Alice Neel
American, 1900-1984

Untitled, from the portfolio Anthology Film Archives, 1982
silkscreen on arches
31 5/8 x 42 in.

SBMA, Gift of the American Art Foundation
1984.12.5



Undated photo of Alice Neel in studio

"The minute I sat in front of a canvas I was happy. Because it was a world, and I could do what I liked in it. "

"I don't paint like a woman is supposed to paint. Thank God, art doesn't bother about things like that."

- Alice Neel

POSTSCRIPT

Portfolio/Series
A Portfolio of Thirteen Prints to Commemorate the Conversion of New York City's Second Avenue Courthouse Building into the New Home of Anthology Film Archives, the First Museum Dedicated to Avantgarde Film and Video
5 of 13 in the Portfolio

Anthology Film Archives evolved from roots and visions that go back to the early 1960s, when Jonas Mekas, the director of the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, a showcase for avant-garde films, dreamed of establishing a permanent home where the growing number of new independent/avant-garde films could be shown on a regular basis.

This dream became a reality in 1969 when Jerome Hill, P. Adams Sitney, Peter Kubelka, Stan Brakhage, and Jonas Mekas drew up plans to create a museum dedicated to the vision of the art of cinema as guided by the avant-garde sensibility. A Film Selection committee – James Broughton, Ken Kelman, Peter Kubelka, Jonas Mekas, and P. Adams Sitney – was formed to establish a definitive collection of films (The Essential Cinema Repertory) and to determine the structure of the new institution.

Anthology Film Archives opened on November 30, 1970 at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater. Jerome Hill was its sponsor. After Hill’s death, in 1974 it relocated to 80 Wooster Street. Pressed by the need for more adequate space, it acquired Manhattan’s Second Avenue Courthouse building in 1979. Under the guidance of the architects Raimund Abraham and Kevin Bone, and at a cost of $1,450,000, the building was adapted to house two motion picture theaters, a reference library, a film preservation department, offices, and a gallery, opening to the public on October 12, 1988.

At the Courthouse, Anthology has found an ideal home as a chamber museum, dedicated to the preservation, study, and exhibition of independent and avant-garde film. It is the first museum devoted to film as an art form, and is committed to the guiding principle that a great film must be seen many times, that the film print must be the best possible, and that the viewing conditions must be optimal.

- anthologyfilmarchives.org



Alice Neel pictured in1970 with her portrait of her friend Andy Warhol (Getty)

COMMENTS

Alice Hartley Neel was born in Pennsylvania in 1900. She first studied art by taking classes at night at the School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia, after working in a clerical position by day. In 1921, she focused on art studies full time at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women. The work she did there was recognized with numerous awards. In 1924, she took outdoor painting and portrait classes through the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and met her future husband, Cuban artist Carlos Enríquez.

The 1920s and 30s were full of personal tragedy and hardship. In 1926, Alice and Carlos move to Havana, Cuba and soon had their first child, Santillana. In Havana, Neel embraces the Cuban avant-garde made up of young writers, artists and musicians. The experience helped develop her lifelong political consciousness and commitment to equality for woman, artists and African Americans. Alice and Carlos lost their first child and shortly after having her second child, Carlos left Alice and took the child with him. Having lost her husband and essentially two children, Neel had a serious nervous breakdown and attempted suicide twice. Alice and Carlos never divorced, but would see each other for the last time in 1934.

In the 30s, Alice Neel lived in New York. Twice, large amounts of work were destroyed. First by a angry boyfriend who burned more than three hundred drawings and watercolors and slashes more than fifty oil paintings. The second was when the Work Progress Administration program ended and the many works she produced while in the program was sold for scrap canvas. Neel moved to Spanish Harlem, New York in 1938 and would continue to live there until the 1960s. There she painted the Puerto Rican community, friends and people she saw on the street. Throughout her career, Neel painted portraits of people in her own life. She referred to her work as “pictures of people” to set herself apart from male-dominated traditional portraiture. By mid- 1940s, Alice Neel was more established as an artist and had a good circle of friends made up of intellectuals and Communist Party leaders. Her portraits during this time are of left wing writers and artists and are included in gallery shows in New York. She also created illustrations for Masses & Mainstream, a Communist publication.

