Alice Neel was ahead of her time in terms of gender, mental illness and racial justice.
.” Like Goya, who showed how war’s barbarism led to executions of unarmed men, Neel portrayed an unromanticized side of a subject that had been essentially hidden from public view.
Similar to Goya, Neel entered spaces like mental asylums that classically trained artists weren’t expected to paint but did. And like Goya, Neel experienced a series of personal tragedies around children — in Neel’s case, the 1927 death of her infant daughter to diphtheria, and then an early estrangement from her subsequent daughter whom Neel’s then-partner took from New York to Cuba in 1930.
After those two events, Neel tried to kill herself and spent time in psychiatric wards, giving her a level of empathy for people in precarious situations that would forever inform her painting, like the early exhibit works “Synthesis of New York— The Great Depression” from 1933 and “Ninth Avenue El” from 1935, which both feature clothed, skeleton-like figures traversing a shadowy New York City that, in real life, was experiencing devastatingly high unemployment.
Confronting art-goers with exacting questions or exacting subjects was a Neel specialty, and true to Neel’s character, she didn’t spare herself. Perhaps Neel’s best-known painting is her 1980 work called “Self-Portrait,” which shows the elderly Neel naked as she sits on a blue-striped chair and holds a paint brush in her right hand. Like Farmer, she’s looking just to the right of the viewer, giving this painting an added tension beyond the artwork’s upfront nudity.
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