Alice Neel

ALICE NEEL

An exhibition of portraits of the family by Alice Neel, one of the finest painters of her generation, is at the Norton Museum of Art February 14 through March 29, 1998. Both critics and the subjects of her paintings have written of Neel’s ability to portray the dynamics of relationships. Kinships focuses on particular family relationships: siblings, domestic pairs, parents and children, and members of her own family. The exhibition was organized by the Tacoma Art Museum, and is sponsored by The Elizabeth Norton Society.

Born in 1900, Alice Neel worked as a figurative painter during the decades of WPA realism, postwar abstract expressionism, and 1970s minimalism. She persevered in her work despite a turbulent personal life that included a year of hospitalization after a nervous breakdown, the destruction in 1934 of over two hundred and fifty paintings and drawings, and little attention to her work until the 1960s. Her art demonstrates a vigorous working manner, an unsparing skill in observation and a generous tolerance for the unpredictability of human nature.

Neel disliked being called a portraitist, but rather labeled herself as a “collector of souls.” She believed that each person has an identity, an essential core of personality, and it was this that she sought to reveal in her paintings. She often captured aspects of relationships of which her subjects were not aware, and combined in her work her stringent analysis of their interactions with a broad acceptance of the depth of human emotions. She painted her subjects as distinct individuals, in the poses that were natural to them; poses that, in Neel’s words, “involve … all their character and social standing … what the world has done to them, and their retaliation.”

The compositions, as well as the subjects’ body language, of such works as The Black Spanish American Family or Annemarie and Georgia, allows the viewer to observe how family members draw together tenderly or reluctantly, look away, touch one another, draw back, or open up. The arms of the parents often encircle their children in Neel’s paintings. The early Mother and Child, Havana, 1926, uses this pose to depict a simple, secure relationship.

However, in later works, such as Mother and Child (Nancy and Olivia), 1967, the poses are more attuned to the ambivalent emotions present in the relationship. Don Perlis and Jonathan, 1982, is a portrait of Neel’s artist friend and his mentally disabled son. The father’s tenderness for Jonathan fills the painting, in which he cradles the boy in his left arm. The warm colors and loose application of paint hide neither the shadowed look on the father’s face, nor the gentle vacantness on the son’s.

Neel’s early work tended to depict generalized relationships, but as her later work deepened, she embraced the particular. She didn’t paint “the gay couple,” or “the art world couple” instead, she painted unique individuals, as her titles relate: Geoffrey Hendricks and Brian or Cindy Nemser and Chuck. Each subject has a clear individualism. She respected the distinct character of each person without sentimentalizing him or her.

The importance of the family for Neel is reflected in her portraits of her sons and their wives and children, some of her best known subjects. Last Sickness, 1952, painted in the year before her mother’s death, is intimate and unsentimental, a daughter’s record of her strong mother’s decline. In Richard in the Era of the Corporation, Neel expresses concern for a son driven by the pressures of a corporate career.

Alice Neel studied at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, now the Moore College of Art. She married Cuban artist Carlos Enriquez in 1925 and moved to Cuba with him where her first child, Santillana, was born. Another daughter was born in 1928. In the early 1930s, Neel returned to New York, where she joined the Public Works of Art Project and later the Federal Art Project. Few of her works from this period remain, however, for in 1934, a man with whom she was living destroyed hundreds of paintings and drawings. Two sons were born in 1939 and 1941. Finally in the 1960s, sixty year old Neel began to receive national attention. A major retrospective of her portraits was held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974, and in 1976 she was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. President Jimmy Carter awarded her with a National Women’s Caucus for Award in 1979.

Alice Neel’s 1978 Margaret Evans Pregnant is an arresting portrait of a mother-to-be carrying twins–and a picture of its time Ann Temkin

There was probably only one thing the portraitist Alice Neel (1900-84) relished more than the chance to paint a person in the nude–the chance to paint a nude person pregnant. Formally interesting, art historically exceptional, psychologically complex, socially audacious–what could be more fun for this seasoned painter and provocateur? But even in the adventuresome 1970s, it was not easy to persuade such a subject to pose naked. Margaret Evans’s willingness had the happy result of a rich and wonderful painting, which can be seen in the Neel retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art from the 29th of next month through September 17.

