Alice Neel

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Alice Neel (January 28, 1900 to October 13, 1984) was an American visual artist who was best known for her portraits of acquaintances, family, lovers, writers, musicians, writers, musicians, and strangers.

Her paintings are an expressionist use of line and color, emotional wisdom, and emotional sensitivity.

By Barry Walker, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, who curated a retrospective of her work in 2010, Neel was dubbed "one of the twentieth century's greatest portrait artists of the twentieth century."

Life and work

Alice Neel was born in Merion Square, Pennsylvania, on January 28, 1900. George Washington Neel, an accountant for the Pennsylvania Railroad, and Alice Concross Neel Neel Neel's mother were both. In mid-1900, her family and her family immigrated to Colwyn, Pennsylvania, in the country's rural town. Young Alice was the fourth of five children with three brothers and a sister. Hartley, Albert, Lillian, Alice, and George Washington Jr. were among her siblings. Hartley's oldest brother died of diphtheria immediately after she was born. He was only eight years old when he was born in the United States. During a time when women were scarcely cherished and opportunities were present, she was thrown into a middle-class, low-middle family. "I don't know what you want to do in the world because you're just a child," her mother told her. Alice wanted to be an artist from a young age, but had no exposure to art.

After graduating from high school, she took the civil service exam and began a career as a clerk in 1918 in order to better help her parents. Neel, Neel, enrolled in the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art & Design), after three years of study and taking art classes by night in Philadelphia, Neel. She rejected impressionism, the prevailing style at the time, and instead adopted the Ashcan School of Realism in her student works. Robert Henri, one of the Ashcan School's most notable figures, was thought to have influenced this influence, as well as the Philadelphia School of Design for Women. She received an honorable mention in her painting class for the Francisca Naiade Balano Prize two years in a row at Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now the Moore College of Art and Design). Neel received the Kern Doge Award for Best Painting in her life class in 1925. In 1925, she graduated from the Philadelphia School of Design for Women. Neel has often stated that she chose an all-girls academy so as not to be distracted from her art by the temptations of the opposite sex.

Neel's Neel encountered Carlos Enrquez, an upper-class Cuban painter, at the Chester Springs summer school run by PAFA in 1924. In Colwyn, Pennsylvania, the couple married on June 1, 1925. Neel and his family arrived in Havana shortly after learning with Enr's family. Neel, the Cuban avant-garde, a group of young writers, artists, and musicians, was welcomed into the Havana, Cuba. Neel forged the foundations of her lifetime political conviction and dedication to equality in this environment. Neel later announced that she had her first solo exhibition in Havana, but there are no dates or locations to reveal this. Neel exhibited with her husband in the 12th Salon des Bellas Artes in March 1927. Eduardo Abela, Vctor Manuel Garca, Marcelo Pogolotti, Marcelo Pogolotti, and Amelia Peláez, who were all members of the Cuban Vanguardia Movement, were among the exhibits on view. She had seven servants and lived in a mansion at this time.

Santillana, Neel's niece, was born in Havana on December 26, 1926. In 1927, however, the pair migrated to New York to live. She died of diphtheria just a month before Santillana's first birthday. Neel's paintings were infused with motherhood, loss, and fear, which pervaded her art for the remainder of her career. Neel's second child was born shortly after Santillana's death. Isabella Lillian (also Isabetta) was born in New York City on November 24, 1928. Isabetta's birth inspired Neel's Well Baby Clinic, a bleak portrait of women and babies in a maternity clinic that looks more like an insane asylum than a nursery.

Carlos had the impression that he was going overseas to look for a place to live in Paris in the spring of 1930. Rather, he returned to Cuba, carrying Isabetta with him. Neel sublet her New York apartment and traveled to work in the studio of her colleagues and fellow painters Ethel V. Ashton and Rhonda Myers during Enriquez's absence.

Neel, the mother of her husband and daughter, had a huge anxiety breakdown and attempted suicide. She was taken into the Philadelphia General Hospital's suicide unit.

Neel was released from the sanatorium in 1931 and returned to her parents' house, and she remained stable almost a year later. Nadya Olyanova, Neel, a longtime visitor and a frequent visitor, has returned to New York.

There Neel painted the local characters, including Joe Gould, who she portrayed in 1933 with numerous penises, as well as his inflated self-confidence and "self-deception" regarding who he was and his unfulfilled aspirations. At Tate Modern, the painting, a rare surviving work of her early life, has been on view.

