THE MET: Alice Neel - by sarah sargent

Alice Neel

Metropolitan Museum of Art By Sarah Sargent

After living through the angst-laden whirlwind that was 2020, I can’t imagine a better show to see than “Alice Neel: People Come First” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Neel’s dual focus on ordinary, often invisible people and social justice issues resonates powerfully and offers a kind of corrective symmetry to Trump, COVID-19, and the violence against people of color epitomized by George Floyd’s murder. The world has caught up with Neel, not just stylistically, but also politically.

A true bohemian, Neel (1900–1984) operated outside the art establishment for most of her career. She left Greenwich Village and the New York art scene for Spanish Harlem in 1938. She never divorced the husband she married in 1925, taking lovers and having sons by two of them. A nonconformist herself, she was naturally drawn to others, painting pictures of artists, gay couples, underground performers and political activists.

Neel’s nonconformity extended to her erotic watercolors and her approach to the nude. Her many portraits of heavily pregnant women showcase this

fundamental aspect of life that had previously been taboo. In 1972, she turned her gaze on poet and art critic John Perreault, depicting him in full-frontal naked glory. Continuing her explorations, she painted Cindy Nemser and Chuck (1975) seated somewhat tentatively in the all together on a formal Empire sofa, and, with extreme lack of vanity, her own 80-year-old self, naked as a jaybird.

Like a caricaturist she exaggerated people’s features; her goal was not humor, but highlighting her subject’s essence. This approach extended beyond her sitters’ visages to include other body parts, clothing and furniture, overemphasizing, for effect, their individual characteristics.

Neel invested nearly the same intensity into objects and pieces of furniture. Thanksgiving (1965), a portrait of her kitchen sink, boasts a lively assortment of soap, sponge, rags and Ajax joined by a turkey carcass slumped in a corner. In Cut Glass with Fruit (1952), a fluted dish and compote come alive with a crazy quilt of crosshatches, slashes and shapes that somehow coalesce to produce the exact quality of those kinds of dishes. Neel couldn’t afford a studio and painting in her apartment often included pieces of furniture like the blue-and-white striped armchair that appears in her nude self-portrait, Black Draftee (James Hunter) (1965) Benny and Mary Ellen Andrews (1972) and other works.

Neel uses pattern to great effect, inserting a striped shirt, an Indian handblocked bedspread, or a plaid bathrobe. The motifs and colors are often quite bold, but she doesn’t overdo it, using one, or perhaps two, and keeps it fresh and unpredictable by sometimes not using any pattern at all.

For Neel, who felt very strongly that man was the measure of all things, abstract art was anathema. Yet again and again in her paintings, the formal elements—color, composition and gesture—have a stand-alone weight and importance that transcends the representational aspects.

Trading off the heavy black line that surrounds the subjects in her earlier works for electric blue was an inspired adaptation that breathes vitality into the work. Neel also began to leave sections of the paintings unfinished. This helped direct attention to the more detailed sections, namely the face and eyes, but it also imbued the paintings with modernity. In the case of Black Draftee (James Hunter), she uses it serendipitously for dramatic effect. The recently drafted Hunter never returned for his subsequent sittings. It was the height of the Vietnam War and Neel embraced the unfinished aspect of the painting as a powerful metaphor for Hunter’s presumed unfinished life.

Neel treated her youngest sitters with the same gravitas she did their elders, understanding that children are individuals, and childhood is not always the easy, carefree existence it’s purported to be. Solemn and soulful, Two Girls Spanish Harlem (1959) and The Black Boys (1967) painted before and just after the Civil Rights Act, present these small humans with great empathy. Their expressions suggest they already know the tough road that faces them ahead.

Richard (1963) and Hartley (1966) are powerful psychological studies of the artist’s sons. Direct and confrontational, the boys stare out at the viewer. Richard is warily buttoned up, Hartley more relaxed. Neel uses a similar palette in both—mauve, burnt sienna and ochre to describe the merest suggestion of a background. The brushwork used to convey the clothes is extraordinary, particularly the dynamic folds of Hartley’s rumpled khakis. His arms, stretched over his head, are long and lean with the slight bulge of his left bicep capturing the exact quality of a young man’s tender musculature.

Moving through the galleries, you see Neel’s evolution as she worked through the dour portraits of the ’40s, distinguished by that heavy black line and somber colors. She had a lot of personal burdens—a dead child, a lost child, a couple of abusive relationships, poverty and lack of professional recognition coupled with fierce ambition—and yet, we see this remarkable transformation occurring from obdurate gloom to a kind of joy. It’s not that she felt the weight of things any less—she remained politically engaged all her life—but it’s as if she attained a kind of acceptance or, at least, shifted her focus from the conditions surrounding the subjects she painted to the people themselves, finding bliss in representing them just as they were.

