Neel was born near Philadelphia in 1900 and mustered out of art school in the mid-1920s with some solid academic training in drawing under her belt. But in the first of many bad decisions concerning men she married Cuban painter Carlos Enriquez in 1925 and moved with him to Havana. They were a fairly hot commodity as an artist-couple in Havana’s then-energetic scene. In 1927 they moved to New York, and for about 25 years thereafter almost nothing went right for Neel, especially in her personal life. Her first child, a one-year-old daughter with Enriquez, died of diptheria. In 1930, Enriquez left her and took her second daughter, Isabetta, with him back to Cuba. Neel returned to her parents to recover, suffered a nervous breakdown, and was hospitalized. Upon release, she tried to kill herself and was hospitalized a second time.
In 1932, Neel moved to Greenwich village and took up with a sailor. A couple of years later he burned 300 of Neel’s watercolors and destroyed 50 of her paintings-including a portrait of Isabetta Neel had painted during a brief visit from her daughter. A subsequent five-year relationship with musician Jose Santiago produced one son, Richard, and her longest liason (1939-58) with filmmaker Sam Brody gave her another, Hartley. During all this time, Neel sold practically none of her art and had only a handful of exhibitions. Her lack of success is partly attributable to inconvenient romances, but a good deal of it derives from her resolute decision-made when abstract expressionism was all the rage-to keep on painting people.
Finally, in the ’60s, the tide turned her way: the art world tired of the “academy” of abstraction and everybody wanted images again: Roy Lichtenstein’s, Alex Katz’s, Chuck Close’s and, to a more modest degree, hers. For the 20 years before her death in 1984, Neel was cheerfully appreciated-actually closer to beloved-by practically everybody concerned with American art. And who wouldn’t love an artist with the gumption to paint herself nude at age 80?
Neel’s painting always had a slightly cartoony look. In the early Depression days, she practiced the same simplified, crude-looking social realism her cohorts on the WPA’s easel painting program did. Truth be told, she wasn’t all that good at it. But in straighforward, poignant portrayals of friends, neighbors and intimates, she found her heart. Her loose brushstroke, lively but manageable color, and uncanny ability-here’s where all that intense living paid off-to get at a sitter’s eccentricities without collapsing them into the grotesque, are what make her portraits so good. In the late ’60s she started painting art-world luminaries (a shirtless and shooting-scarred Andy Warhol, for example) and the public finally took notice.
While Neel is a perserving, no-nonsense, and utterly engaging artist she is not, however, a truly great painter. The big-head/little-body gambit grows facile (one could probably paint Hitler with a big head and make him look somewhat sympathetic). After a while Neel’s unrelenting blue-outline technique seems to hem things in more than shore them up. The phrase “Soutine lite” comes to mind. To most people, though, these complaints will come across as mere carping. In a period in art when portraiture based on direct observation (and not just fiddling around with photographs) was thought to be just about hopeless in terms of creating significant modern art, Neel gave it life and lilt. For that, we are more than grateful.
Footnote: Will Barnet (born in 1911 and still working) is about as different a portraitist from Alice Neel as can be. He’s precise, classical, almost designy and sweetly sentimental. The Montclair Art Museum is fairly different from the Whitney, too. It’s laid back and nestled among big trees in suburban New Jersey. But Barnet’s portraits of himself and his family have an austere, elegant rigor that almost matches Neel’s candidness. A trip to Montclair to see “Will Barnet: A Timeless World” (through Aug. 20 before it goes to Boca Raton, Portland and Little Rock) will nicely round out your personal portrait of portraiture.
