11 Foreword 13 Preface
14
An Engaged Eye
24
Alice Neel and the New Humanism
70
I won’t draw you, you’re the enemy
80
Life is not Picnics on the Grass
126
A few questions to Jenny Holzer
130
144
Alice Neel at the age of 8 twenty-nine, 1929
Angela Lampe
Jeremy Lewison
Larne Abse Gogarty
Elisabeth Lebovici
Angela Lampe
Writings and words of Alice Neel Chronology Nathalie Ernoult
157
List of works
160
Sources and Credits
9
11 Foreword 13 Preface
14
An Engaged Eye
24
Alice Neel and the New Humanism
70
I won’t draw you, you’re the enemy
80
Life is not Picnics on the Grass
126
A few questions to Jenny Holzer
130
144
Alice Neel at the age of 8 twenty-nine, 1929
Angela Lampe
Jeremy Lewison
Larne Abse Gogarty
Elisabeth Lebovici
Angela Lampe
Writings and words of Alice Neel Chronology Nathalie Ernoult
157
List of works
160
Sources and Credits
9
Foreword
‘I am the century,’ said Alice Neel, born on 28 January 1900 in Pennsylvania. She nevertheless had to wait seventy-four years before an American museum opened its doors to her and put on a major exhibition of her work. The reasons were familiar ones: the artist was a woman, she was liberated and independent. A single mother living on social security who, during the ascendency of abstract art, swam against the tide of the avant-garde and remained totally committed to her own very personal brand of figuration. Neel did not achieve recognition until the 1960s, a time when pop art occupied centre stage. Her notoriety was amplified by the women’s liberation movement. Thanks to a series of touring exhibitions in the US and Europe, culminating at the Fondation Van Gogh in Arles in 2017, Alice Neel is today considered one of the most important North American artists: a portraitist without equal. The Pompidou Centre is proud to add to her growing reputation by presenting her works from a new angle. The exhibition and book Alice Neel: An Engaged Eye, Eye the brainchild of Angela Lampe, Curator of Modern Collections at the Pompidou Centre, the National Museum of Modern Art, shed light for the first time on the artist’s political and social engagement and her radical humanism. Thanks to her, the Latino and Puerto Rican immigrants, the Black writers ignored by the intelligentsia, the communist militants (with whom she was in sympathy), the yobs who rule the streets, the single mothers struggling to raise their kids all emerge from the shadows and take their place in the frame of the painting. Neel painted countless portraits of people from all social classes: family, friends, neighbours, artists, poets, journalists, art critics, ‘pictures of people’ who are intensely present in her paintings. A communist sympathiser, she took a lifelong interest in the injustices and inequalities that scarred American society, skewering both racial segregation and homophobic discrimination. Her nude portraits of women,
devoid of any sentimentality and a long way from the traditional canon forged by the male gaze, made her into an icon of militant feminism. In 1971, Neel declared, ‘I have always believed that women should resent and refuse to accept all the gratuitous insults that men impose upon them’, foreshadowing the debates of today. One of the aims of the exhibition Alice Neel: An Engaged Eye was to reveal the contemporary challenges that underlie the work of this emancipated female artist. Loosely structured around two themes – class struggle and the battle of the sexes – the exhibition and this book are supplemented by documents from the painter’s personal archives as well as by works created by artists from subsequent generations: extracts from a film portrait by Michel Auder, a work by Jenny Holzer and photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe. I must give grateful thanks to Alice Neel’s descendants, Ginny and Hartley Neel, who have supported our project from the start. I extend my gratitude also to David Zwirner for his generous support and to Bellatrix Hubert for her kind assistance throughout the preparation of the exhibition. Thanks are due too to Xavier Hufkens for his invaluable help, as well as to Aurel Scheibler, Victoria Miro and Jeremy Lewison. Finally, it goes without saying that this project would not have seen the light of day without the support of numerous private lenders, who were willing to temporarily release some of the artist’s works. My sincere thanks to all. I am pleased that the Pompidou Centre continues to work for a better recognition of female artists by enabling the rediscovery of an extraordinary painter of whose birth we celebrated the 120th anniversary in January 2020. Serge Lasvignes President of the Pompidou Centre
11
Foreword
‘I am the century,’ said Alice Neel, born on 28 January 1900 in Pennsylvania. She nevertheless had to wait seventy-four years before an American museum opened its doors to her and put on a major exhibition of her work. The reasons were familiar ones: the artist was a woman, she was liberated and independent. A single mother living on social security who, during the ascendency of abstract art, swam against the tide of the avant-garde and remained totally committed to her own very personal brand of figuration. Neel did not achieve recognition until the 1960s, a time when pop art occupied centre stage. Her notoriety was amplified by the women’s liberation movement. Thanks to a series of touring exhibitions in the US and Europe, culminating at the Fondation Van Gogh in Arles in 2017, Alice Neel is today considered one of the most important North American artists: a portraitist without equal. The Pompidou Centre is proud to add to her growing reputation by presenting her works from a new angle. The exhibition and book Alice Neel: An Engaged Eye, Eye the brainchild of Angela Lampe, Curator of Modern Collections at the Pompidou Centre, the National Museum of Modern Art, shed light for the first time on the artist’s political and social engagement and her radical humanism. Thanks to her, the Latino and Puerto Rican immigrants, the Black writers ignored by the intelligentsia, the communist militants (with whom she was in sympathy), the yobs who rule the streets, the single mothers struggling to raise their kids all emerge from the shadows and take their place in the frame of the painting. Neel painted countless portraits of people from all social classes: family, friends, neighbours, artists, poets, journalists, art critics, ‘pictures of people’ who are intensely present in her paintings. A communist sympathiser, she took a lifelong interest in the injustices and inequalities that scarred American society, skewering both racial segregation and homophobic discrimination. Her nude portraits of women,
devoid of any sentimentality and a long way from the traditional canon forged by the male gaze, made her into an icon of militant feminism. In 1971, Neel declared, ‘I have always believed that women should resent and refuse to accept all the gratuitous insults that men impose upon them’, foreshadowing the debates of today. One of the aims of the exhibition Alice Neel: An Engaged Eye was to reveal the contemporary challenges that underlie the work of this emancipated female artist. Loosely structured around two themes – class struggle and the battle of the sexes – the exhibition and this book are supplemented by documents from the painter’s personal archives as well as by works created by artists from subsequent generations: extracts from a film portrait by Michel Auder, a work by Jenny Holzer and photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe. I must give grateful thanks to Alice Neel’s descendants, Ginny and Hartley Neel, who have supported our project from the start. I extend my gratitude also to David Zwirner for his generous support and to Bellatrix Hubert for her kind assistance throughout the preparation of the exhibition. Thanks are due too to Xavier Hufkens for his invaluable help, as well as to Aurel Scheibler, Victoria Miro and Jeremy Lewison. Finally, it goes without saying that this project would not have seen the light of day without the support of numerous private lenders, who were willing to temporarily release some of the artist’s works. My sincere thanks to all. I am pleased that the Pompidou Centre continues to work for a better recognition of female artists by enabling the rediscovery of an extraordinary painter of whose birth we celebrated the 120th anniversary in January 2020. Serge Lasvignes President of the Pompidou Centre
11
Preface
Painting without frills, impervious to the temptations of the artistic vogues of its time and distinct from the usual canons of representation, the work of Alice Neel languished on the fringes of dominant currents before finally finding its place at the heart of debates of our contemporary world. Over the course of lasting friendships and collaborations, from Mike Gold to Allen Ginsberg, from Frank O’Hara to Aaron Kramer, from Robert Frank to Linda Nochlin, Alice Neel imposed her vision of humanity, nourished by the Ashcan School and its founder Robert Henri, who taught at the women’s design school in Philadelphia, where she matriculated in 1921 and from which she graduated in 1925. Alice Neel’s life is just like her work. The fourth of five children, her mother would have said to her: ‘I don’t know what you imagine you’ll do in life, you’re only a girl.’ Between Havana, where she moved with her first husband, Carlos Enríquez, and rubbed shoulders with the burgeoning Cuban avant-garde, and New York, where she chose to live in 1927 in the heart of the Bronx, her move to Greenwich Village with her companion, the sailor Kenneth Doolittle, who in the winter of 1934 would destroy more than 300 of the artist’s drawings and watercolours, the years with the musician José Negrón, with whom she would have a son, then a fourth child born of her union with the photographer and filmmaker of Russian origin Sam Brody, the life of Alice Neel had many ups and downs and traumatic events. The loss of her first child, the resultant breakdown that led to a stay in a psychiatric hospital, but also the social context of the Great Depression led her towards an ever more intense level of engagement. Taking advantage of commissions from the Work Projects Administration, Neel developed a personal and highly unconventional style and increasingly interrogated the role and the idealised criteria of the representation of the female body. A supporter of the Communist Party, though her work was criticised as much for its singularity as for the views it expressed, painting the Latino and Puerto Rican immigrants, the Black writers ignored by the intelligentsia, the yobs who rule the streets, at the end of the war Alice Neel created illustrations for Masses & Mainstream, Mainstream a political publication, while continuing to paint and draw. When in 1943 the Works Project stopped its collaboration with her, she was left with no income and had to resort to shoplifting. It wasn’t until 1962 that her work appeared in the magazine ARTnews and her paintings took flight in a series of ever more pared-down portraits and canvases that combined empathy, humour and cruelty.
