Arts and Letters

It is sad that fame came to Alice Neel late. From the very beginning she was a fine painter, but was unrecognized most of her painting life. She was elected to the Academy-Institute when she was in her late seventies. The Patricia Hills monograph Alice Neel, was published in 1983, and the week in which she died, the detailed and penetrating article about her life and art, "Alice Neel and the Human Comedy," by Judith Higgins, appeared in the October 1984 issue of ARTnews. She enjoyed her membership in the Institute and her monograph, and she would have relished the ARTnews article, for she believed in fame and immortality. "I want to be famous," she would say all her life.

Now that Alice Neel is gone, the usual appraisal and re-appraisal of her accomplishments may be expected. Her paintings, drawings, and watercolors will be categorized, catalogued, and finally she will be pigeonholed in her "proper" place in American art.

But where does Alice Neel really belong? Has there been any other painter, present or past, in American art, like her? The New York Times obituary calls her a portraitist, but to which other American portrait painter can she be likened? I could suggest the names of European painters—the early Kokoschka, Schiele, even van Gogh and Soutine.

I once visited Alice. Her apartment was literally taken over by her paintings. ("Nobody wants to buy my portraits," she once complained to me. "But Alice," I remember answering her, "who would want to have your devastating portrait of him or herself?")

Looking at all these paintings, some on the wall, some on the floor, leaning against the wall, I thought of an exhibition that I saw in a New York gallery at about that time. It was the work of the aristocrats of the so-called indigenous American art—Sheeler, O'Keeffe, Preston Dickinson, Dove, Spencer, Demuth—pictures of buildings, streets, interiors, facades of factories, a neat show, precise, prophylactic—not a human being in any of those interiors and streets. How sharply in contrast to these were the paintings of Alice Neel! "A veritable inferno!" I said to myself looking at her paintings.

I thought of other American painters who did populate their canvases: Reginald Marsh, Thomas Benton, John Stuart Curry. But Alice Neel does not belong to either of these groups. She is a unique figure in American art. I use the word "inferno" above, advisedly, for the people she painted, the anonymous ones, the celebrities, the transvestites, the gays, and the prostitutes, although they sit, stand, or recline, are not static. They are convulsively alive, their limbs seem to be in motion, their mouths, eyes grimace and contort. She painted them often naked, emphasizing their constitutional inadequacies and their anatomical idiosyncrasies. She exposed their nakedness, vulnerability, mortality. Some of these figures seem to be in pain (Carmen and Baby, Randall in Extremis, the portrait of David Rosenberg dying of cancer).

Even children she painted as probingly, without sentimentality, "Two Black Girls," "Two Puerto Rican Boys," "Dominican Boys on 108th Street." Her own grandchildren, and naked children, with their hairless genitalia, helpless in their nakedness.

As for her naked female nudes and the naked pregnant women, one has to go back to the medieval depictions of Eve, to find something analogous.

About twenty years ago Alice Neel posed for me in a black sleeveless dress, with heavy white embroidery. She looked at the bare arms in the painting and quoted Shakespeare, something about "melting flesh with age." (She was still a vigorous sixty, with a lovely complexion and bright blue eyes.)

At 81 she painted herself naked, full length, her flesh "melting" and hanging loose. One more self-portrait exists—only a skull. Would it be too much to say there was something of Shakespeare in Alice Neel?