Alice’s Wonderland



Two Girls, Spanish Harlem (1950s) by Alice Neel, oil on canvas.

PMA offers a journey into the world of painter Alice Neel.

by Susan Hagen

Alice Neel

Philadelphia Museum of Art, 26th and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, through April 15, 215-684-8100

Like a lot of women artists of her generation, Alice Neel (born in 1900) has been the subject mainly of social history rather than art history. Neel grew up in suburban Philadelphia and graduated from the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art and Design) when it was an unprecedented, proto-feminist institution. Neel lived in New York until her death in 1984, and her life has been studied anecdotally for two or three decades because it overlapped with so many other great artists. But her life also coincided with the birth and development of a uniquely American style of painting, and Neel’s role in this development has not, until now, been carefully analyzed.

Luckily, we can now study this important artist’s work in a long overdue major retrospective exhibition organized by PMA curator Ann Temkin. The show is marvelous in the scope that it offers — a full range of paintings and watercolors from six decades — and it reconstructs Neel’s career, incorporating rarely seen early works. Neel lived an unconventional life, but ironically it was her down-to-earth, self-effacing personality (mom/grandmother — not stereotypical artiste) that may have kept her career from being treated seriously by critics and curators of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s. Plus, she chose to work figuratively in the heyday of Modernism and abstraction.

All throughout her long career, Neel painted real people: friends, neighbors, family, art world acquaintances, even a Fuller brush salesman. Isabetta (1934-35), a starkly glorious painting of a nude girl (Neel’s daughter, raised by her ex-husband in Cuba) is a precursor to future developments in her work. Standing with her hands on her hips, the girl has bright blue eyes, a thick wedge of dark hair, and is outlined in blue like many of Neel’s later subjects. Last Sickness, a portrait of the artist’s mother in her bathrobe, shows the growing complexity of Neel’s emotionally charged paintings. The viewer (almost voyeuristically) experiences the grief of losing a parent and facing one’s own mortality, softened by the pithy humor of a small dish holding two lemons.

Deeply serious though clearly not without a sense of humor, Neel was socially active throughout her career, especially in socialist protests of the ’30s and, later, the women’s movement. Her paintings reflect this: T.B., Harlem, (1940), is a darkly powerful image of a young man languishing in bed from a serious illness, while Two Girls, Spanish Harlem, circa 1959, is bursting with life.

Neel continued to stretch the boundaries of the portrait, sometimes poignantly or humorously revealing flaws or showing her subjects in undignified poses. She painted a wonderfully rugged portrait, Robert Smithson, his face raw and angular, sublimating the important discoveries of the Abstract Expressionists. In Andy Warhol the art world celebrity is shown exposing scars on his bare white abdomen and a girdle-like bandage, while Annie Sprinkle shows the porn star decked out in full S&M regalia. John Perreault classically positions the art critic/curator’s lean, hairy body on white sheets. His pale blue eyes are alert and friendly. It’s one of the most scintillating male nudes ever painted and an important "first" for the feminist movement.

Neel rarely used herself as a subject, but she boldly combined the conventions of the nude and the self-portrait again in her 1980 Self-Portrait. Her octogenarian body is casually displayed while she’s focused on her work. Neel appears self-critical but pleasant, while the folds of her aging flesh seem chastened by the crisp blue and white stripes of her chair.

This extraordinary show documents how Alice Neel diligently undermined a conventional art form with increasingly unconventional techniques. Her sensitive and expressive portraits flaunt their subjects’ humanity and uniqueness, complete with frailties, folds of flab or scars. Made from the very substance of Neel’s life (her relationships with the people in it) the portraits are a major achievement in American art.