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Alice Neel: Beyond Portraiture

I usually keep an eye on any interesting exhibitions that come to town. But I very nearly missed the fabulous Alice Neel – Painted Truths that was showing at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts since March.  Fortunately someone on Facebook brought it to my attention a few days ago. Even then I was hard pressed to find time since I was busy getting ready for a trip last week. I got back home on the 12th. The exhibition closed at 7pm on Sunday, the 13th of June. I managed to get to the MFAH yesterday at 6 and was able to catch the show in the last hour of the last day. The extensive retrospective was spectacular indeed. Unfortunately there was no time for a second round past the paintings. 

From the MFAH write up on Alice Neel:

One of the great American painters of the 20th century, Alice Neel (1900-1984) is best known for her psychologically acute portraits. Intimate, casual, direct and personal, satirical at times, they chronicle the social and economic diversity of mid-20th-century American life.

Having consciously set out to chronicle the zeitgeist of her time, Neel painted friends and family, as well as the celebrated artists and writers of her day, such as Andy Warhol, Frank O´Hara, and Meyer Shapiro.

Alice Neel: Painted Truths both traces the evolution of Neel´s style and examines themes that she revisited throughout her career, including her social and political commitment, her stylistic evolution, and her reversal of the typical artist/model gender roles, maternity, and old age.

Alice Neel is most famous for the people she drew and is therefore often classified as a portrait artist. The advent of photography made portrait painting a redundant art, in some people's opinion. But an artist like Neel can shift the conversation about portraiture to a startling level of insight and creativity – no skillful photography could have made her work redundant. Her work was the result of a detached yet incisive eye - a commentary on the emotional inner life of her subject, yet unerringly correct in capturing their physical likeness. (see # 3 below - Neel's depiction of Andy Warhol)  She also showed a wicked touch in assessing some of her sitters. A pair of portraits of a woman named Ellie Poindexter shows one flattering image meant for the consumption of the subject and another representing what Neel "really" thought of Poindexter. I cannot find the former anywhere on the web but you can see the "honest" version (# 4 in the line up) among the images below. 

Alice Neel pat-whelan2 Alice Neel - moth-chil-nancy-olivia Alice Neel- andy-warhol Alice Neel - ellie-poindexter 1 Alice Neel- 1   
 
For a description of Alice Neel's turbulent life see here  and for a large sampling of her work, see the gallery here. Am I correct in getting the distinct impression that the artist was kinder to her male subjects than she was to the women she painted? 

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6 responses to “Alice Neel: Beyond Portraiture”

  1. Ruchira

    I was quite blown away by Alice Neel’s work. To elaborate more on what I said in the last sentence of the post, I am copying what I wrote on my Facebook in a conversation with Elatia Harris on this subject:
    What came across to me in Neel’s portraits of women is that perhaps she wasn’t very happy with her own womanhood. She may have seen the usual quandaries of female existence (unequal sexual powers in a relationship, marriage, motherhood etc.) as an onerous burden. She seems to transfer that disappointment on to the women she painted. The despair, pain, insecurity and sometimes ruthlessness are quite prominent in their faces and body language. Her women are pretenders, sufferers or frightened. The men’s portraits on the other hand, are a mixed bag. Some like the union leader Pat Whelan, the scarred Andy Warhol and her own son Hartley are extremely sympathetic depictions. There are a few male subjects who come across as jerks. But most look as if Neel “understood” their vulnerabilities and their “defects” are expressed honestly without cruelty.

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  2. Sujatha

    I didn’t quite read it that way. Not all the mothers look anxious, though the one you have in the blog post does: Carmen and Judy look normal to me, frozen in a moment of time, as does the other where the daughter’s face mirrors the expression of the mother (I forget the name).
    I think I agree with Norman’s take on Neel’s depiction of the breasts (female or male). They are ‘working’ breasts, not artistic or artful arrangements in the usual sense.

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  3. Pepito

    From what I’ve been told, Carmen was a cleaning woman that came to help Alice Neel once in a while. Judy, her daughter, was born with severe health problems and died shortly after. Most of her best portraits were of working class people from her neighborhood, whom she was very sympathetic to and, to a certain point, identified with.

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  4. Ruchira

    The MFAH exhibit had clustered Neel’s “Mother & Child” paintings on one wall – with unbelievably attractive and haunting results, the Carmen one being the most eye-catching. Indeed, Carmen was Neel’s cleaning woman and the baby died soon after birth. The painting shows the sick and extremely weak infant unable to nurse at her mother’s breasts.
    If I were offered a gift of a few of Neel’s paintings from this exhibition, I probably would have picked some from the “maternal” wall. The canvases are striking, poignant and slightly nervous-making.

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  5. Pepito

    Ruchira, you might want to check out the book ‘Alice Neel: Women’ by Alice Carr. There are sections of ‘mother and child’ and of pregnant women pictures. My instructor’s wife appears in both. Very interesting.

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  6. Thomas at My Porch

    That sounds like a great exhibit. I love Alice Neel. Recently for work I was in the offices of the Commission of Fine Arts here in DC. In their lobby they have portraits of past chairmen on the walls. Although the portraits are all pretty good they are also pretty conventional. But one lucky chairman got his portrait painted by Neel and it definitely stands out.

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