Alice Neel

ArtForum, Sept, 2000 by Jeff Weinstein

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK

"Thus the Whitney, which can usually be counted on to do the wrong thing, devoted a solo exhibition to Alice Neel, whose paintings (we can be reasonably certain) would never have been accorded that honor had they been produced by a man."

Shall we play name that critic? Hint: His vehicle--surprise! it's a he--was the New York Times, which published this assessment in ... 1977, three years after a single-floor show of Neel's work opened at the Whitney. By contrast, Lawrence Alloway, writing in The Nation in 1974, took the Whitney to task for its belatedness: Neel, who was born outside Philadelphia in 1900, was seventy-four at the time of this, her first solo museum outing. To many who knew her work from gallery shows, the tardiness was puzzling; in the late '60s, museums had begun to award full-career retrospectives to those at the early middle, not just the end, of their artistic lives.

Neel died in 1984 and has yet to garner a definitive survey, but what might be called a retrospective in miniature (if such a thing can be) has been organized by Ann Temkin of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. "Alice Neel" occupies the Whitney's third floor until mid-September, iced top and bottom by sympathetic opposites Barbara Kruger and Robert Rauschenberg. Some of Neel's later portraits may be familiar, but this is a surprising and mind-exercising exhibition overall, rich with immediate and delayed pleasures. The setting, however, inevitably evokes memories of the earlier show. At the opening in June, a number of those who knew or posed for the artist said they could hear

her insinuating, wry voice echo in the Breuer space: "Still one damn floor. What do I have to do to get another?"

Can a viewer understand this artist's work without knowing her life? This is the spot in a Neel review where an account of her early miseries and lifelong social commitments usually appears--something that would be absent from a review of, say, Donald Judd, whose coolness seems properly matched to the faceless rigors of an unbiographical formalism. Neel herself spoke--endlessly and not always accurately--about her life as a means of grasping her work, and she was right to do so: One of the expressionist strengths of her paintings is their ability not only to reflect but also to interpret or comprehend their historical moments. Try to imagine how the gardens of Fairfield Porter comprehend their "historical moments," and you'll see how some representationalists have so much more to give than others.

The daughter of a railroad clerk and a descendant of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Neel attended the country's first women-only art school (now Moore College of Art and Design), where, while champing at the premodernist bit, she steeped herself in the methods of Thomas Eakins and Robert Henri. At twenty-five, she married the artist Carlos Enriquez, moved to his homeland, Cuba, and gave birth to a daughter, Santillana del Mar, who died of diphtheria back in the States. She had another daughter, Isabetta, whom Enriquez took to Cuba; Neel subsequently suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized. She never saw her husband again and saw her daughter only twice thereafter.

Neel was poor most of her life, at least until the '70s, when her prolific output finally returned a decent living. She had what melodramas call terrible luck with men, raising Hartley and Richard, her two sons from two separate liaisons, more or less alone. She has been called an archetypal bohemian, but her hand-to-mouth Greenwich Village existence during the Depression was not unusual, and she reacted to the situation as many did, by looking for socially responsible solutions--Marxism and communism among them--to the period's brutal and inequitable conditions. She was an early beneficiary of the Work Projects Administration, which provided needy artists with canvases and allowed them to paint at home. But for the most part, Neel decided that individual "proletarian portraits," not socialist-realist tableaux, would be her way of capturing the tenor of the time--despite exceptions such as the somber Investigation of Poverty at the Russell Sage Foundation, Ca. 1935, and Nazis Murder Jews, 1936, a record of a Manhattan protest march that was one of the first artworks to announce the truth bluntly stated in its title.

Much of Neel's--and other artists'--WPA work has been lost: Bales of finished canvases were sold by the government at four cents a pound to be used as insulation. Neel, however, had the lucky but infuriating experience of retrieving a few of her WPA paintings from a bric-a-brac dealer, a freighted moment incorporated by her close friend Kenneth Fearing into his 1946 novel, The Big Clock. In 1935, Neel had painted a portrait of Fearing in which the bespectacled, raven-haired author sits at a table, naked city in the background, blood pouring from his heart. (In the 1948 film version of The Big Clock, the Neel character is played deliciously by Elsa Lanchester. The feisty Neel translates well on screen: Susan Sarandon portrays a quieter version in this year's Joe Gould's Secret. Neel's still-startling 1933 portrait of the grinning, naked Gould, festooned with multiple genitalia, is in the Whitney show as well.)