From this point on her notoriety continued to grow. In 1970 she made the front cover of Time Magazine, Magazine and then a few years later a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art cemented her reputation. She became involved with the Factory, painted Andy Warhol with his eyes closed, slumping and scarred, two years after the failed murder attempt by Valerie Solanas, Gerard Malanga and Jackie Curtis, the drag queen who ‘thought she was James Dean for a day’, as Lou Reed sang in ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, a song inspired by the American author Nelson Algren. Angela Lampe wanted to curate an exhibition of this singular and uncompromising body of work. Neither retrospective nor anthology, the seventy paintings and drawings collected here offer an accurate and rigorous portrait of one of the major figures of twentieth-century painting. Between ‘class war’ and ‘battle of the sexes’, these works, with their uncompromising realism, taboobusting in an era characterised by the domination of the heroic abstractions of the post-war United States and prohibitions of all types, acutely expose the bodies, ages, characters and social conditions of an American society very far from any triumphal hegemony. She stares reality in the face. So I take my hat off to Angela Lampe, the curator of this exhibition, for having represented the beauty and exigency of the work of Alice Neel in her own time and brought out its acuity and necessity for us today. Time, as we know, works in favour of works of a strange beauty. It offers them a place that is often hard won but makes them clear to those who have eyes to see. Mixing truth and concern, tenderness and idleness, the work of Alice Neel leaves its mark on those who look at it. I remember a trip to New York and the works exhibited by Robert Miller, the impact of which has never quite dissipated, some forty years after the event. So this magnificently assembled exhibition represents to my eyes the deserved recognition of an artist whose keen eye and extreme freedom of line make her without doubt an artist of the first order. At this point in time, in the oh-so-troubled world we inhabit today, Alice Neel celebrates, with a rare and uncompromising empathy, our human condition in the face of the real. ‘Life, said a philosopher, is everything that happens.’
Bernard Blistène Director of the National Museum of Modern Art – Centre for Industrial Creation
13
Preface
Painting without frills, impervious to the temptations of the artistic vogues of its time and distinct from the usual canons of representation, the work of Alice Neel languished on the fringes of dominant currents before finally finding its place at the heart of debates of our contemporary world. Over the course of lasting friendships and collaborations, from Mike Gold to Allen Ginsberg, from Frank O’Hara to Aaron Kramer, from Robert Frank to Linda Nochlin, Alice Neel imposed her vision of humanity, nourished by the Ashcan School and its founder Robert Henri, who taught at the women’s design school in Philadelphia, where she matriculated in 1921 and from which she graduated in 1925. Alice Neel’s life is just like her work. The fourth of five children, her mother would have said to her: ‘I don’t know what you imagine you’ll do in life, you’re only a girl.’ Between Havana, where she moved with her first husband, Carlos Enríquez, and rubbed shoulders with the burgeoning Cuban avant-garde, and New York, where she chose to live in 1927 in the heart of the Bronx, her move to Greenwich Village with her companion, the sailor Kenneth Doolittle, who in the winter of 1934 would destroy more than 300 of the artist’s drawings and watercolours, the years with the musician José Negrón, with whom she would have a son, then a fourth child born of her union with the photographer and filmmaker of Russian origin Sam Brody, the life of Alice Neel had many ups and downs and traumatic events. The loss of her first child, the resultant breakdown that led to a stay in a psychiatric hospital, but also the social context of the Great Depression led her towards an ever more intense level of engagement. Taking advantage of commissions from the Work Projects Administration, Neel developed a personal and highly unconventional style and increasingly interrogated the role and the idealised criteria of the representation of the female body. A supporter of the Communist Party, though her work was criticised as much for its singularity as for the views it expressed, painting the Latino and Puerto Rican immigrants, the Black writers ignored by the intelligentsia, the yobs who rule the streets, at the end of the war Alice Neel created illustrations for Masses & Mainstream, Mainstream a political publication, while continuing to paint and draw. When in 1943 the Works Project stopped its collaboration with her, she was left with no income and had to resort to shoplifting. It wasn’t until 1962 that her work appeared in the magazine ARTnews and her paintings took flight in a series of ever more pared-down portraits and canvases that combined empathy, humour and cruelty.
From this point on her notoriety continued to grow. In 1970 she made the front cover of Time Magazine, Magazine and then a few years later a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art cemented her reputation. She became involved with the Factory, painted Andy Warhol with his eyes closed, slumping and scarred, two years after the failed murder attempt by Valerie Solanas, Gerard Malanga and Jackie Curtis, the drag queen who ‘thought she was James Dean for a day’, as Lou Reed sang in ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, a song inspired by the American author Nelson Algren. Angela Lampe wanted to curate an exhibition of this singular and uncompromising body of work. Neither retrospective nor anthology, the seventy paintings and drawings collected here offer an accurate and rigorous portrait of one of the major figures of twentieth-century painting. Between ‘class war’ and ‘battle of the sexes’, these works, with their uncompromising realism, taboobusting in an era characterised by the domination of the heroic abstractions of the post-war United States and prohibitions of all types, acutely expose the bodies, ages, characters and social conditions of an American society very far from any triumphal hegemony. She stares reality in the face. So I take my hat off to Angela Lampe, the curator of this exhibition, for having represented the beauty and exigency of the work of Alice Neel in her own time and brought out its acuity and necessity for us today. Time, as we know, works in favour of works of a strange beauty. It offers them a place that is often hard won but makes them clear to those who have eyes to see. Mixing truth and concern, tenderness and idleness, the work of Alice Neel leaves its mark on those who look at it. I remember a trip to New York and the works exhibited by Robert Miller, the impact of which has never quite dissipated, some forty years after the event. So this magnificently assembled exhibition represents to my eyes the deserved recognition of an artist whose keen eye and extreme freedom of line make her without doubt an artist of the first order. At this point in time, in the oh-so-troubled world we inhabit today, Alice Neel celebrates, with a rare and uncompromising empathy, our human condition in the face of the real. ‘Life, said a philosopher, is everything that happens.’
Bernard Blistène Director of the National Museum of Modern Art – Centre for Industrial Creation
13
Angela Lampe
‘Now, history is made, not by abstract individuals, but by acting, living and passing individuals.’ Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State, State 18711
The 1976 publication of Il Formaggio e I Vermi ((The The Cheese and the Worms), Worms), by the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, an exploration of the life of a sixteenth-century miller, marked a paradigmatic shift in historiography. Inspired by the work of Antonio Gramsci, Ginzburg turned his attention away from the elites and the conquerors as makers of history and concentrated instead on a simple man of the people who was a victim of the Inquisition: Domenico Scandella, known as ‘Menocchio’, from the small village of Frioul. The main focus of interest in what would later become known as ‘microhistory’ was the life of a single individual, the experience of an ordinary man used to illuminate the wider world around him. In this pioneering work, hitherto overlooked and marginalised groups emerged from the shadows and spoke in their own voices.
