Onde estava Alice Neel?
(1900-81) https://www.aliceneel.com/
Alice Neel, Un regard engagé, Pompidou, dir. Angela Lampe, 2022 (& Barbican)*
Alice Neel, ed. Ann Temkin. Philadelphia Museum 2001 (Whitney 2000 etc)
Artist, Humanist, Individualist.
"Alice Neel was one of the great American painters of the twentieth century and a pioneer among women artists. A painter of people, landscape and still life, Neel was never fashionable or in step with avant-garde movements. Sympathetic to the expressionists of Europe and Scandinavia and to the darker arts of Spanish painting, Alice Neel's style and approach was distinctively her own.
Throughout her career, she painted with unwavering social conscience, capturing everyone from left-wing activists in 1930s Greenwich Village to art world luminaries like Andy Warhol. Never bound by artistic fashion or social convention, Neel's work celebrated human dignity and championed social justice causes decades before they gained mainstream acceptance.
Her fearless portraits revealed the psychology of her subjects with remarkable honesty and empathy. Today she is recognized as a master of 20th-century American painting, whose work anticipated many contemporary conversations about identity, equality, and representation."
Realismo norte-americano contemporâneo desde 1960, from Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (tx Frank Goodyear Jr) Gulbenkian 1982 catálogo. A.N. "Linda Nochlin & Daisy"pp. 49, 60*
Art in the seventies, Edward Lucie-Smith, Phaidon, 1980. A N and Guston senior figures. Erotic feminism. Political art. p. 92-94 swing back towards content, not simply exercise of style, historical tradition of Modernism, the elitist context. to shock, identify with political avant-garde. veteran artists
The american century, Art & Culture 1950-2000, Lisa Phillips, Whitney Museum, 1999. p. 46 Mid 50's Figurative expressionism. Alex Katz, L Rivers, Fairfield Porter 1960, A N "raw depictions of human vulnerability and intensity". Innovative figuration. Bay Area Figurative school California. Diebenkorn. Golub, Chicago. // p. 260 a way out of the opressive academy of formalism: Guston 1969> ; A N since the thirties "frank and confrontational portraits of strong-willed characters depicted against blank grounds". "crude and expressionist methods in their emotionally charged works"." they embraced subject matter and psycological content" 258-60. // film "Pull my daisy" 1959 dir. R. Freank e Alfred Lesli, A N and Larry Rivers, New american film 68.
Realism in the 20th century painting, Brendan Prendeville, Thames & Hudson, 2000, pag. 206-07, 208 (cf. Sherman, Hockney, Katz ("painterly perceptualist", 50', Fairfield Porter e Larry Rivers)... (Paula Rego). Chap. 4: New Realities: Hopper, Morley. "Embedded Mater"
The word new made. Figurative painting in the twentieth century, Timothy Hyman, Thames & Hudson, 2016. "The libertarian line: A N and the modern portrait (1933-80)" pp.104-109.
Postwar Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic 1945-1965. Enwezor, Haus der Kunst Munchen, Preste. "Realism as international style", p. 444, 459 ilust. 1953, with Beauford Delaney 1941, John Biggers 1955, J P 1953. Guttuso. "The United States had its own contingent of fellow travelers. As Alice Neel, considered by many a pioneer of Socialist Realism in American painting, declared in 1951, "I am against abstract and non-objective art because such art shows a hatred of human beings. East Harlem is like a battlefield of humanism, and I am on the side of the people here, and thet inspire my paintings". The dandyish pose struck by the young Georgie Arce in his portrait by Neel is but a thin veneer over the violent life of teenagers of color in Spanish Harlem" p. 444.
PostwarRPostwarea
1 Barbican:
Discover d works of Alice Neel, the court painter of the underground, at the
Barbican Art Gallery until May 21st, 2023. Through her vivid portraits, Neel retaliated against exclusionary histories and highlighted the fundamentally political nature of how we look at others.
#AliceNeel #BarbicanArtGallery
Artists You Need to Know: Alice Neel
Alice Neel is widely regarded as one of the foremost American artists of the twentieth century.
