Alice Neel
1900–1984
Over the course of a career that stretched from the 1920s to the 1980s, Alice Neel painted hundreds of friends, family members, lovers, artists, art historians, writers, and political activists, believing that “people are the greatest and profoundest key to an era.” Seeking to express psychology above absolute physical likeness, she often used exaggerated colors and expressive brushstrokes and eliminated extraneous details in order to capture the inner lives of her subjects.
Neel was a longtime supporter of leftist causes. In the painting Pat Whalen, she depicts the Communist activist and union organizer for the longshoreman of Baltimore as a paragon of social justice. Whalen’s creased face and stern expression—along with the copy of the Daily Worker, the official newspaper of the Communist Party USA, resting beneath his large, clenched fists—suggest both a noble archetype of the blue collar worker and an all-consuming commitment to the working man’s cause.
Neel’s portrait of Andy Warhol, created more than three decades later, engages an altogether different quarter of American culture. At the time, Warhol was making silkscreen paintings of celebrities and nightlife personalities that in many ways represented the polar opposite of Neel’s approach to portraiture. Two years before he sat for Neel, Warhol had been shot by radical feminist Valerie Solanas; here his bare torso is marked by surgical scars that extend from either side of his drooping chest before disappearing beneath the corset he wore after the shooting to support his abdominal muscles. Neel isolates him on a sketchily drawn bench surrounded by empty canvas. By removing the throngs of followers, dark sunglasses, fright wig, and turtlenecks behind which Warhol usually hid, Neel exposes a profoundly vulnerable side of the celebrity artist.
Dana Miller and Adam D. Weinberg, Handbook of the Collection (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2015), 277–278.
Introduction
Alice Neel (January 28, 1900 – October 13, 1984) was an American visual artist. Recognized for her paintings of friends, family, lovers, poets, artists, and strangers, Neel is considered one of the greatest American portraitists of the 20th century. Her career spanned from the 1920s to 1980s.
Her paintings have an expressionistic use of line and color, psychological acumen, and emotional intensity. She pursued a career as a figurative painter during a period when abstraction was favored, and she did not begin to gain critical praise for her work until the 1960s. Her work contradicts and challenges the traditional and objectified nude depictions of women by her male predecessors. This is done by depicting women through a female gaze, illustrating them as being consciously aware of the objectification by men and the demoralizing effects of the male gaze.
Wikidata identifier
Q460186
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed April 26, 2025.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, painter, photographer, sculptor
ULAN identifier
500022216
Names
Alice Neel, Alice Hartley Neel
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed April 26, 2025.
