Alice Neel
1900–1984 · American portrait painter
Alice Neel (1900 - 1984) was an American painter best known for her portraits, and one of the leading figures of Expressionism and Social Realism in the United States. Her work, marked by an expressive use of line and colour, focuses on friends, family, lovers, poets, artists and strangers. She is widely regarded as one of the great American portraitists of the twentieth century. She kept painting figuratively at a time when abstraction was favoured, and critics did not begin to value her work until the 1960s.
Trained at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, she married the Cuban painter Carlos Enríquez in 1925 and moved to Havana, where she came into contact with the Cuban avant-garde. After returning to the United States, the death of her daughter Santillana from diphtheria, shortly before her first birthday, left a deep mark on her painting, bringing to the fore themes of motherhood, loss and anxiety. After her separation from Enríquez, who took their daughter Isabetta to Cuba in 1930, she suffered a nervous breakdown and a suicide attempt, and was hospitalised.
In 1931 she returned to New York and painted the people of her surroundings. At the end of 1933 she was hired by the Works Progress Administration. During the 1930s she portrayed leftist activists and thinkers, and her female nudes broke with the idealised tradition of the nude: her sitters appear aware of the male gaze. Later she settled in Spanish Harlem, painted mainly the women and children of her neighbourhood, and had children with two different partners.
After years of limited recognition, her work regained attention in the late 1960s, and Neel became a feminist icon. In 1970 Time magazine commissioned her to paint activist Kate Millett for its cover; Millett refused to pose, and the painter worked from a photograph. The American Academy of Arts and Letters admitted her in 1976, and by 1984, the year of her death, her reputation had reached its peak. Her life and work are the subject of the documentary Alice Neel, directed by her grandson Andrew Neel.