Alice Neel: Hot Off the Griddle

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It has been widely reported that Georgie’s incarceration was a result of the chaos, violence and underfunded system he grew up with. The exhibition features 70 such works of Neel’s friends, her sons, their ex-girlfriends, loners, drop-outs, draftees, revolutionaries, expectant mothers, poets, museum curators, and strangers off the street. The exhibition shows a reportage style film of the area which crackles with life and personality and brings an extra dimension to the portraits of street children and neighbours that are displayed alongside. When Hunter did not come back to her studio for a second sitting, Neel declared the work complete: a testament to the possibilities of youth, of what was started with attention and purpose but could not be finished. Speaking on her pregnant nudes, Neel said, “It isn’t what appeals to me, it’s just a fact of life… I feel as a subject it’s perfectly legitimate, and people out of a false modesty, or being sissies, never show it… Something that primitives did, but modern painters have shied away from because women were always done as sexual objects.

This isn’t art about Neel or her ego, it’s art about people, about how they’re good and kind and flawed and how they’re all quite beautiful, even the ugly ones. In 1943 when the payments ended, she immediately went on welfare until the 1950s, bringing up her children on a tight budget. It was important therefore to represent human beings in painting and create especially a space for those who otherwise went unseen.She was even commissioned to create a portrait of women’s rights activist Kate Millett for Time magazine. Elsewhere, the Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks and his open-shirted lover Brian Buczak are pictured like tired-eyed hipsters wearing their clothes from the night before. Neel painted right up to her death and was known to phone friends to exclaim: ‘Guess what, I’m still alive! Neel met Carlos Enríquez, a wealthy Cuban painter, and married him less than a year later, moving to Havana. In 1974, her work was celebrated with a major exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York; she was 74 years old.

For me, people come first,” journalist Mike Gold quotes Neel saying in 1950 in The Daily Workers , a newspaper published by the Communist Party USA. It feels like we see a boy who’s yearning to be a young man but who still cowers under his own childhood as well,” Eleanor Nairne, curator of the Barbican show, said. In Pregnant Julie and Algis, pictured above, there is a tension in the angle of her head to match the disquiet in her eyes. It never betrays Neel by sidestepping the graceless, sorry or awkward in her art, just as she never ignored it in life.The great depression leads to some overtly political street-scene works, but they’re pretty awful: badly executed and ugly. The exhibition charts Neel’s painting during the Great Depression, when she became one of the first artists to enrol on the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

You’ll see these alongside portraits of famous faces including Joe Gould, Sam Brody and Frank O’Hara, and intimate depictions of friends, lovers and neighbours. Born in 1900, Alice Neel painted figuratively in New York during a period in which it was deeply unfashionable to do so. This is the largest exhibition to date in the UK of American artist Alice Neel (1900–1984) whose vivid portraits capture the shifting social and political context of the American twentieth century. Neel had never had much of a profile; the turn towards abstract expressionism hadn’t been kind to her distinctly representational mode of portraiture. Drawing on international public and private collections, Alice Neel: Hot Off The Griddle brings together works spanning her 60-year career.The only reason it was sensitive is that something is embarrassing about being on welfare,” he said. We abide by the Editors’ Code of Practice and are committed to upholding the highest standards of journalism.