1960s onwards, and widened the spectrum of her models to more privileged strata of society, she never abandoned her left-wing principles. A few weeks before her death, she declared: ‘Well, in politics and in life I always liked the losers, the underdog. There was a smell of success that I don’t like.’4 Her empathy for the most dispossessed places Alice Neel in the tradition of engaged realist painters, a social orientation in the history of painting that began in France in the middle of the nineteenth century, particularly with the work of Gustave Courbet, an associate of the anarchist Pierre Joseph Proudhon. Meyer Schapiro, the famous Marxist art historian whom Neel painted twice (fig. 1),5 declared that
Drawing on the epistemological break instigated by Marxism,2 this change of perspective perfectly sums up the approach of Alice Neel. From her early work in Cuba in the mid-1920s, the young artist, recently married to Carlos Enríquez, the son of a local upper-class family, shifted her focus of interest away from the smart neighbourhoods to the beggars on the streets of Havana (see p. 34). After her return to New York a few years later, Neel joined the Communist Party3 and began to chronicle the social inequalities of the Great Depression that scarred the popular, multi-ethnic neighbourhoods where she lived – Greenwich Village first of all, then Spanish Harlem. Throughout her life, Neel continued to paint those on the margins of American society, the people excluded because of their country of origin, the colour of their skin, their eccentricity, their sexual orientation or even their radical politics. Even when Neel became better known, from the
1. Alice Neel, Meyer Schapiro, 1983 Oil on canvas, 106.7 × 81.7 cm The Jewish Museum, New York. Purchase: S. H. and Helen R. Scheuer Family Foundation Fund
1. Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State, see http://dwardmac.pitzer. State edu/Anarchist_Archives/bakunin/ godandstate/godandstate_ch1.html. 2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels explained their new materialist view of history in The German Ideology (1845/6).
14
3. Gerald Meyer, ‘Alice Neel. The Painter and Her Politics’, Columbia Journal of American Studies, Studies Fall 2009, p. 173. Neel joined the Communist Party in 1935. There was a poster of Lenin on the wall of the kitchen in her last New York apartment on West Broadway until her death in 1984 (fig. 7).
4. Alice Neel, quoted in ‘Alice Neel by Henry Geldzahler’, Alice Neel, Neel exhibition catalogue, Bridgehampton/New York, Dia Center for the Arts, New York, 1991, p. 6. 5. After the war, Neel attended lectures by Meyer Schapiro at the New York School for Social Research.
She painted her first portrait of him from memory in 1947 and the second in 1983, when he posed for her. The latter is now in the Jewish Museum in New York (fig. 1).
15
Angela Lampe
‘Now, history is made, not by abstract individuals, but by acting, living and passing individuals.’ Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State, State 18711
The 1976 publication of Il Formaggio e I Vermi ((The The Cheese and the Worms), Worms), by the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, an exploration of the life of a sixteenth-century miller, marked a paradigmatic shift in historiography. Inspired by the work of Antonio Gramsci, Ginzburg turned his attention away from the elites and the conquerors as makers of history and concentrated instead on a simple man of the people who was a victim of the Inquisition: Domenico Scandella, known as ‘Menocchio’, from the small village of Frioul. The main focus of interest in what would later become known as ‘microhistory’ was the life of a single individual, the experience of an ordinary man used to illuminate the wider world around him. In this pioneering work, hitherto overlooked and marginalised groups emerged from the shadows and spoke in their own voices.
1960s onwards, and widened the spectrum of her models to more privileged strata of society, she never abandoned her left-wing principles. A few weeks before her death, she declared: ‘Well, in politics and in life I always liked the losers, the underdog. There was a smell of success that I don’t like.’4 Her empathy for the most dispossessed places Alice Neel in the tradition of engaged realist painters, a social orientation in the history of painting that began in France in the middle of the nineteenth century, particularly with the work of Gustave Courbet, an associate of the anarchist Pierre Joseph Proudhon. Meyer Schapiro, the famous Marxist art historian whom Neel painted twice (fig. 1),5 declared that
Drawing on the epistemological break instigated by Marxism,2 this change of perspective perfectly sums up the approach of Alice Neel. From her early work in Cuba in the mid-1920s, the young artist, recently married to Carlos Enríquez, the son of a local upper-class family, shifted her focus of interest away from the smart neighbourhoods to the beggars on the streets of Havana (see p. 34). After her return to New York a few years later, Neel joined the Communist Party3 and began to chronicle the social inequalities of the Great Depression that scarred the popular, multi-ethnic neighbourhoods where she lived – Greenwich Village first of all, then Spanish Harlem. Throughout her life, Neel continued to paint those on the margins of American society, the people excluded because of their country of origin, the colour of their skin, their eccentricity, their sexual orientation or even their radical politics. Even when Neel became better known, from the
1. Alice Neel, Meyer Schapiro, 1983 Oil on canvas, 106.7 × 81.7 cm The Jewish Museum, New York. Purchase: S. H. and Helen R. Scheuer Family Foundation Fund
1. Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State, see http://dwardmac.pitzer. State edu/Anarchist_Archives/bakunin/ godandstate/godandstate_ch1.html. 2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels explained their new materialist view of history in The German Ideology (1845/6).
14
3. Gerald Meyer, ‘Alice Neel. The Painter and Her Politics’, Columbia Journal of American Studies, Studies Fall 2009, p. 173. Neel joined the Communist Party in 1935. There was a poster of Lenin on the wall of the kitchen in her last New York apartment on West Broadway until her death in 1984 (fig. 7).
4. Alice Neel, quoted in ‘Alice Neel by Henry Geldzahler’, Alice Neel, Neel exhibition catalogue, Bridgehampton/New York, Dia Center for the Arts, New York, 1991, p. 6. 5. After the war, Neel attended lectures by Meyer Schapiro at the New York School for Social Research.
She painted her first portrait of him from memory in 1947 and the second in 1983, when he posed for her. The latter is now in the Jewish Museum in New York (fig. 1).
15
which he attempted to redefine the role of art in a society in the grip of scientific positivism and political indoctrination: ‘Science cannot go outside of the sphere of abstractions. In this respect it is infinitely inferior to art [. . .] it recalls to our minds the living, real individualities which appear and disappear under our eyes. Art, then, is as it were the return of abstraction to life.’11 Alice Neel’s project might be defined as relocating life at the centre of her art in order to counter the danger of an increasing reification of the human. In 1950, Mike Gold (p. 54) quoted his painter friend in the communist paper Daily Worker:: ‘I am against abstract art and non-objective art Worker because such art shows a hatred of human beings. East Harlem is like a battlefield of humanism, and I am on the side of the people there, and they inspire my painting.’12 In terms of her work, we might justifiably speculate that it is this desire to fight against an alienating and dehumanising art that leads her to reject the technical term ‘portraits’ in favour of the more straightforward ‘pictures of people’. Neel was not satisfied simply to faithfully reproduce the
2. Gustave Courbet, Stonebreakers, 1849 [Painting destroyed during the bombing of Dresden 1945] Painting, 15.9 × 25.9 cm Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Gemäldegalerie Neue Meister, Dresden
3. John Sloan, Sixth Avenue and Thirtieth Street, New York City, 1907 Oil on canvas, 61.6 × 81.3 cm Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Meyer P. Potamkin and Vivian O. Potamkin, 2000
There is no doubt that Neel had her roots in this tradition of socially aware realism. In Philadelphia she attended the school where Robert Henri, one of the founders of the
Ashcan School, had taught in his early years. That was well before Neel’s time, but in 1923, when she was in her second year of studies, Henri published his major work The Art Spirit, Spirit, a summary of his teachings advocating a form of realism based on absolute truth to life, eschewing all received notions of beauty. We know that Neel took this book with her to Cuba.7 Her stay in the country, then still under the yoke of America, opened her eyes to the vast class differences that existed in this multicultural society: ‘There were people who were hugely wealthy and the bitterly poor were much poorer then I had ever seen.’8 She had no hesitation: after a few weeks, she persuaded her husband to leave the comfort of their family villa and move into one of the more working-class neighbourhoods of Havana.9 Perhaps it was in this early attempt to get close to real life that Neel’s singular identity took shape. Recognising the necessity to get involved, to reach out to people in order to capture their individual lives, she felt compelled to get close to her models, to try to identify with them without sentimentalising them in any way. Her engagement was never abstract, it fed off genuine experiences. It was profoundly personal and undogmatic: ‘I am an anarchic humanist,’ Neel replied to one of her models who asked her if she was a communist.10 As Mikhail Bakunin, the Russian anarchist, put it in God and the State, State, written in 1871, the year of the Paris Commune, in
6. Meyer Schapiro, ‘Courbet et l’imaginaire populaire’ [Courbet and the Popular Imagination], Style, artiste et société [Style, Artist and Society], Paris, Gallimard, 1982 (1940–1941), p. 291. See also
Martin’s Press, 2010, p. 24. 8. Ibid., p. 44. 9. See Gerald Meyer, ‘Alice Neel: The Painter and Her Politics’, art. cit., p. 154. 10. From the film Alice Neel: Collector of Souls (1978) by Nancy Baer. I am
11. Bakunin, ‘God and the State’, op. cit. 12. Alice Neel, quoted in Andrew Hemingway, Artists on the Left. American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926–1956, 1926–1956 New Haven/ London, Yale University Press, 2002,
the painter of Stonebreakers (1849, fig. 2) thought he was the only artist of his time who expressed what the people felt and defined his art as, in essence, democratic.6 After the revolution of 1848, realism became the art of progress, most suited to express the consciousness and the emancipation of the people. Thereafter, a new generation of painters emerged who would redefine the depiction of rural and industrial life according to the principles of naturalism, closely in tune with the novels of Émile Zola. Vincent Van Gogh is a prime example: acting as a sort of pastor to the poorest in society, he directly confronted the misery of miners and shared the hard lives of peasants such as those portrayed in his celebrated Potato Eaters (1885). At the turn of the century, Jules Adler became known as the ‘painter of the humble’. Exploitation, misery, alienation, but also social action such as the strike at Le Creusot, painted in 1899, were at the heart of his work. On the other side of the Atlantic, a few years later, a group of young realist painters formed a group under the name of the Ashcan School. Their paintings imortalised everyday scenes from the slums of American cities (fig. 3).
