Alice Neel

Alice Neel (January 28, 1900 - October 13, 1984) was an American artist known for her oil on canvas portraits of friends, family, lovers, poets, artists and strangers. Her paintings are notable for their expressionistic use of line and color, psychological acumen, and emotional intensity.

For an artist to be born in 1900 in the U.S. was almost a guarantee that the great Depression would strike even the most promising career amidships, and that the support of the Work Project Administration (WPA), however imperfect, would constitute a lifeline.

What makes Alice Neel's career so remarkable is her early recognition of her aptitude for catching character and setting in down on canvas and her persistence with portraiture far beyond the WPA years into her maturity, when the Abstract Expressionists appeared to have derailed figuration as a serious mode in which to make art.

During the 1960s and 1970s Alice Neel remained very much herself as various forms of 'a return to the figure,' including superrealism, photorealism, and a rebirth of interest in academic drawing and painting from nature, came into being.

CONTENTS: Foreword by Anne d'Harnoncourt * Alice Neel: Self and Others by Ann Temkin * People as Evidence by Susan Rosenberg * Gentlemen Callers: Alice Neel and the Art World by Richard Flood * Undergoing Scrutiny: Sitting for Alice Neel * Plates * Chronology by Sarah Powers * Checklist of the Exhibition * Exhibition History * Selected Bibliography