Alice Neel: Hot Off the Griddle

Product Information

For me, people come first,” journalist Mike Gold quotes Neel saying in 1950 in The Daily Workers , a newspaper published by the Communist Party USA. Born on January 28 1900, artist Alice Neel liked to say she was four weeks younger than the century. The Art Gallery is located on Level 3 and can be accessed by stairs and lifts from Level G or via the Sculpture Court if coming from outside.

In her diary, she wrote: “I love you Harlem for the rich deep vein of human feeling buried under your fire engines.

An 80-year-old woman looks back at us wearing nothing but a pair of glasses and a “screw you if you don’t like it” expression. From this followed her portraits of Communist Party-linked intellectuals such as Harold Cruse and Mike Gold, a young Frank O’Hara, and the funeral of Mother Bloor, founding member of the Communist Labour Party. A section of the exhibition focuses on Neel’s artistic friendships, with portraits of figures such as Frank O’Hara and Andy Warhol. She resumed painting after a stay in a psychiatric hospital, and moved to Greenwich Village in 1931.

Born in 1900, Alice Neel painted figuratively in New York during a period in which it was deeply unfashionable to do so.

She poured her trauma into her paintings, depicting themes of motherhood and loss and developing her signature anxious, frenetic style while on the suicide ward of the Philadelphia General Hospital. Neel actively went against the grain of her time, which included disregarding Abstract Expressionism during the 1940s and ‘50s, Pop art during the 1960s, and Minimalism. The baby girl gazes milk-drunk at her mother who looks back at the viewer, aware of the complete reliance of the small being as she feeds her.

The FBI watchlist file about her, in which she is described as a ‘romantic Bohemian type communist’, appears front and centre in the first room (Neel vehemently rejected Bohemianism for its own sake: ‘I hate Bohemians, frankly’). As Neel’s profile grew, her choice of subjects expanded: alongside Vietnam conscripts and Village drag queens, the rich, powerful and famous began to appear.The main gallery is a kind of all-together-now vision of a certain time and place: downtown Manhattan in the 1960s and 70s. In 1960, with a studio crammed full of pictures she couldn’t get exhibited, let alone sell, she rang O’Hara and requested a sitting. She painted everyone: people of colour, the elderly, the poor, and gay and transgender people, and persevered through a time when figuration was renounced,” artist Amy Sherald said. Face versus body, the mind in spite of the physique, or perhaps the life itself: that seems a steady fascination.