16
T. J. Clark on Courbet, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution, London, Thames and Revolution Hudson, new edn (1982). 7. See Phoebe Hoban, Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty, Pretty New York, St
grateful to Ginny Neel for having drawn my attention to this remark by the artist.
features of her model, she sought to grasp the singularity of each person, to reveal their hidden reality: ‘one of the primary motives of my work was to reveal the inequalities and pressures as shown in the psychology of the people I painted.’13 Consider The Spanish Family (p. 47), whom Neel painted in front of a wrought iron gate as if she wanted to impose a form of social reversal on Manet’s famous painting The Railway. Railway. Instead of a young bourgeois woman intently reading alongside a little dog and a girl in a summer dress, the American painter confronts us with a young mother who stares at us with tired eyes, surrounded by three haggard children. We can sense immediately the misery in which this immigrant woman lives – her poverty, which forces her to beg, her difficulties in raising her children, the weight of her distress, which seems hopeless – but Neel also shows us her resistance and even her pride. There is a similar combativeness evident in the portrait of Art Shields (p. 55), whose lined face speaks of a series of defeats. This staunch communist did not manage to save the lives of the Italian anarchists Nicol Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who were falsely accused in a political trial. A former soldier
p. 248. 13. Speech by Alice Neel at the Moore College of Art, Philadelphia, June 1971.
17
which he attempted to redefine the role of art in a society in the grip of scientific positivism and political indoctrination: ‘Science cannot go outside of the sphere of abstractions. In this respect it is infinitely inferior to art [. . .] it recalls to our minds the living, real individualities which appear and disappear under our eyes. Art, then, is as it were the return of abstraction to life.’11 Alice Neel’s project might be defined as relocating life at the centre of her art in order to counter the danger of an increasing reification of the human. In 1950, Mike Gold (p. 54) quoted his painter friend in the communist paper Daily Worker:: ‘I am against abstract art and non-objective art Worker because such art shows a hatred of human beings. East Harlem is like a battlefield of humanism, and I am on the side of the people there, and they inspire my painting.’12 In terms of her work, we might justifiably speculate that it is this desire to fight against an alienating and dehumanising art that leads her to reject the technical term ‘portraits’ in favour of the more straightforward ‘pictures of people’. Neel was not satisfied simply to faithfully reproduce the
2. Gustave Courbet, Stonebreakers, 1849 [Painting destroyed during the bombing of Dresden 1945] Painting, 15.9 × 25.9 cm Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Gemäldegalerie Neue Meister, Dresden
3. John Sloan, Sixth Avenue and Thirtieth Street, New York City, 1907 Oil on canvas, 61.6 × 81.3 cm Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Meyer P. Potamkin and Vivian O. Potamkin, 2000
There is no doubt that Neel had her roots in this tradition of socially aware realism. In Philadelphia she attended the school where Robert Henri, one of the founders of the
Ashcan School, had taught in his early years. That was well before Neel’s time, but in 1923, when she was in her second year of studies, Henri published his major work The Art Spirit, Spirit, a summary of his teachings advocating a form of realism based on absolute truth to life, eschewing all received notions of beauty. We know that Neel took this book with her to Cuba.7 Her stay in the country, then still under the yoke of America, opened her eyes to the vast class differences that existed in this multicultural society: ‘There were people who were hugely wealthy and the bitterly poor were much poorer then I had ever seen.’8 She had no hesitation: after a few weeks, she persuaded her husband to leave the comfort of their family villa and move into one of the more working-class neighbourhoods of Havana.9 Perhaps it was in this early attempt to get close to real life that Neel’s singular identity took shape. Recognising the necessity to get involved, to reach out to people in order to capture their individual lives, she felt compelled to get close to her models, to try to identify with them without sentimentalising them in any way. Her engagement was never abstract, it fed off genuine experiences. It was profoundly personal and undogmatic: ‘I am an anarchic humanist,’ Neel replied to one of her models who asked her if she was a communist.10 As Mikhail Bakunin, the Russian anarchist, put it in God and the State, State, written in 1871, the year of the Paris Commune, in
6. Meyer Schapiro, ‘Courbet et l’imaginaire populaire’ [Courbet and the Popular Imagination], Style, artiste et société [Style, Artist and Society], Paris, Gallimard, 1982 (1940–1941), p. 291. See also
Martin’s Press, 2010, p. 24. 8. Ibid., p. 44. 9. See Gerald Meyer, ‘Alice Neel: The Painter and Her Politics’, art. cit., p. 154. 10. From the film Alice Neel: Collector of Souls (1978) by Nancy Baer. I am
11. Bakunin, ‘God and the State’, op. cit. 12. Alice Neel, quoted in Andrew Hemingway, Artists on the Left. American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926–1956, 1926–1956 New Haven/ London, Yale University Press, 2002,
the painter of Stonebreakers (1849, fig. 2) thought he was the only artist of his time who expressed what the people felt and defined his art as, in essence, democratic.6 After the revolution of 1848, realism became the art of progress, most suited to express the consciousness and the emancipation of the people. Thereafter, a new generation of painters emerged who would redefine the depiction of rural and industrial life according to the principles of naturalism, closely in tune with the novels of Émile Zola. Vincent Van Gogh is a prime example: acting as a sort of pastor to the poorest in society, he directly confronted the misery of miners and shared the hard lives of peasants such as those portrayed in his celebrated Potato Eaters (1885). At the turn of the century, Jules Adler became known as the ‘painter of the humble’. Exploitation, misery, alienation, but also social action such as the strike at Le Creusot, painted in 1899, were at the heart of his work. On the other side of the Atlantic, a few years later, a group of young realist painters formed a group under the name of the Ashcan School. Their paintings imortalised everyday scenes from the slums of American cities (fig. 3).
