Real Life in America, Through the Eyes of Alice Neel

Alice Neel was born in the first month of the 20th Century to a father who worked as an accountant in the per diem department of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and a mother descended from one of the signatories to the Declaration of Independence. They lived in a small house in Colwyn, a small town outside Philadelphia. After taking a secretarial job with the Army Air Corps, working for Lieutenant Theodore Sizer, who later became an art historian at Yale University, Neel enrolled in evening art classes; in 1921, she joined the fine art programme at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, paying for the first year with her savings.

Neel’s formative years spent in a family of working people, and her own experience of having to labour to get the education she wanted, trained her eye on the lives of those who fought for their livelihoods and for a place in the world. Painting through the Great Depression, the Second World War and into the civil rights and women’s rights’ movements of the 1960s and 1970s, she captured the struggles and nuances of her sitters’ experiences, regardless of their backgrounds. She painted Communist party members, conscripted soldiers, women in the late stages of pregnancy with swollen, round bellies (then still a little-painted subject), artists including Andy Warhol (whom she asked to strip from the waist-up, painting the scars left on his torso by an attempted assassination two years before), and herself, often completely naked. She would leave her backgrounds half-painted, her interest not extending beyond the edges of the person in front of her.

Alice Neel: Beautifully Imperfect, a new exhibition at the Serralves Museum in Porto, celebrates the place of imperfection in Neel’s practice. It opens with a naked self-portrait painted in 1980, when Neel was 80 years old. “Alone, nude and facing the viewer directly, Neel appears at the very beginning of the exhibition without idealisation, without artifice, and without submitting to any convention,” the curator, Inês Grosso, tells Ocula. “It is a radical opening, almost a silent manifesto.” Here, Grosso writes about her highlights from the exhibition, pulled from “a body of work always attentive to the singularity of each person”.

Alice Neel, Well Baby Clinic (1928–1929)

Well Baby Clinic (1928–1929) portrays a public family-planning clinic, the kind of institution that began to appear in the United States and Europe at the beginning of the 20th century as a result of reforms in public healthcare and the growing preoccupation with infant mortality rates. These clinics offered medical support to mothers and their babies and gave advice on diet, sanitary measures and childcare, above all to the poorest urban populations. 

The artwork was inspired in part by Neel’s personal experience. One year before she made this painting, Neel had endured the death of her first daughter while still a baby and suffered economic and emotional hardship as a mother. Instead of romanticising the idea of child-rearing, Neel portrayed a space where tension, exhaustion and vulnerability are commonplace. Here, the mothers and children form an almost claustrophobic scene. 

While being an early work, Well Baby Clinic already reveals several of the key themes that would prevail throughout the artist’s career: her interest in everyday lives, the feminine experience, and in people who were traditionally denied representation in the American painting canon. 

Alice Neel, Benjamin (1976)

Benjamin (1976) is a portrait of the son of the caretaker of the building on the Upper West Side where Neel lived and worked until the end of her life. The boy is depicted alone against a blue, featureless background, in a slightly awkward pose. In the exhibition, this painting is part of the selection of works dedicated to family, together with portraits and drawings of the artist’s children and Lushka, her son Hartley’s pet dog. The term “family” embraces a wider emotional range of subjects for Neel, including her children and others, her neighbours and the animals that were part of her daily life.

Alice Neel, Lushka (1974)

For centuries, principally in court and aristocratic portraits, dogs were depicted beside the human subject of the painting not only as companions, but also as symbols of social status. Lushka (1974) re-engages directly with this tradition but also displaces it, positioning the animal alone at the centre of the composition like a quasi-human presence. Depicting the dog face-on, alone in its surroundings and looking directly at the viewer, Lushka recalls the psychological intensity of the artist’s portraits of people. The intense colours of the grass, sky and mountains distance the painting from any kind of naturalism. 

Alice Neel, Rita and Hubert (1958)

The painting Rita and Hubert (1958) is a record of the social and political texture of 1950s America. It portrays an interracial couple at a moment in which anti-miscegenation laws, which banned interracial marriage and cohabitation, were being enforced in some US states, years before the protests of the 1960s, or Loving v Virginia’s landmark 1967 decision, which legalised interracial marriage across the country. 

The work reveals the artist’s profound interest in people beyond the traditional centres of power and representation. Throughout her career, Neel painted artists, activists, neighbours, workers and members of the Black and Latino communities of New York City, building a picture of American society formed from ordinary stories and relationships. 

Alice Neel, Woman in Café (1975)

Women sitting alone in cafés became a recurring theme in painting from the second half of the 19th century. In the work of Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas and Vincent van Gogh, the café took the place of historical, mythological or religious settings. Cafés, cabarets and bars were the places to meet, observe and be in solitude.

Alice Neel reclaims the motif in Woman in Café (1975), one of the most enigmatic works in the exhibition. The identity of the woman isn’t clear; she sits stiffly, her arms crossed, and her gaze is inscrutable, heightening the mystery of the portrait. In whose presence do we find ourselves?

As we would see in café paintings of the modern French School, the figure is presented in a confined space, confronting the viewer with a feeling of physical presence and psychological distance. 

Alice Neel, Thanksgiving (1965)

Thanksgiving (1965) is particularly interesting because of the way Neel transforms the banality of an uncooked turkey in a kitchen sink into a profoundly disturbing image. As in her portraits, this painting makes no effort to depict its subject in a flattering light: we see a mass of plucked flesh.

The turkey, a traditional American Thanksgiving dish and associated with the idea of family celebration, is shown at a moment prior to the meal, by itself in the domestic space of the kitchen. Instead of festive warmth, Neel focuses on the materiality of form, the carcass, its preparation and the more humdrum, somatic aspect of the setting. 

Seen through contemporary eyes, the painting forges relationships with feminist artists who explored the domestic space, the kitchen and the invisible toil usually considered to be “woman’s work”. Pieces such as Martha Rosler’s 1975 short film Semiotics of the Kitchen transformed domestic gestures and kitchen objects into spaces for critical reflection and critique on feminine roles. Although Alice Neel did not broach these topics in explicit ways, her life and work inevitably echo readings such as these. 

A mother, artist and profoundly independent person, Neel frequently came into conflict with traditional models of domesticity. At the same time, her home also served as an atelier and a place for creation; she painted within the domestic space, received guests and teased out themes and subject matters for her work there. Her paintings show the interior of the home not simply as an everyday setting, but also as space for work, observation and psychological world-building.

Alice Neel, Black Draftee (James Hunter) (1965)

The Vietnam War had a profound impact on the political and cultural life of the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. Conscription, the regular television coverage of the conflict, and the growing number of casualties contributed to demonstrations, student movements and intense protests against the war. Many artists turned to painting, photography, performance, public art and video as forms of political intervention and social critique. Artists such as Nancy Spero and Philip Guston addressed, in different ways, questions of military violence, trauma, power, political authority and the role of the media. 

Black Draftee (James Hunter) (1965) depicts a young recruit for the Vietnam War, at a time when compulsory military service was on the rise in the United States, affecting, most dramatically, young men from the working and middle classes. Neel met James Hunter in the street and invited him to pose for a portrait but, during the first session, he informed her that he would be leaving for the war effort a few days later and so, as far as he knew, would not be coming back to complete the painting. The artist decided to leave the work unfinished. 

The figure appears, therefore, only partially outlined, while his downward gaze heightens the introspective mood of the painting and his apprehension at the imminent war. —[O]

Alice Neel: Beautifully Imperfect (until 17 January 2027) at the Serralves Museum, Porto

Main image: Alice Neel, Rita and Hubert (1958). Courtesy of Defares Collection