Alice Neel

was born in 1900, to Alice Concross Hartley, a descendant of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and George Washington Neel, an accountant in the per diem department of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Her father’s family is variously described as owners of a steamship company and as a family of opera singers. Neel was the fourth of five children.


In 1918, she graduated from Darby High School, afterwards taking a business course including typing and stenography. Upon completing the course, she took the civil service exam. She held a secretarial job with the Army Air Corps, working for Lieutenant Theodore Sizer, who later became an art historian at Yale University. She took evening art classes at the School of Industrial Art and later turned down a secritarial job at Swarthmore College.


Shortly after finishing her studies Neel married a Cuban painter named Carlos Enríquez, the son of wealthy parents. They were wed in 1925 and moved to Havana the following year to live with Enríquez’s family. In 1926 she became pregnant with her first child. Following the birth of her daughter, Santillana, Alice returned to her parents’ home in Colwyn. Carlos followed soon after, and the family moved to New York City. Just before Santillana’s first birthday, she died of diphtheria. The trauma caused by Santillana’s death infused the content of Neel’s paintings, setting a precedent for the themes of motherhood, loss, and anxiety that permeated her work for the duration of her career.

Immediately following Santillana’s death, Neel became pregnant with her second child, Isabetta. Isabetta’s birth in 1928 inspired the creation of "Well Baby Clinic", a bleak portrait of mothers and babies in a maternity clinic more reminiscent of an insane asylum than a nursery and, in the spring of 1930, Carlos returned to Cuba, taking Isabetta with him.

Mourning the loss of her husband and daughter, Neel suffered a massive nervous breakdown. After a brief period of hospitalization, she attempted suicide. She was placed in the suicide ward of the Philadelphia General Hospital. Deemed stable almost a year later, Neel was released from the sanitorium in 1931 and returned to her parents’ home. Following an extended visit with her close friend and frequent subject, Nadya Olyanova, Neel returned to New York.

Toward the end of the 1960s, interest in Neel’s work intensified. The momentum of the Women’s Movement led to increased attention, and Neel became an icon for Feminists. In 1970 Neel was commissioned to paint Feminist activist Kate Millett for the cover of Time magazine. In 1974, Neel's work was given a retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and posthumously, in the summer of 2000, also at the Whitney.

By the mid-1970s, Neel had gained celebrity and stature as an important American artist. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter presented her with a National Women’s Caucus for Art award for outstanding achievement. Neel’s reputation was at its height at the time of her death in 1984. Neel's life and works are featured in the documentary "Alice Neel," which premiered at the 2007 Slamdance Film Festival and was directed by her grandson, Andrew Neel. The film was given a New York theatrical release in April of that year.

Alice Neel was also the subject of the retrospective "Alice Neel: Painted Truths" organized by The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, and on view March 21-June 15, 2010.


Opinion


Alice Neel's works always remind me of a paint by numbers book even though they are obviously more. She quotes:

I do not pose my sitters. I do not deliberate and then concoct... Before painting, when I talk to the person, they unconsciously assume their most characteristic pose, which in a way involves all their character and social standing – what the world has done to them and their retaliation.

This is an interesting concept. It hints that she is painting a person Esse Quam Vidiri (a latin phrase meaning: to be rather than to seem) hinting they feel, act, and see life as a result of everyting that has happened to them. Neel's attitude is very mental as these ideals stem from the basics of psycology. One is a result of there culture, their mind, and their lives experiences, either good or bad.