16
T. J. Clark on Courbet, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution, London, Thames and Revolution Hudson, new edn (1982). 7. See Phoebe Hoban, Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty, Pretty New York, St
grateful to Ginny Neel for having drawn my attention to this remark by the artist.
features of her model, she sought to grasp the singularity of each person, to reveal their hidden reality: ‘one of the primary motives of my work was to reveal the inequalities and pressures as shown in the psychology of the people I painted.’13 Consider The Spanish Family (p. 47), whom Neel painted in front of a wrought iron gate as if she wanted to impose a form of social reversal on Manet’s famous painting The Railway. Railway. Instead of a young bourgeois woman intently reading alongside a little dog and a girl in a summer dress, the American painter confronts us with a young mother who stares at us with tired eyes, surrounded by three haggard children. We can sense immediately the misery in which this immigrant woman lives – her poverty, which forces her to beg, her difficulties in raising her children, the weight of her distress, which seems hopeless – but Neel also shows us her resistance and even her pride. There is a similar combativeness evident in the portrait of Art Shields (p. 55), whose lined face speaks of a series of defeats. This staunch communist did not manage to save the lives of the Italian anarchists Nicol Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who were falsely accused in a political trial. A former soldier
p. 248. 13. Speech by Alice Neel at the Moore College of Art, Philadelphia, June 1971.
17
4. Alice Neel, Pat Whalen, 1935 Oil, ink and newspaper on canvas, 68.9 × 58.7 cm Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Gift of Dr Hartley Neel
living, breathing individuals. It is this that distinguishes Neel from painters of trades of the likes of Courbet, Jules Adler or even Otto Dix. The latter, in line with the aesthetic of the New Objectivity, sought to encapsulate a certain human type who was representative of German society in the 1920s, the modern intellectual (Portrait (Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden,, 1926, fig.5), the fashionable lawyer or the busy art Harden dealer. Dix’s figures remain distant and cold, visual clichés or even caricatures. As for Neel, her aim was always twofold: I have a couple of objectives. One is to capture the essence of the person plus of course his outer appearance, but the very essence you know, the thread of life. It’s a rather hard thing to capture, isn’t it? And to capture it on this moving assembly line that life is because, you know, it changes moment to moment. The other objective is to capture the Zeitgeist. I think that art is also history. Every painting tells the story of its day, and I think we live under times of great pressure. After all my show runs from 1933-1973 – don’t you think they were years of great pressure, the Nazi horrors, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Watergate, and all of these things are partly psychological, aren’t they?19
for the Spanish republic who was imprisoned in the Civil War, Shields nevertheless continued to fight against social injustice with his sharp pen as his only weapon. Neel paints his right hand like a pistol in a holster.14 The combative fists of the union leader Pat Whelan (fig. 4) resting on the Communist Party paper The Daily Worker perform the same function of counterpoint to the absent gaze of the disillusioned man. Following the example of micro-history, Neel’s approach is almost anthropological. As Pamela Allara emphasises in her study of the artist, Neel presents us with individuals, one by one, and their stories as if narrated in an oral tradition. The narrative that comes out of this is not created by abstract forces but by human activity.15 Towards the end of her life, Neel stated: ‘I believe that man is the first premise: no matter how much machinery you have, if the world is destroyed, man destroys it, human beings push the buttons. I had to show that in my work. I do believe that capitalism has used images without man for its own purposes.’16 It’s easy to see how the intransigence Alice
Neel shows in her support for individuals and their powers of actions put her at odds with certain ideological groups. Notably after she moved to Harlem in 1938, her decision to concentrate on portraiture, an anachronistic and aristocratic genre, set her apart from the group of artists working for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), who practised a style of historical painting in step with the collectivist values of the Communist Party. Neel had to defend herself by explaining that her portraits constituted a microcosm in which ‘One plus one plus one is a crowd’.17 Allara suggests the term ‘proletarian portrait gallery’ to describe Neel’s contribution to socialist realism.18 However, insofar as it suggests that Neel was attempting to represent a whole socio-cultural class, the term is problematic. Her whole approach was in opposition to a tradition of portraiture which defined individuals exclusively by their membership of a social group or a professional body. Neel’s portraits are not reducible to their mere metonymic function, representing a whole of which the person depicted is but a representative; these are
Above all, unlike Dix, who preferred not to get to know his models,20 Neel formed an attachment to the person posing in front of her easel. Her point of departure was the here and now. For her, a painting is a ‘moment’s monument’.21 She sympathetically explored how her model had been affected by the passage of time. To do this, she talked to the sitter constantly and studied their face and body language. ‘Before painting, when I talk to the person, they unconsciously assume their most characteristic pose, which in a way involves all their character and social standing – what the world has done to them and their retaliation,’22 In line with the Marxist dialectic whereby the social determines the individual, and vice-versa, Neel tries to capture in her portraits the tension between the specific and the general, not to paint an alienated representative of a certain class, but rather a unique and living individual who is a witness of her time. To define the art of truth that she aspired to, she often invoked The Human Comedy of Honoré de Balzac, that great fresco of every social class in post-Napoleonic France, which was especially admired by the communists for its observations on the impact of economic reality on human lives. ‘That is really what life is’ said Neel about Balzac’s work, ‘And put together, that’s what my paintings are.’23 Neel’s realism does not neglect the psychological aspect of her models; she saw
14. See Pamela Allara, Pictures of People: Alice Neel’s American Portrait Gallery, Waltham, Brandeis University Gallery Press, 2000 (1998), p. 110. 15. Ibid, p. XVII. 16. ‘“I’ve always been concerned with
17. G. Meyer, ‘Alice Neel. The Painter and Her Politics’, art. cit., p. 170. See also P. Allara, Pictures of People, People op. cit., pp. 74–75. The communist leader Gus Hall refused to have his portrait (p. 69) shown in the Alice Neel
19. Diana Loercher, ‘Alice Neel, American Portraitist’, The Christian Science Monitor, Monitor 4 March 1974, p. F6. 20. Dix wrote: ‘When you paint a portrait of someone, it’s better not to know them.’ Quoted by Diether
18
humanity”: An Interview with Alice Neel’, The Newsletter of the American Society for the Study of the German Democratic Republic, Republic no. 1, vol. 1, October 1979 (see pp. 140–41 of this book).
exhibition organised in Moscow in 1981 as he didn’t want to be accused of running a personality cult. 18. P. Allara, Pictures of People, People op. cit., p. 74.
Schmidt, Otto Dix im Selbstbildnis [Otto Dix in Self-portrait], Berlin, Henschelverlag, 1978, p. 253. 21. Neel borrowed the expression ‘A poem is a moment’s monument’, which she erroneously attributed to
5. Otto Dix, Bildnis der Journalistin Sylvia von Harden (Portrait of the journalist Sylvia von Harden), 1926 Oil and tempera on wood, 121 × 89 cm Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris, Purchase 1961
herself as a ‘collector of souls’. At no stage does she position herself as a mere objective observer. In her long interview with Patricia Hills, she affirmed: ‘If I have any talent in relation to people […] it is my identification with them. I get so identified when I paint them, when they go home I feel frightful. I have no self – I’ve gone into this other person. […] It’s my way of overcoming the alienation. It’s my ticket to reality.’24 So when we try to understand the political implications of her work, we have to talk about her vision. It is her eye that is engaged. In the same way that Jean-Luc Godard didn’t want to make political films but make films politically, Alice Neel did not
Percy Shelley, but which in fact comes from Dante Gabriel Rossetti (‘A sonnet is a moment’s monument’, the opening line of his poem ‘The Sonnet’, 1880). See Patricia Hills, Alice Neel, Neel New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1983, p. 167.
