Alice Neel's portrait of the Soyer brothers says it all. There they are, Raphael and Moses, venerable, venerated, the golden boys of Thirties' art and social realism in America. The portrait captures their myth perfectly. The two little old men sit like elves, as picturesque as an American tradition should be. With other artists such as Ben Shahn they stamped their imagery on a period when social unrest demanded a socially conscious art; they survived and remained famous, partly through sheer longevity, but mostly because the domesticated socialism of their imagery perfectly suited an intellectual audience which continued to reward them.
There is nothing domesticated about Alice Neel. From the beginning of her career in the 1920s she has stood outside—and sometimes outrageously beyond—convention and pursued her freedom with a relentless determination, in her art, in her politics, most of all in her life. No intellectual, she: Neel's life and art tell us that the vitality of freedom dwells elsewhere than in the cerebrum, and that its price is high.
This February, south Florida featured two sides of the work of Alice Neel: at the Fort Lauderdale Museum of the Arts, the recent portraits (1961-77) which have attracted much of the attention now centered on her; and at the Virginia Miller Galleries in Miami's Coconut Grove, a retrospective of works on paper (1926-77), mostly drawings, that have never been shown before and that shed new light on the variety of Neel's work.
If the Soyer brothers' portrait (on view in Fort Lauderdale) said volumes about fame and success in the art world, a small watercolor at Virginia Miller Galleries tells us still more about Neel's art. The Grandchild (1972) shows us a painter, only two years out of art school, already in full command of her technique. The paint, breathed on to the paper with a delicacy that only watercolor can offer, arrests the viewer with its subtlety of color and breadth of handling. This is the mastery of paint that still, 50 years later, works its spell, casual to the point of looseness, deceptive in its ease, but invariably compelling.
The Grandchild reveals another fundamental characteristic of Neel's work, one which bears constant repetition: this "woman artist," painting a "woman's subject," has remained throughout her life devoid of sentimentality. For the rest of her career, whenever Neel will turn to subjects relating to womanhood—the maternity ward, mothers with babies, her own children, her grandchildren—she will treat them as one more confrontation with life and with personality, an especially promising arena for her magic brush and her merciless eye.
Alice Neel, The Grandchild
1927, Watercolor, 13 3/4 x 15 1/4 inches
Alice Neel
Alice Neel Invitation
Stylistic development is another of our expectations which Neel has refused to satisfy. She herself says, "I was never concerned with style," and a search of the drawings for phases and evolutionary shifts reveals instead stylistic variety and recurring themes.
Her early socialist convictions, scarcely mellowed today one senses, provide the thread of continuity for several drawings in strikingly different styles. Where the political message is strongest, as in The Bowery (early 1950s) and the caricature of the hated Communist-chaser Judge Harold R. Medina and his witness Angela Calomeris (1949), the technique is at its most strident, unpleasant, and laborious in its avoidance of grace.
In others, the social message is subsumed in human and aesthetic concerns. In The Men From Bleeker Street (1933) and the death portrait of Mother Bloor in her casket (1951), drawings united by strongly leftist preoccupations despite almost 20 years' separation, the sense of humanity dominates, and the delicate line is correspondingly sensitive and appealing. The drawing of Mother Bloor recalls the 1946 portrait of Neel's father in his casket. The inevitable comparison with Ben Shahn's The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (1931-32) underscores the powerful non-political impact of Neel's work. Still other drawings capture their subjects with no nonsense; for an old woman sitting on a stoop (1935) Neel used blunt, quick strokes of the pencil, capturing the pose and the weight perfectly while avoiding the easy pull on the heartstrings we might expect.
Only the later drawings, such as the always powerful portraits of daughter-in-law Nancy (1966-77), bring us back to the recent paintings and unite the two exhibits. Indeed, the portraits on canvas might well be called extensions of Neel's drawings, for their initiating outlines survive in the finished products and the changes of mind are left, as in a sketch.
The claim that Alice Neel perfectly captures the character of her sitters falls wide of the mark. Her work carries a heavy expressionistic component, and expressionism does not penetrate the subject's psyche so much as use it as a jumping-off point for the artist's. These portraits, at least the non-commissioned ones, are a projection of Neel's inner vision, and more likely reflect only those aspects of the sitter's character which excited Neel and stirred her response.
If her portraits of the eccentric and aberrant stand among her most powerful works—Andy Warhol stripped to the waist, the transvestite Jackie Curtis with the cherubic young man named Rita Red (both 1970), the delicate collage of Christopher Lazar (1932, prefiguring the better known multi-phallic Joe Gould of 1933)—Neel has often enough confessed her interest in mental instability. In her work of the '60s and '70s she combines equal parts of Frans Hals and Edvard Munch, always sensing the rightness of pose and glance, a virtuoso of paint and color, but with the added elements of confrontation and anxiety that make the works part of their time. Her own words lend a bitter twist to this perception: "All this is decadence; it's also the despair of the artist because he was never connected with society."
At 78, Alice Neel, like the Soyers, is a survivor. In the decades when they, Reginald Marsh, Ben Shahn, and a host of lesser lights were making their way into the art history books, she was a phantom, stealing past unseen. Listen to her again, on having her own portrait done: "I don't like my type. That's how I always felt about life. That's why life is frightful. I don't like to pose. I would like to be invisible."
Let us not be beguiled by this apple-cheeked lady, all sweetness and shock. The complex personality that uttered that series of non-sequiturs produced these works, and they are as often negative and self-hating as curious and exhilarated. Neel was indeed invisible, and a loner. The strength of her works says much about the value of isolation, but still more about survival. She kept at it, obsessively feeding on the energy of her own work, seeking a standard that few reach even with encouragement, while living a life starkly independent of society's norms.
She is a major artist of the 20th century. We can judge for ourselves an art world that celebrated far weaker stuff while ignoring her. Against that backdrop, Alice Neel is a giant.