As the avant-garde of the 1940s and 1950s renounced figuration, Neel developed her signature approach to the human body.
Working from life and memory, she created daringly honest portraits of her family, friends, art world colleagues, writers, poets, artists, actors, activists, and more.
Her paintings, which are forthright, intimate, and, at times, humorous, engage overtly and quietly with political and social issues.
Neel's ability to depict those around her with unfazed accuracy, honesty, and compassion displays itself throughout her canvases.
Calling herself a "collector of souls," Neel is acclaimed for not only capturing the truth of the individual, but also reflecting the era in which she lived.
Images and Text Courtesy of David Zwirner
#AliceNeel
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Regards sur l'art americain des années soixante, dir. Claude Gintz, Ed. Territoires 1979 ---
La peinture americaine, Le XX siècle, Barbara Rose, Skira, 1986 ---
Le triomphe de l'art americain. Les années soixante, tome 2, Irving Sandler, Ed. Carré 1990 ---
American art in the 20th century 1913-1993, Royal Academy 1993, Joachimides & Rosenthal ---
Identity and alterity. Figures of the body 1895/1995, 46ª Biennale di Venezia, 1995 Jean Clair ---é incompreensível a ausência de AN, mas estão Maria Lassnig e Marlene Dumas
Modern starts, 1880-1920, MoMA 1999 ---
Making choices, 1929-1955, MoMA ---
Walker Evans & company, Peter Galassi, MoMA ---
Modern despite modernism, Robert Storr, MoMA 2000 ---
American art since 1945, David Joselitt, Thames & Hudson, 2000 ---
Art since 1900, Foster Krauss Bois Buchloch, Thames & Hudson, 2004 --- 1959. Bacon, Freud, Guston: "grotesque cartoonish desfigurations" p. 477 "third generation of neo-expressionists". painterly expressionists: Appel, Diebenkorn Golub Paolozzi. Cold war politics of figuration, CCF.
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2021 J. Hoberman The Point
“Alice Neel: People Come First,” on view at New York’s Metropolitan
Museum of Art through July, may be the most enthusiastically received
and is certainly most aptly named exhibition in the Met’s recent
history. The show is comprehensive in presenting all aspects of Neel’s
work, and the timing is propitious. Neel was declared a major American
painter after her 1974 Whitney Museum retrospective, but her current
canonization coincides with an increasing attention paid to known but
hitherto marginalized, politically-aware women artists. Neel’s Met
retrospective is concurrent with the first New York museum survey given
to the underappreciated, unclassifiable Niki de Saint Phalle, and
another major museum show that argues the centrality of the
French-American sculptor and New York School outlier Louise Bourgeois to
postwar intellectual trends by anointing her “Freud’s daughter.”
Nearly four decades after her death, Neel reappears as an avatar of
art-world diversity. If in 1974, she was hailed as a feminist (another
term she uneasily accepted), she now is a woman who shucked off her
white middle-class privilege. A hardcore bohemian as well as a dedicated
(if eccentric) Communist, Neel spent much of her career in near
poverty, living in New York’s Spanish Harlem and painting her children,
her lovers and her neighbors. But, paradoxically, after years of
obscurity, Neel grabbed the spotlight. By expanding her subjects to
include celebrated art-world figures, she became one herself—a shrewdly
dotty media personality.
That revolt is amply apparent at the Met, although Neel was hardly a
primitive. She looked at paintings as well as people, absorbing ideas
from the modernist masters Van Gogh, Munch and, in her window-views,
Edward Hopper. Her style, however, is all her own. Given the apparent
rapidity with which she worked (at home in her Manhattan tenement
apartments), she was a genius sketch artist. There’s an adroit
cartoonish quality to many of her canvases. Heads tend to be outsized
and pushed forward, in what the art critic Lawrence Alloway described as
“cephalic looming.” Features can be slightly lopsided. Hands are elongated but private parts, when they appear, are typically front and center. Other parts can be perfunctory.
