Alice Neel was an American artist. She created the realist portraits of her relatives, friends and colleagues in an expressionist style. The canvases full of colours reveal not only the outside beauty of the models but their inner emotional life.
Background
Alice Neel was born on January 28, 1900, in Merion Square (currently Gladwyne), Pennsylvania, United States. She was the fourth of five children in a middle-class family of George Washington Neel, an accountant for the Pennsylvania Railroad, and Alice Concross Hartley.
Alice’s father issued from a family of steamship owners and opera singers, and her mother’s ancestors were signatories of the Declaration of Independence. Neel had three brothers named Hartley, Albert and George Washington, Jr., and a sister Lillian. Alice’s eldest brother, George Washington died soon after her birth at the age of eight.
This period, when Alice Neel had only about three months, the family relocated to Colwyn, Pennsylvania.
Alice was raised in time when the possibilities for women in the society were restricted.
Education
Alice Neel entered the Upper Darby High School in Upper Darby Township, Pennsylvania in 1914 and spent there four years. After graduating, Neel attended the business courses where she learned including typing and stenography. Then, she passed the Civil Service exam.
In order to become an artist, Alice Neel enrolled at the night art classes of the School of Industrial Art, a division of Pennsylvania (currently Philadelphia) Museum of Art. Nowadays, the institution is known as the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.
In 1921, she decided to pursue her artistic training at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (currently Moore College of Art and Design). For one year from 1922, she attended the illustration course. Alice was a brilliant and talented student that allowed her to receive a senatorial scholarship for the following three years.
Neel’s teachers at the institution included Paula Balano for drawing, anatomy and stained glass design, Henry Snell for landscape painting, and Rae Sloan Bredin for life class and portraiture.
During the summer of 1924, Alice Neel learned outdoor portrait and landscape drawing at the Chester Springs school of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
A year later, Neel obtained her diploma.
In 1971, Alice Neel obtained an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from her alma mater, the Moore College of Art and Design.
Alice Neel started her professional career from a post of the clerk for the Lieutenant Theodore Sizer at the Army Air Corps. She left the post in 1921 and found a job in a bank in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
In 1926, Alice joined her husband in Havana, Cuba where she had her debut solo exhibition. The first show was followed the next year by the group presentation at the XII Salón de Bellas Artes (Fine Arts Saloon) along with her husband and such representatives of the Cuban Vanguardia Movement as Eduardo Abela, Victor Manuel García Valdés, Marcelo Pogolotti, and Amelia Pelaez. A couple of Neel’s paintings, ‘Portrait’ and ‘Enríquez’ were featured in the local magazine ‘Revista de Avance’. Alice Neel started the long collaboration with the magazine as an illustrator.
The same year, the periodical sponsored the Exhibition of Modern Art (Exposicion de Arte Nuevo) where the artist presented some of her artworks as well. On May, Alice Neel came back to Colwyn, and later, joint by her husband, to New York City. There, Alice got a job in a Greenwich Village bookstore of Fanya Foss who became one of her lifetime friends. In 1928, the artist shifted from a bookstore to a National City Bank of New York (currently Citibank).
At the beginning of the new decade, Neel’s husband left her spouse in New York City with an intention to find a new living place in Paris, but instead, he came to Cuba. During this time, the painter returned to her parent’s house in Colwyn where she spent time working in the studio of her art school classmates Ethel Ashton and Rhoda Meyers. Depressed by the long absence of her husband and a daughter, Neel lived a nervous breakdown and tried to kill herself. The artist recovered in a year and came back to New York City.
The first exhibition in which the artist took part after the problems with health was the First Washington Square Outdoor Art Exhibit on May 1932 where Neel demonstrated to the public her ‘Well Baby Clinic’ among some number of other canvases. In November the same year, the artist participated in the show again.
The subsequent year, the painter participated at the show called ‘Living Art: American, French, German, Italian, Mexican, and Russian Artists’ organized at the Mellon Galleries in Philadelphia.
During the years of Depression, Alice Neel was among the first participants of the Public Works of Art Project and the Federal Art Project by the Works Progress Administration. She created the portraits of Communist leaders and reflected the street scenes of the period. This job provided the artist with the recognition from the art circle.
During the 1940s, Alice Neel supported herself by doing the illustrations for Communist publication ‘Masses & Mainstream’, including the Phillip Bonosky’s novel ‘The Wishing Well’.
In 1941, the artist was invited to teach at the Winifred Wheeler Day Nursery in New York City where she spent two years. This period, Neel settled down in an apartment at 21 East 108 Street where she produced the majority of her important paintings.
The financial support which the painter had have from the collaboration with Works Progress Administration ended in 1943. Since then, Neel restricted her exhibition activity except for one-person show in 1944 held at Rose Fried’s New York gallery.
The first solo exhibition after the long pause took place at the A.C.A. Gallery in 1950. This period, Alice Neel met the author Mike Gold who admired her social realist canvases and became the strong supporter of her art and her friend as well. With his help, Neel demonstrated her artworks at the New Playwrights Theatre in 1951. Three years later, she returned to the A.C.A. Gallery to exhibit eighteen paintings at the ‘Two One-Man Exhibitions: Hugh N. Mulzac, Alice Neel’. It was the last show of the artist during this decade at the end of which the painter following the invitation from the director Robert Frank tried herself as an actress in his movie ‘Pull My Daisy’.
