Hilton Als, curator of Alice Neel, Uptown writes about Neel's portrait of Ron Kajiwara, 1971
… At the time he sat for Neel, Kajiwara was at the epicenter of a new kind of show-biz hip; her portrait is as much a report about that particular New York phenomenon as it is a record of style as a way of being—a post-Whistlerian illustration of modernism at work, inherently queer, bristling with attitude and dandy distance and an almost feminine softness or yearning behind the pretend armor. In her important 1973 essay on style, Kennedy Fraser writes that the stylish “must keep leaping up and sniping at complacency. The slightest softening, or a tilt in the direction of coziness or caution, could cause the death of style.” Indeed, there is a certain playfulness and hardness that Kajiwara shows in the world of this painting: a world made vertical by Neel, thus emphasizing her subject’s thinness, his long hand and knee-high boots.
He wears a coat that Baudelaire, one of the more original dandies, might have envied. But it’s Kajiwara’s left hand on his thin hip that says something—says a great deal—about attitude as a kind of defense, a not-suffering-fools-gladly dandy stance that pays back, with its archness, all those people who no doubt chided Kajiwara for his apparent difference, for the years he spent in the closet, in that internment camp, in a largely white avant-garde world. Ron wears whatever attitude he could muster with the confidence, self-interest, and slightly skeptical self-possession of an artist whose body and style amounts to one aspect of his art, while his interior life is being coaxed out, teased out, by Neel, who understood the children of her time, and how they came to be, as much as she understood anything.
Read Hilton Als’ full text about Ron Kajiwara, along with essays on other portraits included in Alice Neel, Uptown in the accompanying book, published by David Zwirner Books and Victoria Miro.