ALICE NEEL: PAINTER OF MODERN LIFE

This retrospective of paintings by Alice Neel (1900–1984) – one of North America’s most important female artists, although largely unappreciated during her own lifetime – is the fruit of a collaboration between several European institutions. The exhibition at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles places the US painter and her realist brush firmly in the spotlight. Imbued with a powerful psychological dimension, Neel’s portraits bear witness to  almost a century of evolution in attitudes towards gender and ethnicity, and to radical changes in fashion at the heart of American society. 

Working in an epoch that declared abstraction the new modernism, Neel would always remain a “painter of modern life” as imagined by Charles Baudelaire, with whom she shared the same vision of modernity and the artist’s role in relation to it. Hallmarked at once by expressionism and realism, Alice Neel’s œuvre translates the paradoxical personality of its maker, who wanted to paint individuals from all social classes and create a visual history of her time – a Comédie Humaine . 

Conceived by Jeremy Lewison, the leading expert on Alice Neel, the exhibition presents more than seventy paintings, including a portrait of Andy Warhol “laid bare” under the artist’s keen gaze. 

After the Ateneum Art  Museum in Helsinki and the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag in The Hague, the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles  welcomes this major exhibition from 4 March to 17 September 2017, after which it will travel on to Germany and the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg. 

Exhibition curator: Jeremy Lewison 

ABOUT THE ARTIST 

Alice Neel is born on 28 January 1900 in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, USA. She studies art at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, an institution that distances itself from the formalist approach to art taught during this epoch. In the 1930s Alice Neel lives in Greenwich Village, a district of New York with a Bohemian reputation and popular with artists. She is entered on the payroll of the Works Progress Administration, for which she paints  urban scenes. During this period she also meets and paints the portraits of fellow Communist Party sympathizers. 

In 1938 she moves to Spanish Harlem (today East Harlem), where she embarks on a new series of portraits featuring Puerto Ricans, among others. In the 1960s she settles in Upper West Side, where she reconnects with the art world and executes her  famous portraits of artists, gallerists and curators. At the end of the decade she finds inspiration for her art not only among family members, but also by observing women and children, whom she thus paints at the dawn of the feminist movement. From this period onwards, too, her painting is finally recognized by the American art scene and celebrated in the form of numerous solo and collective shows. 

Alice Neel dies on 13 October 1984 in New York. 

  Catalogue

This groundbreaking book re-evaluates the work of Alice Neel, one of the most renowned American portrait painters of the 20th century   

This insightful catalogue examines anew the full range of Alice Neel’s (1900-1984) celebrated paintings of people, still life, and cityscapes. Featuring around seventy paintings spanning the entire length of her career, this handsome book accompanies a major retrospective of her work, and reveals her underlying interest in the history of photography, German painting of the 1920s, and other artists, such as Van Gogh and Cézanne, all of which provided an important precedent for the veracity and raw emotional intensity of her figurative works. Neel is renowned for her visual acuity and psychological depth, and her portraits and nude paintings of friends, family, strangers, and prominent cultural figures alike convey an incredibly consistent intimacy regardless of the relationship to her subject.

The accompanying essays trace the trajectory of Neel’s artistic language as it evolved alongside contemporaneous trends in the New York City art world and examine the manner in which her own work figured into the social and cultural contexts of her time. Created over a sixty-year period, Neel’s oeuvre offers a remarkably expressive document of the specific milieus she navigated through and ultimately transcends the marker of time altogether.

Main exhibitions (a selection) 

• Face Value: Portraiture in the Age of Abstraction , National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, 18 April 2014 – 11 January 2015 

• Alice Neel: Painted Truths , Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 21 March – 13 June 2010, and subsequently touring to the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and the Moderna Museet, Malmö 

• Alice Neel , Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 29 June – 17 September 2000, and subsequently touring to Andover, Philadelphia, Minneapolis and Denver 

• Féminin-Masculin,  Le Sexe de l’art , Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 24 October 1995 – 12 February 1996 

Alice Neel: The Spanish Family© Estate of Alice Neel 

  Alice Neel: Frank O'Hara© Estate of Alice Neel 

  Alice Neel: Jackie Curtis and Ritta Redd© Estate of Alice Neel 

  Alice Neel: Joey Skaggs© Estate of Alice Neel 

  Alice Neel: Self-Portrait© Estate of Alice Neel 

Alice Neel: Gus Hall© Estate of Alice Neel  

 

José , 1936 Oil on canvas, 58.4 x 46 cm Estate of Alice Neel Photo credit: Malcolm Varon, New York 

Pregnant Julie and Algis , 1967 Oil on canvas, 107.6 x 161.9 cm Estate of Alice Neel Photo credit: Malcolm Varon, New York

Ginny and Elizabeth , 1975 Oil on canvas, 106.7 x 76.2 cm Estate of Alice Neel Photo credit: Ethan Palme 

 Great review, more images