Alice Neel: the ‘anarchic humanist’

Alice Neel described herself as an ‘anarchic humanist’, and her state of mind is reflected in the paintings she made. Her intimate, haunting depictions of the people around her reveal an artist who was endlessly curious about the human condition and candid about its circumstances. ‘Frankly, I’m a psychological painter. I love people under all kinds of stresses,’ she once explained.

On the face of it, Neel’s paintings can be read in two ways: as studies of raw humanity, and as reflections on the artist’s experiences of the politics of her era. She had a unique ability to see through the veneer of life. ‘I think what I was trying to do was get away from the soda-cracker quality of America,’ she said.

Born in Pennsylvania in 1900, Neel graduated from the Philadelphia School of Design for Women in 1925 and then escaped her small-town roots for a bohemian life in Cuba with her first husband, Carlos Enríquez. In 1927 she moved to Greenwich Village in New York, where she found like-minded individuals in the Communist Party and among the itinerant avant-garde.

Soon after Neel’s arrival in New York, her baby daughter died of diphtheria. It was the first of two tragedies that befell the artist: her second daughter was taken back to Cuba by her husband, causing Neel to have a nervous breakdown.

Broke and alone, Neel moved to the Upper East Side, settling in Spanish Harlem, where her apartment doubled as a makeshift studio. As the Great Depression hit, Neel captured its fallout in the faces of the unemployed labourers, street hustlers and single mothers who populated her neighbourhood. Always political, Neel was careful not to romanticise her subjects, conveying their lives with clear-eyed honesty.

By the 1950s she had become a friend of the beatniks, hanging out with Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and the photographer Robert Frank — she even appeared in their garrulous 1959 short film, Pull My Daisy, as an amenable matriarch.

This, however, was Clement Greenberg’s time. His essay on ‘“American-Type” Painting’ had sounded the klaxon for Abstract Expressionism, and Neel’s social realism was not what the Manhattan elite wanted. Steadfastly figurative, she was ignored by the art establishment and lingered in obscurity until the rise of second-wave feminism in the late 1960s, when her work began to be included in group shows. In 1974 she was given a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

What Neel’s supporters saw in her large, sparely painted portraits was an artist bucking the trend. She rarely made preparatory drawings, preferring to ‘get to it’ by outlining her sitters in energetic blue lines, and then filling in with Cezannesque colour. She played with physique, and often took liberties with perspective and anatomy to emphasise the drama of the picture.

Her best paintings, which could be startlingly graphic, are loaded with subtle emotions. Consider the double portrait David McKee and His First Wife Jane, from 1968, which is offered in the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale at Christie’s on 7 March 2024. McKee, a close friend of the artist, was director of New York’s Marlborough Gallery. He had been influential in introducing Neel to collectors and dealers, and his recollection of her was of a ‘wonderfully entertaining and amusing, kind person’ who was ‘very gifted’.

The painting depicts a well-dressed couple (Neel was good at sartorial details) sitting closely together. David’s arm is behind Jane’s back, while her hands rest gently, if slightly proprietorially, on his knee. Despite these indications of physical intimacy, the couple avoid each other’s gaze, suggesting an underlying sense of unease.

In an interview in 1978, Neel said she would encourage her sitters to 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’. That is evident in her 1970 portrait of Andy Warhol. The Pop artist was rarely seen in public without his dark glasses and fright wig, but under Neel’s scrutiny he is semi-naked and vulnerable, sitting quietly on the sofa with his eyes closed, a thin, pale figure bearing the scars of a recent assassination attempt.

Neel remained a student of the human condition right up until her death in 1984, continuing to depict people in her inimitable style. When asked in 1978 why she painted, she replied, ‘If I didn’t paint all the time, I probably wouldn’t live. It’s what keeps me alive.’

Led by the 20th/21st Century: London and The Art of the Surreal evening sales on 7 March 2024, Christie’s 20th and 21st Century Art auctions take place in London from 27 February to 21 March. Find out more about the preview exhibition and sales here