22. Alice Neel, quoted in P. Hills, op. cit., pp. 189–90. 23. Ibid, p. 184. 24. Ibid, p. 183.
19
4. Alice Neel, Pat Whalen, 1935 Oil, ink and newspaper on canvas, 68.9 × 58.7 cm Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Gift of Dr Hartley Neel
living, breathing individuals. It is this that distinguishes Neel from painters of trades of the likes of Courbet, Jules Adler or even Otto Dix. The latter, in line with the aesthetic of the New Objectivity, sought to encapsulate a certain human type who was representative of German society in the 1920s, the modern intellectual (Portrait (Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden,, 1926, fig.5), the fashionable lawyer or the busy art Harden dealer. Dix’s figures remain distant and cold, visual clichés or even caricatures. As for Neel, her aim was always twofold: I have a couple of objectives. One is to capture the essence of the person plus of course his outer appearance, but the very essence you know, the thread of life. It’s a rather hard thing to capture, isn’t it? And to capture it on this moving assembly line that life is because, you know, it changes moment to moment. The other objective is to capture the Zeitgeist. I think that art is also history. Every painting tells the story of its day, and I think we live under times of great pressure. After all my show runs from 1933-1973 – don’t you think they were years of great pressure, the Nazi horrors, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Watergate, and all of these things are partly psychological, aren’t they?19
for the Spanish republic who was imprisoned in the Civil War, Shields nevertheless continued to fight against social injustice with his sharp pen as his only weapon. Neel paints his right hand like a pistol in a holster.14 The combative fists of the union leader Pat Whelan (fig. 4) resting on the Communist Party paper The Daily Worker perform the same function of counterpoint to the absent gaze of the disillusioned man. Following the example of micro-history, Neel’s approach is almost anthropological. As Pamela Allara emphasises in her study of the artist, Neel presents us with individuals, one by one, and their stories as if narrated in an oral tradition. The narrative that comes out of this is not created by abstract forces but by human activity.15 Towards the end of her life, Neel stated: ‘I believe that man is the first premise: no matter how much machinery you have, if the world is destroyed, man destroys it, human beings push the buttons. I had to show that in my work. I do believe that capitalism has used images without man for its own purposes.’16 It’s easy to see how the intransigence Alice
Neel shows in her support for individuals and their powers of actions put her at odds with certain ideological groups. Notably after she moved to Harlem in 1938, her decision to concentrate on portraiture, an anachronistic and aristocratic genre, set her apart from the group of artists working for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), who practised a style of historical painting in step with the collectivist values of the Communist Party. Neel had to defend herself by explaining that her portraits constituted a microcosm in which ‘One plus one plus one is a crowd’.17 Allara suggests the term ‘proletarian portrait gallery’ to describe Neel’s contribution to socialist realism.18 However, insofar as it suggests that Neel was attempting to represent a whole socio-cultural class, the term is problematic. Her whole approach was in opposition to a tradition of portraiture which defined individuals exclusively by their membership of a social group or a professional body. Neel’s portraits are not reducible to their mere metonymic function, representing a whole of which the person depicted is but a representative; these are
Above all, unlike Dix, who preferred not to get to know his models,20 Neel formed an attachment to the person posing in front of her easel. Her point of departure was the here and now. For her, a painting is a ‘moment’s monument’.21 She sympathetically explored how her model had been affected by the passage of time. To do this, she talked to the sitter constantly and studied their face and body language. ‘Before painting, when I talk to the person, they unconsciously assume their most characteristic pose, which in a way involves all their character and social standing – what the world has done to them and their retaliation,’22 In line with the Marxist dialectic whereby the social determines the individual, and vice-versa, Neel tries to capture in her portraits the tension between the specific and the general, not to paint an alienated representative of a certain class, but rather a unique and living individual who is a witness of her time. To define the art of truth that she aspired to, she often invoked The Human Comedy of Honoré de Balzac, that great fresco of every social class in post-Napoleonic France, which was especially admired by the communists for its observations on the impact of economic reality on human lives. ‘That is really what life is’ said Neel about Balzac’s work, ‘And put together, that’s what my paintings are.’23 Neel’s realism does not neglect the psychological aspect of her models; she saw
14. See Pamela Allara, Pictures of People: Alice Neel’s American Portrait Gallery, Waltham, Brandeis University Gallery Press, 2000 (1998), p. 110. 15. Ibid, p. XVII. 16. ‘“I’ve always been concerned with
17. G. Meyer, ‘Alice Neel. The Painter and Her Politics’, art. cit., p. 170. See also P. Allara, Pictures of People, People op. cit., pp. 74–75. The communist leader Gus Hall refused to have his portrait (p. 69) shown in the Alice Neel
19. Diana Loercher, ‘Alice Neel, American Portraitist’, The Christian Science Monitor, Monitor 4 March 1974, p. F6. 20. Dix wrote: ‘When you paint a portrait of someone, it’s better not to know them.’ Quoted by Diether
18
humanity”: An Interview with Alice Neel’, The Newsletter of the American Society for the Study of the German Democratic Republic, Republic no. 1, vol. 1, October 1979 (see pp. 140–41 of this book).
exhibition organised in Moscow in 1981 as he didn’t want to be accused of running a personality cult. 18. P. Allara, Pictures of People, People op. cit., p. 74.
Schmidt, Otto Dix im Selbstbildnis [Otto Dix in Self-portrait], Berlin, Henschelverlag, 1978, p. 253. 21. Neel borrowed the expression ‘A poem is a moment’s monument’, which she erroneously attributed to
5. Otto Dix, Bildnis der Journalistin Sylvia von Harden (Portrait of the journalist Sylvia von Harden), 1926 Oil and tempera on wood, 121 × 89 cm Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris, Purchase 1961
herself as a ‘collector of souls’. At no stage does she position herself as a mere objective observer. In her long interview with Patricia Hills, she affirmed: ‘If I have any talent in relation to people […] it is my identification with them. I get so identified when I paint them, when they go home I feel frightful. I have no self – I’ve gone into this other person. […] It’s my way of overcoming the alienation. It’s my ticket to reality.’24 So when we try to understand the political implications of her work, we have to talk about her vision. It is her eye that is engaged. In the same way that Jean-Luc Godard didn’t want to make political films but make films politically, Alice Neel did not
Percy Shelley, but which in fact comes from Dante Gabriel Rossetti (‘A sonnet is a moment’s monument’, the opening line of his poem ‘The Sonnet’, 1880). See Patricia Hills, Alice Neel, Neel New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1983, p. 167.