Neel was one of the first artists to work for the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression. During an interview at the Whitney Museum, Neel was offered $30 a week to participate in the Public Works of Art Project. She had been living in poverty. Although Neel was involved in the PWAP and the Works Progress Administration (WPA)/Federal Art Project, her work was still well-known in the art world. Although enrolling in these government programs, she painted in a realisticist style and her subjects were mainly Depression-era street scenes and Communist thinkers and leaders. Mother Bloor, the poet Kenneth Fearing, and Pat Whalen were among the sitters. Kenneth Doolittle, a heroin user and a sailor, was involved in a drug gang and a sailor's affair. He set a fire to 350 of her watercolors, paintings, and drawings in 1934. Her husband Carlos suggested reunite at this time, but in the end, the couple never reconciled nor officially filed for divorce.

The Communist Party's world was made up of artists, scholars, and party leaders, all of whom were subjected to her paintings. Her artwork celebrated subversion and sexuality, depicting whimsical scenes of lovers and nudes as well as a watercolor she created in 1935, Alice Neel and John Rothschild in the Bathroom, which showed the naked pair peeing. Neel made a name for herself in the 1930s as an artist and forged a solid reputation in her circle of downtown intellectuals and Communist Party leaders. Although Neel was never a member of the Communist Party, her participation and sympathies with Communism's ideals remained unchanged. Neel began painting her neighbors, specifically women and children, in the 1930s.

The summer of 1930 was a period in her life where she referred to as "one of her most fruitful" because that was when she painted her first female nudes. Initially, Neel preferred painting men over women. Women in art, she said, was a dreary way of life based on serving men. It was at a time when she was most vulnerable as a result of her children's death and divorce from her husband. She had a nervous breakdown and had to be hospitalized in the fall. Neel's subject matter changed; she went from painting portraits of ordinary people, relatives, acquaintances, and strangers to female nudes. The feminine nude in Western art had always represented a "Woman" as vulnerable, anonymous, passive, and ageless, as the male gaze's most recognizable object. Neel's female nudes however disagreed and "satirized the belief and the feminine body's appearance." Art historians argue that in a striking contrast to the common idealistic interpretation of the female body in art, she was able to free her female sitters from this prevailing belief, which in turn gave them dignity and autonomy. Neel did not portray the human body in a realistic way by using her "expressive line, vibrant palette, and psychological depth; it was the way she was able to capture and respect her sitters' psychological and inner perspective that made the portraits realistic. For this reason, many art critics today describe Neel's female nudes as truthful and honest portraits, though at the time the paintings were controversial in the art world because they challenged women's traditional role. Neel often painted women in social interaction or public spaces, thus directly contradicting the "Spheres of Femininity" that the majority of nineteenth-century women artists existed and worked in. Neel is allegedly violating the female role in the household and everyday life from her artwork, in other words.

Ethel V. Ashton (1930), one of Neel's best known female nude portraits, is one of the best known early female nude portraits. Many art historians said she painted Ethel, her friend from the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now part of Moore College of Art and Design), "nearly crippled with self conscious by her own exposure." In a crouched seated position, Ethel's body was shown clearly in the eye, where she was able to gaze directly into the viewer. Ethel's eyes were often described as "soulful" and as expressing a sense of anxiety. Neel painted her friend on a distorted scale that contributed to the notion of "vulnerability and trepidation." "She's almost apologizing for life," Neel said of the photograph: "She's almost apologizing for life." And here's a look at all the furniture she must carry all the time. "The artist used to her broad legs, a bloated stomach, and pendulous breasts," the artist wrote on furniture. The formal aspects of the painting, light and shadow, the brushstrokes, and the shade are all meant to bring pathos and humour to the piece, but they are done in a specific way to convey a certain mood, which is vulnerability. The painting was on view at the University Exhibition 43 years later, where many art critics and the general public had blasted it vehemently. The painting's reaction was a strong dislike, as it was thought that it was going against the established ways female nudes were supposed to be depicted. The female nude, Ethel, was on view and "stormed out of rage." The particular painting of the female nude was neither sexual nor flattering to the feminine form. Neel's intention was not to paint the female body in an idealistic manner; rather, she wanted to paint in a straight and honest manner. For this reason, she regarded herself as a genuineist painter.

