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Alice Neel (1900-1984) started out with three strikes against
her: she was a woman, she was a woman artist, she was a woman artist who ignored
American abstraction and painted portraits of real people, people she knew.
That she painted portraits not of the rich and famous merely compounded her
difficulties. Painting in her home without gallery or museum recognition,
her career reflected the larger cultural pattern of ignoring female talent
that then pervaded the country. Until the 1970s she had neither recognition
nor sales.
The recent traveling Retrospective Exhibition - Previously
at the Addison Gallery of American Art, Massachusetts, and the Whitney Museum
of American Art, New York, opening this month at the Philadelphia Museum of
Art, then moving on the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and Denver Museum
of Art - has stimulated renewed interest in her career. As a result, the paintings
now sell for upwards of $200,000, the drawings between $16,000-25,000. The
prints have not yet escalated in price.
Coping with poverty, two difficult marriages, raising her children,
the vicissitudes of family life (her first husband in a fit of rage destroyed
300 of her pictures), she embraced leftist ideology bravely incorporating
it into some of her work. None of this, however, is apparent in the portraits
of the 1970s and 1980s of her family and friends. By the 1970s, her turbulent
life had attained a balance, much like Picasso's in the 1950s (as can be seen
in his paintings of his children and domestic life after Dora Marr). The anger
and search for causes of her earlier work yielded to a new calm, a sense of
humor and love.
A basic assumption of the work is that the quotidian reality
of an American life in the 20th century is centered on the family. As such
it is also autobiography. Neel's portrait gallery is her world. Only a small
portion of her sitters belonged to the art elite, but it didn't matter. 
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