In the 1950s and 60s, Alice Neel became more involved with the Woman’s Rights Movement. She participates in several protests against museums lack of inclusion of women and African American artists in their exhibitions. She would later become an icon of the women’s movement and be recognized with the International Women’s Year Award for her work and dedication. She continues to exhibit and paints portraits of artists, including Andy Warhol and Robert Smithson, curators, gallery owners and political personalities. Interest in Neel’s work continues to grow and she is able to exhibit in group and solo gallery shows more frequently. In 1963, she receives the Longview Foundation Purchase Award from Dillard University, New Orleans.

In the 1970s, Alice Neel painted portraits of her family as well as a major series of nudes. She exhibited extensively throughout the mid 1970s and in 1974 a retrospective exhibition of her life work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York was held. This was a great achievement for her personally as a woman artist. She had fought for many years to create more opportunities for women artist to be more widely accepted by the museum establishments. She was elected a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters (now the American Academy of Arts and Letters) and received the National Women’s Caucus for Art Award for outstanding achievement in the visual arts in 1979. She died in 1984 of cancer.

Alice Neel was one of the pioneer artists of the twentieth century. Her paintings reflect her dedication to social realism, but they also describe her life and socially turbulent world in which she lived.

- ackermansfineart.com

Synopsis
Alice Neel, an unshakable original, witnessed a parade of avant-garde movements from Abstract Expressionism to Conceptual Art, and refused to follow any of them. Instead, she developed a unique, expressive style of portrait painting that captured the psychology of individuals living in New York, from friends and neighbors in Spanish Harlem to celebrities. Part of what makes Neel one of the greatest American portraitists of the twentieth century is her refusal of traditional categories (gender, age race, social status, etc.). She does not presume what she does not know. She observes each subject with a fresh eye. Neel's insights into the human condition never wavered, remaining direct, unflinching, and always empathetic.

Key Ideas
Types are less interesting to Neel than individuals. Andy Warhol and her neighbor's children are subjected to the same level of scrutiny, curiosity, and psychic assessment. "If I hadn't been an artist, I could have been a psychiatrist" she once said.

At a time when it was deeply unfashionable, Neel persisted in being a figure painter and a portraitist. While fully engrossed in the New York art scene and connected with its major innovators, she remained steadfast in her choice of style and subject matter, unswayed by an art world that favored abstraction. She persisting in making work that pleased her, regardless of what anyone thought. In this respect, she is very much like another great portraitist: Vincent van Gogh.

Neel was virtually unknown and had only a handful of solo shows prior to 1970. In the last two decades of her life, she had sixty. This was not purely due to the strength of her work, but to a seismic shift in the art world, which had begun to acknowledge the achievements of minorities and women.

While prolific, Neel appears to have been relatively uninterested in self-marketing. In this respect, she is different from many other successful artists of her generation, particularly women, who had to work especially hard to get noticed by the critics. Louise Nevelson, around the same age, is an especially intriguing study in contrast.

Most Important Art
This early work depicts Neel's husband, the painter Carlos Enríquez, a year after they were married. The portrait displays many of the stylistic and compositional features evident in her mature work. It is clear, however, that Neel was still evolving as an artist. The face, with its distracted features, looks past the edge of the frame, as if focused on a faraway thought. The background here is much darker and the features more idealized than in Neel's later portraits (although, after all, this was her lover). Interest in psychological depth, while evident here, would be fully mastered in her later work.