The important exhibitions of the 1960s included the shows at the Old Mill Gallery, Tinton Falls, New Jersey (1960), at the Reed College in Portland, Oregon and at the Kornblee Gallery in New York City, both latter in 1962. The following year, Alice Neel started the collaboration with the New York Taylor Graham Gallery which had represented her art till 1982. At the same time, the artist received the first stipend from the benefactor, the psychiatrist Dr. Muriel Gardiner. This financial support had lasted until the end of the artist’s days.
By 1965, when Neel had an exhibition at the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth College, the series of pregnant female nudes appeared. Among the most known works from the series was ‘Margaret Evans Pregnant’ of 1978.
During the 1970s, Alice Neel continued her painting activity which she combined with an active participation in many social events related to art world, including the protests against the Museum of Modern Art initiated by the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, the Artists and Writers Protest Against the War in Vietnam and the Conference of Women in the Visual Arts at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C in 1972. The same year, Neel’s painting ‘The Family (John Gruen, Jane Wilson, and Julia)’ was listed at the annual exhibition of the Whitney Museum of American Art. This one was followed by the show dedicated to the female art at the School of Visual Arts Gallery in New York City in 1973. For two years since that time, the artist had taken part at about eight similar exhibitions.
The couple of huge retrospectives of Nell’s artworks was held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974 and at the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens, Georgia in 1975. This time, she had six more personal exhibitions and took part at the sixteen group shows.
In 1977, the artist met the printmaker Judith Solodkin who pushed her to create the first prints and lithographs.
The last years of her life, Alice Neel had several retrospectives, including the Robert Miller Gallery and the solo show of 1981 in Moscow, Soviet Union (currently Russian Federation) organized by Phillip Bonosky, the correspondent of ‘Daily Worker’ magazine. Besides, she took part at the National Academy of Design’s 158th Annual Exhibition.
Although her poor health provoked by the consequences of colon cancer, Alice Neel remained active the last year of her life.
Alice Neel supported the ideas of the Communist Party, although she never officially joined the Party.
Views
Quotations:
"Nobody knows what makes good art. As an artist, when it happens, you're grateful, and then you get on with it."
"You should keep on painting no matter how difficult it is, because this is all part of experience, and the more experience you have, the better it is... unless it kills you, and then you know you have gone too far."
"I thought you had to give up a lot for art, and you did. It required complete concentration. It also required that whatever money you had had to be put into art materials."
"The minute I sat in front of a canvas I was happy. Because it was a world, and I could do what I liked in it."
"Like Chekhov, I am a collector of souls... if I hadn't been an artist, I could have been a psychiatrist."
"Whether I'm painting or not, I have this overwhelming interest in humanity. Even if I'm not working, I'm still analyzing people."
Membership
American Academy of Arts and Letters
,
United States
1976
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"Emotional values predominate in Alice Neel’s paintings of people [...]. Her approach is frankly expressionistic; she uses a great deal of black, accentuating profile lines, and catches figures in strongly individual poses. And its dramatic intensity succeeds because of unmistakable artistic sincerity." New York Times, December 31, 1950
Connections
Alice Neel met her future husband, the Cuban painter Carlos Enriquez, in 1924 at Chester Springs summer school. They married the following year on June 1 in Colwyn, Pennsylvania. The family produced two daughters, Santillana del Mar Enríquez and Isabella Lillian. Santillana died of diphtheria in 1927. Three years later, Neel’s husband suddenly left his wife and took Isabella Lillian with him. The couple broke out, but they never divorced officially. Till the end of her life, Alice Neel saw her daughter rarely.
The artist never married again, but she had several romantic relationships during her life. She had a romance with a seaman Kenneth Doolittle. In 1934, Neel met a nightclub singer, Jose Santiago Negron, with whom five years later she had a son Richard.
The following year, Alice got acquainted with a photographer and documentary filmmaker Sam Brody who became her life partner for twenty years. In 1941, Neel gave birth to his son named Hartley. Hartley and Richard were raised as brothers.
Alice Neel: Painted Truths
Alice Neel: Painted Truths brings together paintings that demonstrate Neel’s range and ability, along with insightful commentary from four leading art historians. Although the book focuses on her portraits, it also covers the artist’s early social realist paintings and cityscapes, tracing the evolution of Neel’s style and examining themes that she revisited throughout her career
2010
Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty
In this first full-length biography of Alice Neel, a best-selling author Phoebe Hoban recounts the remarkable story of Neel's life and career, as full of Sturm and Drang as the century she powerfully captured in paint
2010
Pictures of People: Alice Neel’s American Portrait Gallery
In this vibrant chronicle of the life and work of the prolific painter and bohemian eccentric Alice Neel, whose career spanned the decades from the 1920s to the 1970s, Pamela Allara highlights portraits that constitute a virtual gallery of American cultural history
2014
Alice Neel: Painter of Modern Life
This insightful catalogue examines anew the full range of Alice Neel’s celebrated paintings of people, still life and cityscapes. The accompanying essays trace the trajectory of Neel’s artistic language as it evolved alongside contemporaneous trends in the New York City art world and examine the manner in which her own work figured into the social and cultural contexts of her time
2016
Alice Neel: Uptown
In short and illuminating texts on specific works written in his characteristic narrative style, Hilton Als writes about the history of each sitter and offers insights into Neel and her work, while adding his own perspective