Alice Neel Painted Truths

Widely regarded as one of the most important American painters of the 20th century, Alice Neel is internationally recognized for her contributions to Abstract Expressionism, especially her perceptive portraiture. Neel (1900-1984) was a portrait painter at a time when this was traditionally the role of a male artist. After ascending to prominence in the 1960s as the feminist movement gained momentum, she has remained an iconic figure in the history of American painting.

A self-proclaimed “collector of souls,” Neel often painted friends and family, as well as the celebrated artists and writers of her day, such as Andy Warhol, Frank OHara, and Meyer Shapiro, delving into personalities and idiosyncrasies with a rare frankness. Alice Neel: Painted Truths brings together paintings that demonstrate Neels range and ability, along with insightful commentary from four leading art historians. Although the book focuses on her portraits, it also covers the artists early social realist paintings and cityscapes, tracing the evolution of Neels style and examining themes that she revisited throughout her career.

Alice Neel's remarkable drawings are intimate explorations of her personal life: her loves and her family, her friends, people she met in New York and the art world. Spontaneous and dynamic, the works on paper in Black and White provide insight into her environments, exterior and interior. In them she positions universal themes — motherhood, death, longing — within the sphere of her private existence and her social unconscious. While a handful of the drawings are urban cityscapes and others are domestic settings, the majority are portraits. And when Neel, the self-named Collector of Souls, composed a portrait, she never posed her sitters. Instead, she studied and spoke intimately with her subjects as they unconsciously assumed their most natural attitude, which she believed exhorted all their character and life experience. The images she created, full of distinctly innate gestures, stemmed from her succinct understanding and assembled memory, and coalesced into a unique impression of a person.