22. Alice Neel, quoted in P. Hills, op. cit., pp. 189–90. 23. Ibid, p. 184. 24. Ibid, p. 183.
19
me even though I was a much better painter.’31 In all these comments, Alice Neel affirms her gender but refuses to allow her painting to be put in a gendered category. She doesn’t want to be bracketed within an essentialised and decontextualised ‘feminine art’, or ‘spaces of femininity’,32 to employ Griselda Pollock’s useful concept (who incidentally is careful not to reimpose femininity on women). It is to do with conditions of production: for example, those in which the works of Mary Cassatt or Berthe Morisot negotiate with a domestic point of view, of the sort that looks out through curtains, shutters, blinds, balconies or balustrades, without being seen from outside – the cafés, brothels, the public space where their impressive companions are to be found. Incidentally, by choosing to study at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, Alice Neel refused to learn the impressionism that was taught at the school of fine art: ‘And life for me was not picnics on the grass with Renoir and any of that’.33 (This reminds me of Suzanne Valadon, who might have said something similar). Also, she repudiated ‘middle-class’ feminism, of the sort she associated with Betty Friedan (and popularised in The Feminine Mystique of 1963), with which she couldn’t identify. The idea that the aim of female ‘liberation’ was to achieve power was, according to the artist Simone Leigh, fundamentally white and bourgeois.34 If the minority seeks to deny its own disparity and attempts to homogenise itself by force, it becomes in turn a machine of exclusion. On the contrary, Alice Neel’s reality principle led her not towards the seizure of power but towards its dilution, to ‘defetishize and decommodify the gesture/signature/ author complex by returning both to the laboring, producing body and to […] the practice of painting, in social as well as symbolic space, as a metonymic trace, an index of a socially formed, psychically enacted subjectivity at work, both consciously and unconsciously, upon its own and its culture’s materials’.35 Here again, the words of the art historian Griselda Pollock perfectly sum up Alice Neel’s realism. Her signature is not the indication of some heroic status or God-given genius. In contrast, it is perhaps rather of the complete absence of shame. Thus, in her choice of subjects, Alice Neel does not compromise on her point of view. She systematically destroys the patriarchal, heterosexual and colonialist
31. A. Neel, quoted in P. Hills, Alice Neel, op. cit., p. 77. Neel 32. G. Pollock, ‘Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity’, Vision and Difference. Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art, Art London, Routledge, 1988. 33. And she added ‘with Renoir, etc.’ A. Neel, ‘Interview by Richard Polsky’,
86
art. cit., p. 46. 34. Alice Neel. Viva la Mujer, Mujer podcast by Helen Molesworth, joined by Simone Leigh and Moyra Davey, https://www.getty.edu/recordingartists/season-1/neel/. 35. G. Pollock, ‘Killing Men and Dying Women’, art. cit., p. 293. 36. A slogan of the ultra-conservative
system by dissolving each facet of its dream, that is, of its normality. Firstly, there is masculine virility, mocked as that of a rutting dog (Bronx ( Bronx Bacchus, Bacchus , 1929, p. 91), pointlessly multiplied (Joe ( Joe Gould, Gould , 1933, p. 101). Then there is the nuclear family: ‘a daddy a mummy’ 36 do not ensure happiness: The Family (Algis, Julie and Bailey) (1968, p. 119) – a sequel to the edifying picture in which the pregnant Julie is under the influence of Algis – shows the latter filling the whole height of the canvas (though he is cut off at the knees), holding his baby with one hand, while Julie stands further back. Her clothes, her tiny hands and arms and her girlish face make it look like she has regressed, become her husband’s second child. The ‘mansplaining’ 37 pose formed by Benny and Mary Ellen Andrews (1972, p. 115): him, central, laterally and literally filling his armchair; her, pushed back and towards the edge of the canvas, is another manifestation of this. She covers everything. Happy parentage or motherhood; the woman’s place in the home; compulsory heterosexuality; racism; gender binaries … Neel represents masculine women (Mary ( Mary D. Garrad, Garrad , 1977, p. 122), women appropriating postures or gestures normally seen as masculine (Marxist ( Marxist Girl, Irene Peslikis, Peslikis , 1972, p. 124). Counterintuitively, she undresses an eminent art critic to paint him as a nude odalisque (John Perreault, Perreault , 1972, p. 103) but reclothes a Factory male the better to offer him, eyes averted, to the spectator’s gaze (Gerard ( Gerard Malanga,, 1969, p. 109). She constructs ‘genderqueer’ Malanga practices to confuse and transcend the supposedly stable demarcations between sexes, genders, sexual preferences: hence the transvestite couple (Jackie ( Jackie Curtis and Ritta Redd, Redd , 1970, p. 107 and fig. 3), one of whom recross-dresses, this time as a ‘girly boy’ (Jackie ( Jackie Curtis as a Boy,, 1972, p. 108). When she paints gay couples, 38 she Is Boy careful to show the individuality of the connected figures, a ‘same sex’ couple in the terms of heterosexist society. 39 Thus, two major art critics, who were also lovers, are set up in an asymmetric relationship through their respective postures, their faces, their dress (one is in underwear, the other in a suit and tie (David ( David Bourdon and Gregory Battcock,, 1970, p. 112), which de-essentialises what a Battcock gay identity might be. Neel posed Geoffrey Hendricks, an artist associated with Fluxus and happenings, in her kitchen on the day after they met, still wearing his clothes from the night before; he is happily hugging his shabby-
looking companion Brian Buczak. 40 Neel paints Warhol in his injured state (after the murder attempt by Valerie Solanas) (p. 105), and the sex worker Annie Sprinkle in her professional garb, stunning in her poise and her vitality ( Annie Sprinkle, Sprinkle , 1982, p. 125). The sharpness of her realism derives from the dissemblance that she cultivates.
Manif pour tous [Demo for All] in France. 37. A contraction of ‘man’ and ‘explaining’; the way in which men explain something to women with the implicit assumption that he is the fount of all knowledge and she is ignorant. See Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me, London, Granta, 2014, Me
40. When the latter died of AIDS in 1987, Hendricks asked Philip Glass to commemorate his partner with a musical piece: String Quartet No. 4. 4 The artist-curator Sur Rodney (Sur) was also a partner of Hendricks: https://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes. com/.
38. Nadya and Nona (1933, p. 94), two nude women lying on a rooftop (?) are perhaps the lesbian counterparts of these couples. 39. The degree zero of homophobia consists of explaining homosexuality as ‘narcissistic’ or a ‘same-sex relationship’.
Contrary to received wisdom, motherhood is also a source of conflict, not a woman’s destiny, and Neel includes her own in that as her representations of nudity include the ‘mutilating system’41 of old age, experienced subjectively from her point of view, which she smiles at. There was a particularly large number of nude paintings and drawings of pregnant women in a recent exhibition of Neel’s work.42 The sense of unease was immediately striking: as if Alice Neel were trying to represent the violence imposed on all women in her representation of these swollen bellies. Childbirth (p. 93) (‘A portrait done from memory of her hospital roommate, Goldie Goldwasser’)43 dramatises this primal displacement. As she wraps her truncated arms around her head, her torso is exposed/exploded, especially her huge breasts with their amplified dark brown aureolas, like a gigantic pair of eyes occupying the front of the scene. Pregnant Maria (1964, fig.5) reinvents the academic treatment of the reclining nude on draped sheet, and reinterprets the shocking effect of Manet’s deidealised Olympia by ‘combining sexuality with pregnancy.’44 Margaret Evans Pregnant (1978, p. 121) sits naked on a chair that seems much too small for a woman in her condition: an exploding belly that crushes the rest of her torso and indeed her entire body. However, in the mirror that casts back her imperfect reflection she seems much less overwhelmed by the tug of her belly. Reprised no less than seven times between 1964 and 1978, these enduring representations of pregnancy appear in a historical context in which debates over reproductive rights, contraception and the female orgasm45 had achieved more widespread public awareness. The reality principle contained in the paintings also occurs in a temporal and spatial network, with bodies exposing themselves in performances (Carolee Schneemann), in rituals (Yoko Ono), detailing everyday gestures in the space of art (Joan Jonas, Judson Dance Theatre), or conversely instrumentalised naked by clothed male artists (Yves Klein and his living brushes, women’s bodies, to which Pregnant Julie and Algis (1967) is in some way a response, Julie
41. Simone de Beauvoir,’ Briser la conspiration du silence’ [Breaking the Conspiracy of Silence], La Vieillesse [Old Age], Paris, Gallimard, 1970, https://www.monde-diplomatique. fr/2013/06/DE_BEAUVOIR/49163. 42. ‘Alice Neel. Freedom’, David Zwirner, New York, 2019. See
3. Alice Neel with Ritta Redd (on the left) and Jackie Curtis (in the centre) at the opening of Neel’s exhibition at Moore College, Philadelphia, 1971. Estate of Alice Neel
Pamela Allara, ‘“Mater” of Fact. Alice Neel’s Pregnant Nudes’, American Art, vol. 8, no. 2 (spring 1994), Art pp. 6–31, https://www.jstor.org/ stable/3109142. 43. P. Allara, ‘“Mater” of Fact’, art. cit., p. 15.
44. Helena Reckitt and Peggy Phelan (eds), Art and Feminism (Themes and Movements), London and New York, Movements) Phaidon, 2001, p. 51. 45. The ‘reports’ of Masters and Johnson, 1966, and Shere Hite, 1976.
