Alice Neel’s life on canvas gets first Scotland exhibition. By Susan Mansfield.
In 1955, when America was in the grip of anti-communist paranoia, the FBI interviewed Alice Neel. In her file, she was described as a “romantic Bohemian type communist”, probably guilty of nothing worse than hanging out with the writers and radicals of Greenwich Village. Rumour has it she offered to paint the agents’ portraits. They declined.
That story sums up something about Neel, a defiant non-conformist, committed to her art. By this point, she was in her fifties, having pursued her work for decades with little recognition or financial reward. She was a woman in a world dominated by men, a portrait painter in an art world sold on abstract expressionism and pop art. She was poor and often broken-hearted, sporadically treated for psychiatric illness. But she left a legacy of nearly 3,000 works...