And how they were! One’s heart warms to this messy jumble of humanity that at once seems so immediate and also from a simpler, more authentic time before the avaricious 1980s, the AIDS epidemic, 9/11, Citizens United and social media. While working in opposition to the many injustices and alienating forces in America, Neel captures what the world, and New York in particular, looked like. Viewing it through post-2020 lenses and following months of isolation, Neel’s world—where people come first—seems ineffably appealing.

Opposite page: Dominican Boys on 108th Street, 1955, oil on canvas, 41 7/8 x 48 1/16 in., Presented by the American Fund for the Tate Gallery, courtesy of Hartley and Richard Neel, the artist’s sons 2004, ©The Estate of Alice Neel.

Burn Baby, Burn

BY SKOT ARMSTRONG

BUNKER VISION

There is nothing new about burning books. There is a recorded instance in the Hebrew scriptures of a scroll, dictated by a prophet, being burned 2700 years ago. Any place that had a written language has also probably had instances of burning whatever the words were written on. It is a testament to the power of language that people in positions of authority feel the need to physically destroy the written word. As technology found new ways to transmit ideas, the objects burned expanded to incorporate them. It was quite common in the 1960s to see records tossed into a fire. The Nazi book burnings were among the most famous instances, but they are hardly an isolated event in history. In 1953 Ray Bradbury posed the question: “What if book burning was the official ongoing policy of a government?” His book, Fahrenheit 451, was adapted by Francois Truffaut into the 1966 film. He wasn’t the first art- house director to tackle a dystopian theme. One year earlier Godard had made Alphaville, and three years before that Chris Marker’s La Jetee had appeared. Fassbinder, Tarkovsky and Kubrick would also explore dystopias. What all of these films had in common was the convincing use of an existing world in which futuristic objects, technology and architecture gave the viewer a sense that this was happening in the world that they currently inhabited. Dropping an eye-popping red steampunk fire truck into a ’60s British landscape with a good cinematographer can result in a far more jarring image than anything that CGI is able to produce.

In the world that Fahrenheit 451 portrays, firemen burn any printed words on paper and people who won’t move into a fireproof home are regarded with suspicion. When a woman, who secretly reads, tells a fireman that firemen used to put out fires (not burn books) his first reaction is to question how she knows this. The hostility with which he asks signals his suspicion that she learned this from a book, or somebody who read them.

The immersion into this world begins with the movie’s credits, which are spoken. Newspapers are comic strips without words. Lacking stories, the television programs seem to involve questions of etiquette and gossip. To keep the viewers engaged, the television occasionally addresses a viewer by name. Whether or not they are addressing all of the viewers by name is uncertain, but the featured woman that they address seems like a TV star when she is named.

When a fireman starts reading books that he has been tasked with burning, he starts to question his mission in life. (How he learned to read them remains an unsolved mystery.) He quits the fire department, but is asked to ride along on one last mission. His house is the target. He snaps, burns the fire captain, and escapes to the enclave where the book-people live. Each one has memorized a book, and walks around reciting it. (Bradbury was especially fond of how Truffaut portrayed this scene.) This “happy ending” does raise an interesting question: Without a written version, where a book becomes an oral history, how much of the original book will survive as it is passed to the next generation? Anybody who has ever played the game of Telephone will understand the risk.

