Alice Neel (January 28, 1900 – October 13, 1984) was an American visual artist. Recognized for her paintings of friends, family, lovers, poets, artists, and strangers, Neel is considered one of the greatest American portraitists of the 20th century. Her career spanned from the 1920s to 1980s.
Her paintings have an expressionistic use of line and color, psychological acumen, and emotional intensity. She pursued a career as a figurative painter during a period when abstraction was favored, and she did not begin to gain critical praise for her work until the 1960s. Her work contradicts and challenges the traditional and objectified nude depictions of women by her male predecessors. This is done by depicting women through a female gaze, illustrating them as being consciously aware of the objectification by men and the demoralizing effects of the male gaze.
Alice Neel was born on January 28, 1900, in Merion Square, Pennsylvania. Her father was George Washington Neel, an accountant for the Pennsylvania Railroad, and her mother was Alice Concross Hartley Neel. In mid-1900 her family moved to the rural town of Colwyn, Pennsylvania. Young Alice was the fourth of five children with three brothers and a sister. Her siblings were named Hartley, Albert, Lillian, and George Washington Jr. Her oldest brother, Hartley, died of diphtheria shortly after she was born. He was eight years old. She was raised in a straight-laced, lower-middle-class family during a time when there were limited expectations and opportunities for women. Her mother had said to her: "I don't know what you expect to do in the world, you're only a girl." From a young age Alice wanted to be an artist, even with little exposure to art.
In 1918, after graduating from high school, she took the civil service exam and got a high-paying clerical position in order to help support her parents. After three years of work, taking art classes by night in Philadelphia, Neel enrolled in the fine art program at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art & Design) in 1921. In her student works she rejected impressionism, the popular style at the time, and instead embraced the Ashcan School of Realism. It is believed this influence came from one of the most prominent figures of the Ashcan School, Robert Henri, who also taught at Philadelphia School of Design for Women. At Philadelphia School of Design for Women, she won honorable mention in her painting class for the Francisca Naiade Balano Prize two years in a row. In 1925 Neel received the Kern Doge Prize for Best Painting in her life class. She graduated from Philadelphia School of Design for Women in 1925.
In 1924, Neel met Carlos Enríquez, an upper-class Cuban painter, at the Chester Springs summer school run by PAFA. The couple married on June 1, 1925, in Colwyn, Pennsylvania. Neel soon moved to Havana to live with Enríquez's family. In Havana, Neel was embraced by the burgeoning Cuban avant-garde, a set of young writers, artists and musicians. In this environment Neel developed the foundations of her lifelong political consciousness and commitment to equality. Neel later said she had her first solo exhibition in Havana, but there are no dates or locations to confirm this. In March 1927, Neel exhibited with her husband in the 12th Salon des Bellas Artes. This exhibition also included Eduardo Abela, Víctor Manuel García Valdés, Marcelo Pogolotti, and Amelia Peláez who were all part of the Cuban Vanguardia Movement. During this time, she had seven servants and lived in a mansion.
Personal difficulties, themes for art
Neel's daughter, Santillana, was born on December 26, 1926, in Havana. In 1927, though, the couple returned to the United States to live in New York. Just a month before Santillana's first birthday, she died of diphtheria. The trauma caused by Santillana's death infused the content of Neel's paintings, setting a precedent for the themes of motherhood, loss, and anxiety that permeated her work for the duration of her career. Shortly following Santillana's death, Neel became pregnant with her second child. On November 24, 1928, Isabella Lillian (called Isabetta) was born in New York City. Isabetta's birth was the inspiration for Neel's Well Baby Clinic, a bleak portrait of mothers and babies in a maternity clinic more reminiscent of an insane asylum than a nursery.
In the spring of 1930, Carlos had given the impression that he was going overseas to look for a place to live in Paris. Instead, he returned to Cuba, taking Isabetta with him. During the time of Enriquez's absence, Neel sublet her New York apartment and traveled to work in the studio of her friends and fellow painters Ethel V. Ashton and Rhonda Myers.
