 2021 at The Metropolitan Museum, New York.
Riposte digital edition is free to read throughout May and available to members from June. JOIN HERE.