Hartley, Neel's second son, was born in 1941 to Neel and her lover, communist intellectual Sam Brody. Neel did illustration for the Communist magazine Masses & Mainstream in the 1940s and then began to draw portraits from her uptown home. However, the Works Progress Administration in 1943 halted working with Neel, making it impossible for the artist to care for her two sons. Neel would shoplift and was on welfare to help with the end meeting. Neel's art practically disappeared from galleries between 1940 and 1950, save for one solo exhibition in 1944. Neel's friendship with Mike Gold and her admiration for her socially conscious work earned her a show at the New Playwrights Theatre in the 1950s. Neel made a film appearance in 1959 after director Robert Frank ordered her to appear alongside a young Allen Ginsberg in his beatnik film Pull My Daisy (1959). Her work was first reproduced in ARTnews magazine the following year.

Many of Neel's female friends were pregnant by the mid-1960s, prompting her to create a collection of these women nude. The portraits actually emphasize the physical changes and emotional concerns that accompany childbirth rather than masking the physical changes and emotional aches associated with childbirth. When Neel asked why she painted pregnant nudes, she replied, "no."

Neel began painting the "true facts of life" and immediately felt that this subject matter is worthy enough to be painted in the nudes, which distinguishes her from other artists of her time. The pregnant nudes, not the art historian Ann Temkin's, allowed Neel to "collapse the false dichotomy that polarizes women into the chaste Madonna or the specter of the violent whore" as the portraits were of everyday women, but not in art.

Margaret Evans Pregnant (1978), who now has a private collection, is one of her works depicting a pregnant female nude. Margaret was painted while sitting in a reclining chair that compelled her to reveal her pregnant stomach even more, making her the focal point in the canvas. A mirror was placed right behind the chair, allowing the viewer to see the back of her head and neck. However, the mirrored reflection did not look anything like Margaret's frontal portrait. The motives for this particular piece of the painting are uncertain, but art historian Jeremy Lewison says the portrait is "an uncanny double of the sitter and the artist, defying older age" and suggests that the reflection is of an older and wiser woman as well as a mashup of Margaret and Neel's reflections. Neel has been correctly described as a "sort of artist-sociologist who revived and redirected the dying art of ameliorative portraiture by mixing objectivity with subjectivity, nostalgia with expressionism," according to Pamela Allara. Neel discovered that she could not be an objective observer, so her depictions would obviously include her own response."

Neel painted herself in her eightieth year of life, seated on a chair in her studio. She came out completely nude. She wore her glasses and held her paintbrush on the right hand and an old cloth on the other hand. The white color of her hair and the numerous folds and folds of her naked skin indicated her old age. As she painted herself on the chair, her body faced away from the viewer when her head was turned towards the viewer. The portrait was completed in 1980, but she had begun to paint it five years earlier before fading it for a period of time. However, she was encouraged by her son Richard to finish it and returned to in her early 80s as she was also invited to participate in an exhibition of self-portraits at the Harold Reed Gallery in New York. It attracted a lot of notice when Neel's eccentric self-portrait was displayed. When Neel revealed her saggy breasts and stomach for all to see, she painted herself in a sincere manner. She defied social constructs of what was acceptable to be depicted in art yet again in her last painting. One of her last projects before she died was her self-portrait. Neel died with her family and her family present in her New York City apartment from advanced colon cancer on October 13, 1984.

Kate Millett

Alice Neel's painting of Kate Millett was a work of art. Because Millett had declined to pose for Neel, Alice Neel used photographs of Millett to create this painting. The modern feminist movement in the 1960s inspired Neel's painting. Kate Millett, the author of Sexual Politics, was a participant in this movement. Alice Neel's career began to blossom after the feminist art movement took place, and Kate Millett's painting depicted a feminist icon. Neel likened herself to Millett's ethereal aura, capturing her vivid aura. Neel painted this portrait at a time when women were battling for equal rights and being ignored. This portrait was created by Neel for women who were looking for a mentor. Kate Millett's unique painting is aimed straight at the viewer, and her gaze is elving. Millett's portrait was infused with a sense of commanding confidence by Neel. Kate Millett was profiled on Time magazine in September 25, 2017, and Time called her the "high priestess" and that Sexual Politics was the feminist bible.

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