Alice Neel

Born near Philadelphia in 1900, Alice Neel was the foremost American portraitist and one of the most engaging painters of her times. A member of the Works Progress Administration Programme in the 1930s Neel became a painter with a strong social conscience and equally strong left-wing beliefs. These led her to move from the comfort of Greenwich Village to Spanish Harlem in 1938 in pursuit of 'the truth' and there she painted casual acquaintances and people she encountered on the street among the immigrant community. Her engagement with the art world came in the form of a series of dynamic portraits of artists and curators many of which are now in major museum collections throughout the United States. In 1974 she presented a retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, an event that was repeated in 2000, marking the centenary of her birth.

Intimate, casual, direct and personal, Alice Neel's portraits exist as an unparalleled chronicle of New York personalities. Alternating between sombre and vibrant colours, Neel's application of paint could be hard-edged and broad as she addressed her subjects on canvas without preliminary sketches. The result of this direct approach is a body of work that preserves the spontaneity of initial ideas and the liveliness of the one-to-one encounter. Her paintings of mothers and babies reveal her deep understanding of their close bond while her depictions of the elderly reveal an empathy for the changes in body and mind that accompany old age. Few 20th century artists have documented the life cycle with as penetrating a gaze as Alice Neel.

www.aliceneel.com

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