Alice Neel

Alice Neel is widely recognised as one of the great American painters of the twentieth century. Her success, however, has largely been posthumous. In the past decade, interest in her work has grown exponentially, with a series of landmark exhibitions and art historical studies firmly cementing her position on the international stage.

Neel’s oeuvre is fascinating on two counts: not only was she an incredibly gifted painter, but also an astute and idiosyncratic chronicler of some of the most tumultuous decades in American history. While she also painted landscapes and still lifes, Neel is best known as a painter of people. Her sitters included artists, writers, intellectuals and family members, as well as people living on the margins of society, particularly immigrants. Deeply committed to equality and social justice, Neel was interested in the human struggle for survival, and in mankind’s capacity for resilience in the face of hardship and deprivation. With her distinctive brushwork and remarkable feel for colour, Neel succeeded in capturing the inner psychological depths of her sitters. Her commitment to truth and dedication to figuration—unfashionable during her lifetime—ensured that her work remained permanently out of kilter with avant-garde movements such as abstract expressionism, pop art and minimalism. Yet her uncompromising approach gave rise to a unique and highly individualistic body of work that continues to exert an influence on contemporary artistic production.

Alice Neel (b. 1900, Merion Square, PA, USA; d. 1984, New York, NY, USA) has recently been honoured with a major retrospective titled Alice Neel: People Come First at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2021); Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (2021); and the de Young Museum, San Francisco (2022). During her lifetime, the Whitney Museum of American Art celebrated Neel with her first retrospective in 1974 and a centennial, posthumous exhibition in 2000, which was initiated by the Philadelphia Museum of Art where it was shown in 2001. A traveling exhibition highlighting the artist’s political and social engagement was co-organised by the Munch Museum, Oslo; Centre Pompidou, Paris and Barbican Centre, London (2022-2023). Other recent solo exhibitions include Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa (2023); and a traveling exhibition co-organised by Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki; Gemeentemusum, The Hague; the Fondation Vincent Van Gogh Arles; and the Deichtorhallen Hamburg (2016-2018); and Nordiska Akvarelmuseet, Skärhamn, Sweden (2016), among many others.