Alice Neel painted in an Expressionist style, experimenting with various ranges of colour palettes in her portraits.
Read MoreAlice Neel's portraits from her time in Cuba typically show her husband and friends in their avant-garde inner circle, as well as the marginalised local community, in whom she would maintain a lifelong interest. In Mother and Child, Havana (1926), Neel uses generous swathes of browns and pinks to depict a mother lovingly holding her child.
Upon returning to the United States in 1927, Neel and Enriquez settled in New York. Their marriage did not last long: after the death of their first child to diphtheria, the artist suffered a nervous breakdown; Enriquez left her three years later, taking their second child with him back to Cuba. Neel spent the following year in a mental asylum, during which 'a deep, psychological charge' took over her works, as Sharmistha Ray wrote in an article for Ocula Magazine. Compared to her earlier portrait of a mother and child in Havana, Degenerate Madonna (1930) is rendered in cold blues and greys. It features a melancholic mother dressed in black with exposed, sagging breasts accompanied by her young child, who has an alarmingly large and pale head.
Neel spent much of the 1930s in Greenwich Village, painting its residents in her characteristically earnest, Expressionist style. Like many of her contemporaries, she was also a member of the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression. Although she painted consistently, little of the artist's works from these years survive: in 1934, her then-lover, sailor Kenneth Doolittle, destroyed more than 350 of her paintings in a jealous rage.
In 1938, Neel moved to Spanish Harlem for a change of atmosphere, where she encountered the immigrant families who came to frequent her portraits. Whether anonymous (Two Girls, Spanish Harlem, 1959) or named (Elsie Rubens, 1960), the artist's subjects are painted with the same interiority and intensity of character.
Neel relocated to the Upper West Side in 1962, residing there until her death in 1984. There, she began to obtain greater attention than she had previously received, going on to hold a retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974. Works from this later period of Neel's life include well-known artistic and cultural figures, such as Robert Smithson (1962), and the famous portrait of Andy Warhol (1970) after Valerie Solanas shot him two years prior.
Neel also continued to paint her friends, family, and the overlooked, challenging notions of acceptability in portraiture. Among her most daring works is Self-Portrait (1980), painted when the artist was 80. In it, Neel appears nude and seated in a sofa, revealing a non-idealised, aged female body rarely represented in society.
