Alice Neel: Black and White

Alice Neel's remarkable drawings are intimate explorations of her personal life: her loves and her family, her friends, people she met in New York and the art world. Spontaneous and dynamic, the works on paper in Black and White provide insight into her environments, exterior and interior. In them she positions universal themes--motherhood, death, longing--within the sphere of her private existence and her social unconscious. While a handful of the drawings are urban cityscapes and others are domestic settings, the majority are portraits. And when Neel, the self-named "Collector of Souls," composed a portrait, she never posed her sitters. Instead, she studied and spoke intimately with her subjects as they unconsciously assumed their most natural attitude, which she believed exhorted all their character and life experience. The images she created, full of distinctly innate gestures, stemmed from her succinct understanding and assembled memory, and coalesced into a unique impression of a person. I did this at the expense of untold humiliations, but at least after my fashion I told the truth as I perceived it, and, considering the way one is bombarded by reality, did the best and most honest art of which I was capable. --Alice Neel Essay by Amy Young. Hardcover, 150 pages, 58 duotones.