Alice Neel: Modern Life
In the Hague, Netherlands, through February 12
Alice Neel is arguably the greatest portrait painter of the 20th century. Her work went mostly unheralded until the 1970s, when she was elderly but still working, and women artists were finally beginning to get their due; she died in 1984. During the aesthetic upheavals of the modernist movement, Neel, mostly on her own as a single mother in Spanish Harlem in New York, insistently kept at her unfashionable, Expressionist style of figure painting, doing portraits of her friends and lovers. Her work is haunting in its honesty, tinged with sorrow and brimming with sensuous color.
This exhibition, “Alice Neel: Painter of Modern Life,” is at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, Netherlands, through February 12. It is only the second major presentation of Neel’s work in Europe, and features approximately 70 paintings loaned from museums across the globe. It will eventually travel to Fondation Vincent van Gogh in Arles, France, and the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, Germany. Here, in PROVOKR, is an intoxicating taste of Neel’s genius.