Neel painted Evans, then 33 and pregnant with twins, over three summer days in 1978. At the time, Evans was working in the population office of the Ford Foundation. She is the wife of John Evans, an artist Neel met in 1968, at a show of her paintings at New York’s Graham Gallery. A decade later, when Neel heard that Margaret was about to have twins, she couldn’t pass up the opportunity. She got on the phone and invited the mother-to-be to pose. Neel had been fortunate enough only once before to paint a woman pregnant with twins, and that was her own daughter-in-law, Nancy Neel. Evans made arduous bus trips from her home in the East Village to Neel’s apartment on the corner of Broadway and West 107th Street. The sittings took place just a short time before the babies arrived, and Evans’s belly was about as big and unmanageable as it could be. Furthermore, she was asked to withstand not only

Neel’s intense gaze and the discomfort of a long pose but the video camera of Neel’s friend Michel Auder, who was recording her painting process.

There was no preliminary study and no pencil sketch on the canvas. Neel immediately got going with her blue paint, outlining the contour of Evans’s body, which remains visible in the finished picture. Contrary to her usual practice of elaborating the

face first, this time Neel focused on the belly at the center of the composition. It is the main character in the picture, its muteness paralleled by the closed-mouth, wide-eyed expression on Evans’s face.

As in any good portrait, personality projects strongly from the canvas of Margaret Evans Pregnant. Without the helpful cues of clothing or accessories, the record of this encounter between artist and sitter is necessarily made mainly on the basis of body language. Evans is stark naked, wearing nothing but a wedding band that blends almost invisibly with the ocher floor and the chair on which she sits. The graceful model steadies herself on her seat, bolt upright. Her arms extend straight down her sides, their job as props emphasized by the impossible length of her left forearm. Overall, Evans maintains a determined verticality that is echoed by Neel’s signature in the lower right corner of the canvas.

Neel’s setting expertly locates the sense of vulnerability and expectancy that overrides the model’s calm exterior. Although the portrait was painted in the large, crowded area of Neel’s apartment that doubled as studio and living room, there is no hint of the room’s normal bustle. Here it is generalized as floor, wall, moldings, and mirror–spare as a ballet studio. The golden glow of the hardwood floor and velvet chair seems to confirm the radiance and majesty of the mother-to-be. But the picture is not one of pure joy, complicated as it is by the reflection in the corner behind her. Mirrors in portraits have long served to provide additional or conflicting information to that conveyed by the sitter. Here, the fatigue and consternation in Evans’s profile reveal the psychic aspects of motherhood that are usually left unremarked, as if they were characteristics that maternity clothes could hide. The reflection also seems to allude to the generational procession of motherhood, for the woman in the mirror seems strangely older than the Margaret Evans who looks at us. Is it her own mother? Or perhaps the mother she will eventually become?

Neel was 78 when she painted Evans. By this point, the artist was something of a cult figure within the feminist and art communities. But like so many women artists and writers of her generation and of those before it, Neel had entered the limelight late in life. When she was 62, an age at which her male counterparts were getting valedictory retrospectives, the first major article about her appeared, in this magazine. It was titled, with no irony whatsoever, “Introducing the Portraits of Alice Neel”–portraits she had been painting in near obscurity for over 30 years.

During the course of the 1960s and 70s, Neel delightedly watched society catch up with her–a fiercely dedicated painter who had raised two sons without the support of a husband and who was pursuing a genre decidedly out of fashion. While Neel provided a model for the kind of life that some women were then emulating, the women’s movement had a reciprocal effect on Neel’s own art. No better evidence exists than her portraits of pregnant nudes. It was a subject she first approached in 1964, ultimately painting a total of seven such portraits, with Evans’s being her last. The subject had a powerful resonance at a time when women were newly educating themselves about the form and function of their anatomies. The Boston Women’s Health Book Collective published Our Bodies, Ourselves in 1973, while Adrienne Rich’s classic Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution appeared in 1976. As opportunities for women widened dramatically, debate and discussion about their biological destinies and responsibilities intensified. Neel’s paintings of pregnant women offered no clear opinions or solutions. But, in retrospect, as with all of Neel’s best work, Margaret Evans Pregnant endures as both a portrait of a person and a picture of a time.

Ann Temkin is the Muriel and Philip Berman curator of modern and contemporary art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She organized the Alice Neel exhibition that opens at the Whitney Museum of American Art next month and travels to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, February 18 through April 15, 2001.

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