The critic Harold Rosenberg, who knew Neel in the 1930s when both were subsisting on stipends from the Federal Art Project, compared her “objective cruelty” to that of the photographer Richard Avedon: “Both artists record what has befallen their subjects or what they have done to themselves. With the imperturbable ruthlessness of nature, but without a trace of personal malice, faces, bodies, postures are induced to speak for themselves.” Neel may have functioned as a camera but she was hardly a photorealist like Chuck Close, and seems to have only rarely if ever worked from photographs.
Neel took her subjects where she found them in her daily life—an amiably grinning door-to-door Fuller Brush salesman, a tormented-looking museum security guard, the Haitian woman who helped clean her home and look after her grandchildren. At the height of her career in the Sixties and Seventies, Neel portrayed art critics, curators, celebrity artists and louche celebrities—not just Warhol but the Warhol superstar Jackie Curtis, as well as the porn-star performance artist Annie Sprinkle—but she had a particular fondness for political activists and, more sensationally, heavily pregnant nudes—sprawled out and heroic.
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Alice Neel was born into a proper old American family in a small
Pennsylvania town, attended an all-women’s art school in Philadelphia,
then moved with her Cuban husband, also an artist, to Havana. Moving to
New York City around the time the stock market crashed, her life fell
apart—a child died of diphtheria; her husband deserted her, taking with
him their second daughter; she was a hospitalized twice, once for a
nervous breakdown and again after an attempted suicide.
Hospital scenes figure in her 1930s paintings—along with urban
landscapes and remarkably intimate domestic vignettes. One delightfully
free-form watercolor from 1935, “Untitled [Alice Neel and John
Rothschild in the Bathroom],” shows two lovers passing water after sex,
she straddling the toilet as she puts up her hair, he urinating into the
sink. A sort of Ashcan expressionist, Neel painted Depression-era New
York City as a gaudy necropolis. Impassive and monumental, some
portraits show the influence of Diego Rivera’s stoical indios;
others are enlivened by bits of surrealism. A miniature skeleton pours
blood from the heart of the poet Kenneth Fearing, painted in 1935. The
notorious “Joe Gould” (1933) is a festival of male organs. Gould, the
Greenwich Village’s most publicized boho character—and the author of a
famous, never-written “oral history of the world” who went by the
moniker Professor Seagull—appears as a demonically grinning demiurge,
naked, sporting three penises and attended by two more, one circumcised,
one not, courtesy of the headless male torsos on each side of his
makeshift throne.
Perhaps Neel’s greatest indecency was her membership in and
commitment to the Communist Party, which she joined in 1935 when she,
along with many of the future Abstract Expressionists and countless
other painters, was employed by the Federal Art Project, and her work
was becoming more overtly political. The Met’s exhibition title “People
Come First” is taken from a December 1950 article on Neel written by the
Daily Worker columnist Mike Gold, America’s most vociferous
proponent of proletarian art. In the late Thirties, Neel moved out of
Greenwich Village, along with her lover, the Puerto Rican musician, José
Negron, and took an apartment in Spanish Harlem. “T.B. Harlem,” her
painting of Negron’s hospitalized brother, his emaciated, pain-racked
torso partially concealed by a loincloth of hospital bedding, is a
social realist pieta. Eventually, the Federal Art Project ended and
Negron left, but Neel, who now had a young son, never stopped painting.
She went on public assistance and took up with the left-wing filmmaker
Sam Brody, with whom she had her fourth child, a second boy.
American abstraction triumphed. Meanwhile, Neel—living in a slum
neighborhood represented by Vito Marcantonio, the most left-wing of New
York City congressmen—exhibited at the politically-minded ACA Gallery,
contributed illustrations to the CP journal Masses & Mainstream,
attended blacklisted educator Annette T. Rubinstein’s “Writers and
Critics” study group, took courses in Marxism and gave slide lectures at
the Jefferson School, and painted a number of Party heroes. Among them
were her editors Phillip Bonosky and Mike Gold, schoolteachers, the
neighborhood activist Mercedes Arroyo (looking up and off to the side
like an angel awaiting her own annunciation) and the writer-actress
Alice Childress, beautifully turned out in evening dress. Other
paintings included a demonstration to free Willie McGee, an
early-fifties Communist Party cause célèbre, and, most likely working
from a Life magazine photograph, the funeral of the veteran
labor organizer Mother Bloor. Beneath a reproduction of “The Spanish
Family” (1943), a gentler riff on Picasso that could be considered an
exercise in “get real”-ism wherein, flanked by two young children and
holding a baby, a sad-faced Madonna transfixes the viewer with a look of
accusatory resignation, Gold proclaimed Neel “a new star of social
realism,” not least because she had taken to representing the people of
East Harlem.