The pair met in 1924 during a summer painting course in Pennsylvania. He was expelled due to lack of participation; Neel left the program with him. Enríquez returned to Havana in the fall, but the couple carried on their romance through letters. His wealthy family disapproved of Neel and his desire to be an artist (one can only imagine what they thought of her professional ambitions).

Childhood
Alice Hartley Neel was born into a colorful American family. Her father, George Washington Neel, was an accountant with the Pennsylvania Railroad, and hailed from a clan of steamship owners and opera singers. Her mother, Alice Concross Hartley, was a descendant of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence. Young Alice was the fourth of five children, with three brothers and a sister. Her oldest brother, Hartley, died of diphtheria shortly after she was born. He was only eight years old. Several months later, Neel's family moved to the small town of Colwyn, a short distance from Philadelphia, where she attended primary school and high school.

After graduating from high school in 1918, Neel took the Civil Service exam and accepted a secretarial job with the Army to help support her family. She worked there for three years while pursuing her passion for art, taking evening classes at the School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia. Neel's parents did not understand her professional ambitions. "I don't know what you expect to do in the world," her mother once told her, "you're only a girl."

Early Training
With the help of scholarships and her own savings from her work as a secretary, Neel enrolled as a student in 1921 at the Fine Arts program at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women. There, she studied landscape painting under Henry Snell, and life drawing and portraiture with Rae Sloan Bredin. A brilliant student, Neel earned several awards for her portraits - which would remain her life-long focus. In 1924, she attended a summer program organized by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the picturesque village of Chester Springs. There, she met and fell in love with a wealthy Cuban in the program, Carlos Enríquez.

Marriage to Enríquez marked the beginning of a devastating period in Neel's life. The couple married in Colwyn in June 1925 and several months later, they moved to Havana. The following year she had her first exhibition and gave birth to her first child, Santillana, who died while still an infant from diphtheria- the same disease that had claimed Neel's older brother. The couple moved back and forth between Cuba and the US, eventually settling on Manhattan's Upper West Side. They had another daughter, Isabetta, in November 1928, and planned to move to Paris in 1930. Instead, Enríquez moved suddenly and unexpectedly to Paris, taking Isabetta with him and leaving the toddler with his family in Europe. Neel suffered a nervous breakdown over the course of the following months, was briefly hospitalized, and later went to find Enríquez. When it was clear that the marriage was unsalvageable, Neel attempted suicide using the oven in her parents' kitchen, and was hospitalized again. Neel never divorced, but remained estranged from her husband, and would see her daughter only on rare occasions for the rest of her life.

Legacy
Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch and Kathe Kollwitz come to mind as stylistic precursors for Neel's interest in portraying psychic depth that goes beneath the surface. In a world where painted portraits were still primarily for the upper class, Neel's insistence on representing a broad cross-section of the American public, from a range of racial, cultural and socio-economic backgrounds was firmly rooted in her political convictions, and recalls the staunch radicalism of Diego Rivera and American artists of the Harlem Renaissance from Aaron Douglas to Archibald Motley. Her interest in the details of time and place aligns her with documentary photographers like Gordon Parks, Berenice Abbott, Dorothea Lange, and Helen Levitt, all of whom worked for the WPA at roughly the same time as Neel.

Although rarely aligned with Neo-Expressionism, Neel's return to the figure, emotive brushwork, and penetrating insight into human psychology anticipate the movement several decades ahead of its time. Neel's broad impact on the art of today is evident in the work of major portraitists from Chuck Close to Lucian Freud. Elizabeth Peyton's eclectic, egalitarian focus on a broad cross-section of society, and South African artist Marlene Dumas's unflinching view of political and social issues are strongly indebted to Neel. Countless other painters have learned valuable lessons from her work.

Finally, Neel's life-long project to study humanity by means of closely examining the broadest array of subjects informs photographers and documentarians in the age of the internet. Her interest in the human condition of New Yorkers wherever she might find them is closely aligned with the ongoing project Humans of New York (HONY).

- theartstory.com