Alice Neel: People Come First
Historic Retrospective at the MET
There’s less than a month left to see the renowned Alice Neel: People Come First exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The extremely successful show, which is the artist’s first museum retrospective in New York in twenty years, closes on August 1st, 2021.
Alice Neel (January 28, 1900 – October 13, 1984), a champion of social justice and one of the most radical painters of the past century, was known for her beautiful and expressive portraits of people, landscapes, and still lifes. Her subjects included family, friends, strangers, artists, and more, and her style was very visibly her own. She was not influenced by her contemporaries or the avant-garde movements, although she admired European and Scanidnavian Expressionists. Her vivid and emotionally intense paintings stand out for her unique use of line and color. She is also known for depicting women through the female gaze, going against the traditional depiction and objectification of women in the art world.
Born in 1900 in Merion Square, Pennsylvania (near Philadelphia,) Neel trained at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (after having worked for three years, taking art classes at night.) She was extremely socially conscious throughout her entire career and had strong left-wing beliefs. Everything she was told that, as a woman, she wouldn’t be able to do, she achieved. In 1924 she met Cuban painter Carlos Enríquez, whom she married in 1925 and moved with to Havana. The couple welcomed a daughter, Santillana, in 1926, who sadly died of diphtheria less than a year later. This trauma deeply affected Neel and her work. In the 1930s, after moving to New York City, she became a member of the Works Progress Administration, painting urban scenes for them. The different areas in which she lived in the city have had an enormous influence on her art. The people of New York became the most important part of her practice, and her work really shows her profound appreciation and interest in all humanity. As the artist herself declared in 1950: “For me, people come first.”
The approximately one hundred paintings, drawings, and watercolors that appear in the show how the artist’s longstanding commitment to humanist principles influenced her life and art. As stated on the MET’s website: “Images of activists demonstrating against fascism and racism appear alongside paintings of impoverished victims of the Great Depression, as well as portraits of Neel’s neighbors in Spanish Harlem, leaders from a wide range of political organizations, queer artists and performers, and members of New York’s global diaspora. The exhibition also highlights Neel’s erotic watercolors and pastels from the 1930s, her depictions of mothers, and her paintings of nude figures (some of them visibly pregnant), all of whose candor and irreverence are without precedent in the history of Western art.” It is an immense privilege to admire these works in the same city that inspired most of them.
This historic exhibition is one of the biggest art events in New York City this year. Don’t miss your chance to see Alice Neel: People Come First before it closes on August 1st.