Mourning the loss of her husband and daughter, Neel had a nervous breakdown, was hospitalized, and attempted suicide. She was placed in the suicide ward of the Philadelphia General Hospital.
Even in the insane asylum, she painted. Alice loved a wretch. She loved the wretch in the hero and the hero in the wretch. She saw that in all of us, I think.
Deemed stable almost a year later, Neel was released from the sanatorium in 1931 and returned to her parents' home. Following an extended visit with her close friend and frequent subject, Nadya Olyanova, Neel returned to New York.
There Neel painted the local characters, including Joe Gould, whom she depicted in 1933 with multiple penises, which represented his inflated ego and "self-deception" about who he was and his unfulfilled ambitions. The painting, a rare survivor of her early works, has been shown at Tate Modern.
During the Depression, Neel was one of the first artists to work for the Works Progress Administration. At the end of 1933, Neel was offered $30 a week to participate in the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) during an interview at the Whitney Museum. She had been living in poverty. While Neel participated in the PWAP and the Works Progress Administration (WPA)/Federal Art Project, her work gained some recognition in the art world. While enrolled in these government programs she painted in a realist style and her subjects were mostly Depression-era street scenes and Communist thinkers and leaders. Some of these sitters included Mother Bloor, the poet Kenneth Fearing, and Pat Whalen. She had an affair with a man named Kenneth Doolittle who was a heroin addict and a sailor. In 1934, he set afire 350 of her watercolors, paintings and drawings. At this time, her husband Carlos proposed to reunite, although in the end the couple neither reunited nor officially filed for divorce.
She consorted with artists, intellectuals, and political leaders of the Communist Party, all of whom became subjects for her paintings. Her work glorified subversion and sexuality, depicting whimsical scenes of lovers and nudes, like a watercolor she made in 1935, Alice Neel and John Rothschild in the Bathroom, which showed the naked pair peeing. In the 1930s, Neel gained a reputation as an artist, and established a good standing within her circle of downtown intellectuals and Communist Party leaders. While Neel was never an official Communist Party member, her affiliation and sympathy with the ideals of Communism remained constant. In the 1930s, Neel moved to the Spanish Harlem and began painting her neighbors, specifically women and children.
The summer of 1930 was a period in her life that she described "as one of her most productive" because that was when she painted her earliest female nudes. Initially Neel preferred painting men to women. She believed women in art represented a dreary way of life consisting of serving men. It was during the time when she felt most vulnerable because of the loss of her children and separation from her husband. That autumn she had a nervous breakdown and had to be institutionalized. Neel's subject matter changed; she went from painting portraits of ordinary people, family, friends, strangers, and well-known art critics to female nudes. The female nude in Western art had always represented a "Woman" as vulnerable, anonymous, passive, and ageless and the quintessential object of the male gaze. However, Neel's female nudes contradicted and "satirized the notion and the standards of the female body." By this sharp contrast to this prevailing idealistic idea of how the female body should be portrayed in art, art historians believe that she was able to free her female sitters from this prevailing ideology that in turn gave them an identity and power. Through her use of "expressive line, vibrant palette, and psychological intensity", Neel did not depict the human body in a realistic manner; it was the way she was able to capture and dignify her sitters' psychological and internal standpoint that made the portraits realistic. For this reason, many art critics today describe Neel's female nudes as truthful and honest portraits, although at the time the works were controversial in the art world because they questioned women's traditional role. Neel often painted women in social interaction or in public spaces, starkly challenging the "Spheres of Femininity" that most 19th-century women artists existed and worked within. In other words, it is believed that Neel challenged the norms of women's role in the household and in everyday life from her paintings. Neel fundamentally changed the way the art establishment viewed the potentialities of the female nude by depicting an unprecedented range of the female experience.