Alice Neel
Neel’s son Hartley often sat for his mother. The youngest of her four children, Hartley grew up in an unhappy home, with Neel struggling to make ends meet and his father given to violent tempers. In her portraits of Hartley, their shared histories play across the canvas – all their hurt and hope notated in the artist’s hand. These paintings are intimate studies of kinship, disarming in their frankness and poignant in the depth of their emotion. Again and again, Hartley appears in Neel’s paintings, always resigned, always lost in thought. In Hartley, the artist’s adult son looks away from his mother with unfocused eyes. The scene is suffused with blue, casting the figure in a sombre tone.
b.1900, Merion Square; d.1984, New York
Alice Neel found fame late in life. It was only in the late 1960s, buoyed by the counterculture of the time, that she began making a living as an artist. Her figurative paintings – insensible to modernist fashions – had until then been dismissed as naïve and sentimental. Yet it was this commitment to figuration that established Neel as a foremost American painter. She became an incidental chronicler of New York, the city where she lived and painted for six decades. “What a treasure of goodness / And life shambles,” she wrote in a poem to Spanish Harlem, “Your poverty and your loves.” All these things, this goodness and its shambles, found expression on Neel’s canvas. While she painted landscapes and still lives, it is her portraits for which she is remembered, with their stark intimacy and feeling, picturing the wretched and well-off, the famous and forgotten, friends and strangers. Over the many years, her work became a history of the city’s cultural ascendancy, with all its eccentricities and curiosities, its vulnerabilities and vanities. This was New York before Aids, before 9/11, before the subways were safe – a city of beatniks and broken glass.