Art in the Bike Lane

BY ANTHONY AUSGANG

OFF THE WALL

Los Angeles is a city best seen at 30 miles per hour, when its squalor and splendor even out to create a neutral grandeur; it’s at the slower speeds that our angels’ dereliction becomes evident. Pedestrians know this and that’s why nobody walks in LA—like the Missing Persons’ song. However, there is another method of getting around which combines the best qualities of walking and driving: bike riding. Thanks to forward thinkers at the Bikeways Unit at the Los Angeles Department of Public Works, there are bike lanes on the streets and dedicated bike paths away from vehicles. Because of Lewis Macadams’ promotion of the river as a usable urban green space, one of these paths parallels the LA River and has become a popular twowheeled thoroughfare. In the tradition of motorcyclists, one can find both “lone wolf” riders and groups of all sizes on the river’s bike path. It’s not unusual to see ballers on crazy custom bikes with so many appurtenances they resemble Mod scooters and the occasional bike-powered shopping cart train. Since Street artists crave exposure, the number and variety of riders has proven to be attractive to sticker taggers, Graf painters, and agitprop wheat pasters. Thus, whether timing a ride between the Harbor Freeway and Burbank, or just taking it easy, an alert bicyclist can see an impressive array of guerrilla public art. For years the concrete banks of the LA River have been a favored canvas for Graf artists, and while Saber’s massive 60 x 250 feet piece was buffed long ago, new ones are thrown up nightly. Up along the path, much of the renegade art is like that on the boulevards, but there is a genre taking the bicycle as its main motif. The artist “Ra” uses a fat Sharpie to scrawl his three-quarter profile drawings of bicycles and the phrase “Ride On” across the walls beside the path. Like most Graf artists Ra has a rival, and his work is often crossed out by an unidentified aerosol artist who sprays a side view of bicycles in the wild calligraphic style of Lettrists.

Although the path is generally used as a route to get from one place to another, there is a group of people that live in the parkway between the Golden State Freeway and the bike path. They are a Darwinian offshoot of the overpass dwellers, managing to cross the bike path repeatedly without collision. Even so, the astute rider must exercise caution when passing through their villages, for this isn’t picturesque peasantry but a group of the disenfranchised and unwell. As such, they have their own specific artistic style: a jittery meth-addled Expressionist depiction of “the night before” stretched into the sunburned hours. It’s almost as rewarding to look at as it must be to make.

In the unsentimental world of Street Art, both the hysterical and the calculated eventually get buffed, so enjoy it today because tomorrow it’s gone. But the bucolic perseveres like the river itself, and on a graffiti-less wall near the LAPD stables, there’s a painting of a horse that returns the gaze of the observant cyclist; now that’s something worth slowing down for.

Kimberly Brooks

INTERVIEWED BY GORDY GRUNDY

RECONNOITER

The acorn never falls too far. At age 12, an enterprising artist stood in front of White on White, the Kazimir Malevich painting at MoMA NY. She tugged on her father’s sleeve and asked the surgeon, “What does it mean?” His answer inspired Kimberly Shlain Brooks toward a career in the arts. Her question sent Leonard Shlain on a decade-long inquiry which produced the 1991 bestseller, Art & Physics. Shlain dedicated his studies to the art of science; his daughter focused on the science of art. Her new illustrated book, which reveals safe practices for oil painters, may revolutionize the popularity of the once-hazardous medium.

ARTILLERY: You are a busy practicing and exhibiting artist. How long have you been painting and where has that taken you? KIMBERLY BROOKS: I started painting when I was in college, spending the first five years painting the figure. I have moved through so many phases since then, from portraiture to landscape. As I enter my 30th year with the medium, I am flirting with abstraction. I have an exhibition this summer at Zevitas Marcus in Culver City.

Beyond the title of your new book, The New Oil Painting: Your Essential Guide to Materials and Safe Practices, what can we learn? I think oil painting is one of the most misunderstood of all the art materials, the diva of all mediums. Most people think they need solvents. This, among other reasons, causes many artists to opt for acrylics. I longed for a little black book on oil painting, a basic understanding that had everything I needed to know, about the materials, as I use them. I conferred with scientists, conservators and historians. I wanted to make it easily accessible, so I illustrated it with drawings, and thanks to Chronicle Books I have color photography as well.

What prompted your research? How far did you investigate? I used to have a studio in Venice. One hot day, when I had been painting with all the smelly stuff, I suddenly had trouble breathing. It really freaked me out. I knew I had done some kind of damage, but I didn’t know how long it had been brewing. I then spent the next year trying every other media on earth to see what would satisfy me. Nothing measured up to oil painting.

How far did I investigate? Exhaustively. I ultimately learned that you really don’t need all those fancy, toxic things. An experienced oil painter may balk. Hopefully that person will get the book and discover how beautiful and simple oil painting can really be if it’s used the way science, not history, recommends.

Acrylic or oil? Your thesis challenges the choice most artists have made. Thoughts? Definitely oil. I think acrylic can be fine for very geometric work but I don’t like the way it dries so flat and fast. For me, it is not as sensual.

All of your many projects are redefining the term “synergy.” What is First Person Artist? First Person Artist is an interview platform where I talk with notable artists and we answer questions from the audience. During the pandemic, I started hosting “Fireside Chats” and “Vampire Cocktail Hours,” where we gather to look at art online. If any readers are interested in attending the next event, they can sign up at Firstpersonartist.com.