In the late 1950s, Neel painted her way back into an art world that
looked askance at such work. Around the time that she produced two
portraits of the critic-poet-curator Frank O’Hara, one flattering and
one not, Neel was cast in a motherly role in the Robert Frank-Alfred
Leslie-Jack Kerouac Beatnik home movie Pull My Daisy. (“They
picked me because I looked like a conventional American type,” she
said.) Now sixty, Neel had a new visibility. Younger artists were
charmed. Sitting for Alice became a thing. Begun around the same time,
her project has a certain affinity to Andy Warhol’s series of
three-minute “screen tests.”
In general, Neel’s sixties canvases employ a lighter palette. They
are airier, more unfinished. The handling of the paint exudes casual
confidence. Not that Neel’s political commitments wavered. She remained
concerned with class, racial and gender inequality for the rest of her
life, kept a picture of Lenin on the wall and maintained her
monumentally unfashionable affection for the Soviet Union, which some
turned into an excuse to not take her seriously. (In 1981, she partly
financed a show of her works at the Artists’ Union exhibition hall in
Moscow.) She painted not only artists but also activists like James
Farmer, the head of the Congress of Racial Equality, in 1964, and the
militant feminist Irene Peslikis (“Marxist Girl”) in 1972. She went to
hear Malcolm X speak, gave money to the Black Panthers and demonstrated
against the Metropolitan Museum’s infamous “Harlem on My Mind” show,
attacked (not altogether fairly) for an absence of African American, or
indeed any, painting.
Neel’s breakthrough Whitney retrospective, in 1974, was generally well received but panned by the right-wing New York Times
critic Hilton Kramer. “You must hate your mother,” Neel told Kramer,
encountering him at an opening after he insulted her draftsmanship.
Doubtless aware of Neel’s politics, Kramer took her art-world portraits
personally, complaining that people were “shown to be cruel or pompous
or vacant or spaced out or just a little nutty.” (Twenty-five years
later, Kramer was still complaining in a piece with the headline “The
Mob Loves Alice Neel, But I Think She’s Mean.”) True, Neel used a bit of
impasto to enhance the bad skin of the sculptor Robert Smithson in a
1962 portrait, and her 1967 portrait of Met curator Henry Geldzahler,
perhaps taken on in a transparent attempt at logrolling, amply
communicates the sitter’s discomfort, pinned to a chair like a butterfly
under glass.
On the other hand, Neel responded to the anti-glamour of the Warhol
superstar Jackie Curtis with “Jackie Curtis as a Boy” (1972), which,
given pride of place in the exhibit, has, in Curtis’s imperious posture
and suspicious sidelong glance, uncanny echoes of El Greco’s portrait of
Cardinal Fernando Niño de Guevara, the Grand Inquisitor during the
Spanish Inquisition (also in the Met). We don’t question Jackie, Jackie
interrogates us.
Like Neel’s saggy self-portrait, “Alice Neel: People Come First”
overflows with human interest. My second time through the exhibit, I
found myself standing before the nude portrait of the art critic John
Perreault, behind two women of a certain age (more or less my own). We
considered Perreault lounging on an unmade bed, a scruffy male odalisque
whose regally curved penis rests cushioned on his scrotum. “That
painting changed my life,” one woman told the other. “I realized that I
had never really looked at my husband.”
a-frank-exchange-of-views/#
2021 The Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
Alice Neel: People Come First is the first museum retrospective
in New York of American artist Alice Neel (1900–1984) in twenty years.
This ambitious survey positions Neel as one of the century’s most
radical painters, a champion of social justice whose longstanding
commitment to humanist principles inspired her life as well as her art,
see Jacob Lawrence, Hyman 180-84.
Red Grooms b 1937
