Pictures of People: Alice Neel's American Portrait Gallery - Review

Pamela Allara. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England and Brandeis University Press, 1998. 338 pp., 18 color ills., 183 b/w. $45.

If one were to judge by the size and ambitions of these three books on women artists, it would be tempting to think that women are progressing rapidly toward parity with men in twentieth-century art history and contemporary art criticism. These new books on Berenice Abbott (1898-1991), Nell Blaine (1922-1996), and Alice Neel (1900-1984), along with books such as the current Phaidon series, which so far includes invaluable monographs on Nancy Spero, Jessica Stockholder, Mona Hatoum, Mary Kelly, Jenny Holzer, and Ida Applebroog (the series was reviewed in Art Journal, Summer 1998), raise the hope that, in spite of the ongoing superstar marketing of male artists such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, as well as the backlash against feminism in society at large (not to mention the deconstruction of identity by postmodernism), women artists are nevertheless now receiving the substantial treatment that they deserve. These books add to the resources available to the mainstream to help it to continue to absorb the idea that women have played a major part in twentieth-century art.

Neel, Blaine, and Abbott were never obscure. Each was powerful, courageous, and persistent in the pursuit of her career. Yet, they also practiced art exactly as they chose, and it is that quality, paired with their gender, that contributed to their lack of affirmation as canonical artists. Abbott comes the closest to being a household word, perhaps because she was a documentary photographer, the practitioner of a less established discipline.

Two of these women, Abbott and Blaine, achieved significant early success. Blaine was recognized as an abstract painter, Abbott as a portrait photographer of the avant-garde in Paris in the 1920s - success they chose to toss out in favor of a new direction. Neel followed the opposite path: she painted politically charged portraits that placed her outside of every canon, until her later years, when she made the switch to savvy marketing by painting art critics and well known artists and putting together a fabulous autobiographical lecture on herself.

Pamela Allara begins her study of Neel by acknowledging the artist's success in writing her own story at the end of her life, but then she proceeds to complicate our understanding of Neel as an artist. She analyzes the artist using both recent theory and traditional art history and establishes Neel as an artist whose eccentric expressionism and social commitments place her alongside artists like Otto Dix and George Grosz.

At the same time Allara contextualizes the choice of portraiture as Neel's primary approach. That is no small accomplishment since Neel supported Communist principles. Painting oil portraits of individuals would seem to contradict the Communists' preference for collective subjects and populist media, like prints and murals. Neel argued that she was painting the proletariat rather than the wealthy and the privileged. While many of her portraits were of people who were not quite ordinary, such as her leftist male literary friends and lovers in Greenwich Village, she did indeed paint the people in her community when she lived in Spanish Harlem. These are the most moving works of her career.

The most valuable aspect of Allara's book is her ability to weave theoretical issues into the text as it follows a combination of chronology and theme. The result is a history of twentieth-century U.S. art from a new vantage point, that of a woman who consciously insisted on being an outsider in both her life choices and art style.

Neel's earliest years in Pennsylvania are barely mentioned, except as an experience to rebel against, but her first marriage and involvement in the Cuban avant-garde are carefully outlined. The two themes of domestic dysfunction and the impact of the socially committed art environment in Cuba emerge as the armature beneath Neel's career. The Cuban experience supported her firm position on the Left in the 1930s, but she was never a major player, or even a traceable one, a problem that Allara solves through providing both historical context, and a close look at the portraits. Since many of the artist's friends were writers or poets, she also appears as a fictional character in John Dos Passos's The Big Money, where Margo Dowling was a double of Neel, or Alfred Leslie's Pull My Daisy, the Beat film narrated by Jack Kerouac, in which she played the mother.

Appropriately, for a book on an artist so involved with writers, Allara's text (even her layered and theoretically sophisticated analysis of the work), is also a pleasure to read. Here formalism never stands on its own. Take, for example, the author's comparison of Neel's cityscapes with those of Edward Hopper. She points out that Hopper's mute structures close the viewer off, while Neel's invite the viewer in; likewise Neel's buildings "stand for the experience of the poor urban populace" as "she looks out from the eyes of the poor" in contrast to Hopper's escapist images (151).