Alice Neel
b. 1900, United States
d. 1984
Intimate, casual, direct and personal, Alice Neel's paintings exist as an unparalleled chronicle of New York personalities – both famous and unknown. Born near Philadelphia in 1900, Alice Neel was one of the foremost American figurative painters and one of the most engaging painters of her times. A painter of people, cityscapes, landscapes and still lifes she was a woman with a strong social conscience and equally strong left-wing beliefs. These led her to move from the comfort of Greenwich Village to Spanish Harlem in 1938 in pursuit of 'the truth' and there she painted casual acquaintances and people she encountered on the street among the immigrant community. Her engagement with the art world came in the form of a series of dynamic paintings of artists and curators many of which are now in major museum collections throughout the world. In 1974 she presented a retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, an event that was repeated in 2000, marking the centenary of her birth.
Hers is an art characterised by honesty. Alternating between sombre and vibrant colours, Neel's application of paint could be hard-edged and broad as she addressed her subjects on canvas without preliminary sketches. The result of this direct approach is a body of work that preserves the spontaneity of initial ideas and the liveliness of the one-to-one encounter. Her paintings of mothers and babies reveal her deep understanding of their close bond while her depictions of the elderly reveal an empathy for the changes in body and mind that accompany old age. Few twentieth century artists have documented the life cycle with as penetrating a gaze as Alice Neel.
Recent institutional exhibitions include the acclaimed 2021–2022 touring survey Alice Neel: People Come First, organised by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Previous solo exhibitions have included Freedom, David Zwirner, New York, USA (2019); Alice Neel in New Jersey and Vermont, Xavier Hufkens, Brussels, Belgium (2018); Alice Neel: The Great Society, Aurel Scheibler, Berlin (2017); Alice Neel: Painter of Modern Life, Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Germany (2017); Alice Neel: The Subject and Me, Talbot Rice Gallery, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, (2016); Alice Neel: Painter of Modern Life at Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki (2016) travelling to Gemeentemuseum, The Hague (2016 – 2017), Fondation Vincent van Gogh, Arles, (2017), Deichtorhallen, Hamburg 13 October (2017-2018); Alice Neel: Intimate Relations at Nordiska Akvarellmuseet, Skarhamn (2013); Alice Neel: Painted Truths, a retrospective that toured to the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (2010), the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2010) and the Moderna Museet, Malmö (2010-11); Collector of Souls at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2008) and Alice Neel, organised by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and travelling to the Whitney Museum of American Art (2000).
Her work is in the collections of major museums including the the Art Institute of Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; the Denver Art Museum; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Tate, London and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
A major upcoming retrospective, Alice Neel: Un regard engagé, will open at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in October 2022 (5 October 2022–2 January 2023). Work by the artist is included in Women Painting Women, on view at The Modern, Fort Worth (until 25 September 2022).