87
me even though I was a much better painter.’31 In all these comments, Alice Neel affirms her gender but refuses to allow her painting to be put in a gendered category. She doesn’t want to be bracketed within an essentialised and decontextualised ‘feminine art’, or ‘spaces of femininity’,32 to employ Griselda Pollock’s useful concept (who incidentally is careful not to reimpose femininity on women). It is to do with conditions of production: for example, those in which the works of Mary Cassatt or Berthe Morisot negotiate with a domestic point of view, of the sort that looks out through curtains, shutters, blinds, balconies or balustrades, without being seen from outside – the cafés, brothels, the public space where their impressive companions are to be found. Incidentally, by choosing to study at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, Alice Neel refused to learn the impressionism that was taught at the school of fine art: ‘And life for me was not picnics on the grass with Renoir and any of that’.33 (This reminds me of Suzanne Valadon, who might have said something similar). Also, she repudiated ‘middle-class’ feminism, of the sort she associated with Betty Friedan (and popularised in The Feminine Mystique of 1963), with which she couldn’t identify. The idea that the aim of female ‘liberation’ was to achieve power was, according to the artist Simone Leigh, fundamentally white and bourgeois.34 If the minority seeks to deny its own disparity and attempts to homogenise itself by force, it becomes in turn a machine of exclusion. On the contrary, Alice Neel’s reality principle led her not towards the seizure of power but towards its dilution, to ‘defetishize and decommodify the gesture/signature/ author complex by returning both to the laboring, producing body and to […] the practice of painting, in social as well as symbolic space, as a metonymic trace, an index of a socially formed, psychically enacted subjectivity at work, both consciously and unconsciously, upon its own and its culture’s materials’.35 Here again, the words of the art historian Griselda Pollock perfectly sum up Alice Neel’s realism. Her signature is not the indication of some heroic status or God-given genius. In contrast, it is perhaps rather of the complete absence of shame. Thus, in her choice of subjects, Alice Neel does not compromise on her point of view. She systematically destroys the patriarchal, heterosexual and colonialist
31. A. Neel, quoted in P. Hills, Alice Neel, op. cit., p. 77. Neel 32. G. Pollock, ‘Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity’, Vision and Difference. Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art, Art London, Routledge, 1988. 33. And she added ‘with Renoir, etc.’ A. Neel, ‘Interview by Richard Polsky’,
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art. cit., p. 46. 34. Alice Neel. Viva la Mujer, Mujer podcast by Helen Molesworth, joined by Simone Leigh and Moyra Davey, https://www.getty.edu/recordingartists/season-1/neel/. 35. G. Pollock, ‘Killing Men and Dying Women’, art. cit., p. 293. 36. A slogan of the ultra-conservative
system by dissolving each facet of its dream, that is, of its normality. Firstly, there is masculine virility, mocked as that of a rutting dog (Bronx ( Bronx Bacchus, Bacchus , 1929, p. 91), pointlessly multiplied (Joe ( Joe Gould, Gould , 1933, p. 101). Then there is the nuclear family: ‘a daddy a mummy’ 36 do not ensure happiness: The Family (Algis, Julie and Bailey) (1968, p. 119) – a sequel to the edifying picture in which the pregnant Julie is under the influence of Algis – shows the latter filling the whole height of the canvas (though he is cut off at the knees), holding his baby with one hand, while Julie stands further back. Her clothes, her tiny hands and arms and her girlish face make it look like she has regressed, become her husband’s second child. The ‘mansplaining’ 37 pose formed by Benny and Mary Ellen Andrews (1972, p. 115): him, central, laterally and literally filling his armchair; her, pushed back and towards the edge of the canvas, is another manifestation of this. She covers everything. Happy parentage or motherhood; the woman’s place in the home; compulsory heterosexuality; racism; gender binaries … Neel represents masculine women (Mary ( Mary D. Garrad, Garrad , 1977, p. 122), women appropriating postures or gestures normally seen as masculine (Marxist ( Marxist Girl, Irene Peslikis, Peslikis , 1972, p. 124). Counterintuitively, she undresses an eminent art critic to paint him as a nude odalisque (John Perreault, Perreault , 1972, p. 103) but reclothes a Factory male the better to offer him, eyes averted, to the spectator’s gaze (Gerard ( Gerard Malanga,, 1969, p. 109). She constructs ‘genderqueer’ Malanga practices to confuse and transcend the supposedly stable demarcations between sexes, genders, sexual preferences: hence the transvestite couple (Jackie ( Jackie Curtis and Ritta Redd, Redd , 1970, p. 107 and fig. 3), one of whom recross-dresses, this time as a ‘girly boy’ (Jackie ( Jackie Curtis as a Boy,, 1972, p. 108). When she paints gay couples, 38 she Is Boy careful to show the individuality of the connected figures, a ‘same sex’ couple in the terms of heterosexist society. 39 Thus, two major art critics, who were also lovers, are set up in an asymmetric relationship through their respective postures, their faces, their dress (one is in underwear, the other in a suit and tie (David ( David Bourdon and Gregory Battcock,, 1970, p. 112), which de-essentialises what a Battcock gay identity might be. Neel posed Geoffrey Hendricks, an artist associated with Fluxus and happenings, in her kitchen on the day after they met, still wearing his clothes from the night before; he is happily hugging his shabby-
looking companion Brian Buczak. 40 Neel paints Warhol in his injured state (after the murder attempt by Valerie Solanas) (p. 105), and the sex worker Annie Sprinkle in her professional garb, stunning in her poise and her vitality ( Annie Sprinkle, Sprinkle , 1982, p. 125). The sharpness of her realism derives from the dissemblance that she cultivates.
Manif pour tous [Demo for All] in France. 37. A contraction of ‘man’ and ‘explaining’; the way in which men explain something to women with the implicit assumption that he is the fount of all knowledge and she is ignorant. See Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me, London, Granta, 2014, Me
40. When the latter died of AIDS in 1987, Hendricks asked Philip Glass to commemorate his partner with a musical piece: String Quartet No. 4. 4 The artist-curator Sur Rodney (Sur) was also a partner of Hendricks: https://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes. com/.
38. Nadya and Nona (1933, p. 94), two nude women lying on a rooftop (?) are perhaps the lesbian counterparts of these couples. 39. The degree zero of homophobia consists of explaining homosexuality as ‘narcissistic’ or a ‘same-sex relationship’.
Contrary to received wisdom, motherhood is also a source of conflict, not a woman’s destiny, and Neel includes her own in that as her representations of nudity include the ‘mutilating system’41 of old age, experienced subjectively from her point of view, which she smiles at. There was a particularly large number of nude paintings and drawings of pregnant women in a recent exhibition of Neel’s work.42 The sense of unease was immediately striking: as if Alice Neel were trying to represent the violence imposed on all women in her representation of these swollen bellies. Childbirth (p. 93) (‘A portrait done from memory of her hospital roommate, Goldie Goldwasser’)43 dramatises this primal displacement. As she wraps her truncated arms around her head, her torso is exposed/exploded, especially her huge breasts with their amplified dark brown aureolas, like a gigantic pair of eyes occupying the front of the scene. Pregnant Maria (1964, fig.5) reinvents the academic treatment of the reclining nude on draped sheet, and reinterprets the shocking effect of Manet’s deidealised Olympia by ‘combining sexuality with pregnancy.’44 Margaret Evans Pregnant (1978, p. 121) sits naked on a chair that seems much too small for a woman in her condition: an exploding belly that crushes the rest of her torso and indeed her entire body. However, in the mirror that casts back her imperfect reflection she seems much less overwhelmed by the tug of her belly. Reprised no less than seven times between 1964 and 1978, these enduring representations of pregnancy appear in a historical context in which debates over reproductive rights, contraception and the female orgasm45 had achieved more widespread public awareness. The reality principle contained in the paintings also occurs in a temporal and spatial network, with bodies exposing themselves in performances (Carolee Schneemann), in rituals (Yoko Ono), detailing everyday gestures in the space of art (Joan Jonas, Judson Dance Theatre), or conversely instrumentalised naked by clothed male artists (Yves Klein and his living brushes, women’s bodies, to which Pregnant Julie and Algis (1967) is in some way a response, Julie
41. Simone de Beauvoir,’ Briser la conspiration du silence’ [Breaking the Conspiracy of Silence], La Vieillesse [Old Age], Paris, Gallimard, 1970, https://www.monde-diplomatique. fr/2013/06/DE_BEAUVOIR/49163. 42. ‘Alice Neel. Freedom’, David Zwirner, New York, 2019. See
3. Alice Neel with Ritta Redd (on the left) and Jackie Curtis (in the centre) at the opening of Neel’s exhibition at Moore College, Philadelphia, 1971. Estate of Alice Neel
Pamela Allara, ‘“Mater” of Fact. Alice Neel’s Pregnant Nudes’, American Art, vol. 8, no. 2 (spring 1994), Art pp. 6–31, https://www.jstor.org/ stable/3109142. 43. P. Allara, ‘“Mater” of Fact’, art. cit., p. 15.
44. Helena Reckitt and Peggy Phelan (eds), Art and Feminism (Themes and Movements), London and New York, Movements) Phaidon, 2001, p. 51. 45. The ‘reports’ of Masters and Johnson, 1966, and Shere Hite, 1976.
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