Alice Neel

Andy Warhol
1970

Andy Warhol sits shirtless on a bench with his eyes closed, his skin pale and his torso scarred. A supportive corset fits snuggly around his waist.

Dubbed by an art critic a "collector of souls," Alice Neel portrayed an extraordinary variety of sitters, from the anonymous to the highly recognizable, as in this portrait of the renowned Pop artist Andy Warhol. Here, Neel captures the vulnerability of an artist whose work and public persona were famous for their cool detachment. When in public, Warhol typically cloaked himself in a variety of guises—wigs, makeup, sunglasses, and a practiced air of disinterestedness. He once remarked, “Nudity is a threat to my existence.” Neel painted the Pop artist provocateur with his eyes closed and shirt removed, exposing his pale, scarred torso and the supportive corset he was forced to wear after being shot in 1968 by Valerie Solanas, a former member of his studio entourage. The canvas is limited to cool hues, such as a swatch of light blue surrounding Warhol’s head and upper body, whose fragile, androgynous contours are outlined in Neel’s signature aquamarine pigment. The background is spare, with only the outline of a couch, thereby emphasizing what she described as the picture’s "hypersensitive economy." Depicting Warhol as isolated, wounded, and withdrawn, Neel shows us an unexpected, and perhaps more profound, side of her fellow artist.

Not on view

Date
1970

Classification
Paintings

Medium
Oil and acrylic on linen

Dimensions
Overall: 60 × 40in. (152.4 × 101.6 cm)

Accession number
80.52

Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Timothy Collins

Rights and reproductions
© The Estate of Alice Neel. Courtesy The Estate of Alice Neel and David Zwirner

API
artworks/2887

Videos

Audio

Alice Neel, Andy Warhol, 1970

In Where We Are and Human Interest

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Alice Neel, Andy Warhol, 1970

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Trevor Fairbrother: My name is Trevor Fairbrother. I’m an independent curator and writer.
Narrator: Fairbrother discusses Alice Neel’s 1970 portrait of Pop artist Andy Warhol.
Trevor Fairbrother: It’s an interesting year for both of these artists. Alice Neel was actually seventy years old when she painted it, and in a sense was just hitting her stride as an important American realist. She’d had an incredible career since the thirties, but she hadn’t really had much recognition until the wave of feminist interest in the arts in the sixties. And suddenly she was a forebear for a whole new generation of feminist artists and writers.
Narrator: The late sixties were much harder on Warhol. He’d been shot two years before Neel painted this portrait—an attempted assassination by a member of his artistic circle. In posing shirtless for Neel, he exposes the corset that he was required to wear for the rest of his life. He also bares his aging body, his chest sagging so that he almost appears to have breasts.
Trevor Fairbrother: She shows him—I think it’s this kind of essence of loneliness and vulnerability, but at the same time I think she knows that he knows that everybody is looking at him. He was very much invested in famous artists. He wanted to be a kind of brand-name Pop artist, and he certainly is that now, long after his death. He, Warhol, in a sense is rising to her challenge to sit for her, to be painted and to take his clothes off. And so in a sense he’s doing a brave thing, but he’s also―he’s getting through it by shutting his eyes and being very focused internally.
I think part of the soulfulness of this picture is the fact that it might seem unfinished. I wouldn’t say it’s unfinished. I think she decided she had what she needed, and she stopped where she was ready to stop. The picture doesn’t need more.