Alice Neel at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is currently showing Alice Neel: The People Come First, the first museum retrospective of the artist’s work in twenty years. It’s an impressive body of work covering a wide range of subjects, focused predominantly on her portraits.

From the museum’s website-

Alice Neel: People Come First presents Alice Neel (1900–1984) as one of the twentieth century’s most radical artists, a champion of social justice whose long-standing commitment to humanist principles inspired her life as well as her art. “For me, people come first,” Neel declared in 1950. “I have tried to assert the dignity and eternal importance of the human being.” In keeping with the ethical foundations of humanism, Neel dedicated herself to painting what she called “pictures of people.” The artist focused especially on individuals who had experienced injustice as a result of sexism, racism, and capitalism as well as those who combated it. Democratic and inclusive, Neel painted people from many different backgrounds and walks of life.

New York was Neel’s greatest muse and the stage for a human drama she began capturing in the early 1930s. Neel’s life and art were inflected by the tumultuous events of the twentieth century, including the Great Depression, the rise of Communism, and the feminist and civil rights movements. For this reason, she described her work as a kind of history painting. Mindful of the formal and sensuous possibilities of paint, Neel applied her incisive eye to all her subjects, whether people, urban landscapes, or still lifes. Her riveting portrayals of life in New York, whose gritty beauty persists even in precarious times, make Neel’s art even more relevant in 2021.

Below are a few selections from the exhibition, but it’s worth going to the museum’s website (even if you see the show), where all the paintings and their descriptions can be found.

 

This painting of artist Robert Smithson is worth noting for the detail Neel put into depicting Smithson’s skin condition, and her decision not to shy away from showing these aspects in her portraits.

The New York Times has an interesting story about Jeff and Toby Neal, the boys from the picture above, and the search for the painting they sat for so many years ago.

This moving portrait is one of her last paintings, and captures Neel’s daughter-in-law Ginny’s grief after her mother’s passing.

This exhibition closes August 1st, 2021.