Alice Neel: People Come First
This art piece today is the “People Come First” exhibition by Alice Neel at The Met.
A long-time resident of New York, Alice was born in rural Pennsylvania in a small town called Merlon Square. A few years later her family moved closer to Philadelphia, during which she developed an affinity to art, drawing the flowers in her home. After taking night art classes, she enrolled in Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art and Design), graduating in 1925. During this time, she was one of the first generation of American women permitted to study nude models in art school.
Upon graduation, she married Cuban painter Carlos Enríquez and moved with him to Havana. She gave birth to their daughter, Santillana, who died of diphtheria a year later in 1927. In 1930, Enríquez would leave with their second daughter to Paris, leading Alice to suffer a nervous breakdown and attempt suicide. She was hospitalized for six months. Despite the turmoil of her personal life, Alice threw herself into art, taking a particular interest in figurative painting, which served as a defiant contrast to the waves of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and postmodernism, that viewed portraiture as outdated.
As these movements moved away from figuration, Alice developed her characteristic portrayal of the human body, painting her friends, family, neighbors in Harlem, writers, poets, artists, actors, activists, and members of New York’s diaspora. Considering herself a “collector of souls” she approached the portraits with a candid honesty, and saying: ““For me, people come first,” Neel declared in 1950. “I have tried to assert the dignity and eternal importance of the human being.”
Her refusal to conform to the artistic trends of her time were also joined to a defiance of the societal norms women, in particular mothers and artists, were held to at the time. Painting from a female gaze, Alice never let herself be restrained by convention, even after achieving great success, still capturing the “diversity, resilience, and passion” of the human being.
Sources
https://www.aliceneel.com/about-neel/
https://nmwa.org/art/artists/alice-neel/
https://www.davidzwirner.com/artists/alice-neel/biography
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/10/t-magazine/alice-neel-apartment.html
https://blenderworkspace.com/events/alice-neel-people-come-first-metropolitan-museum-of-art-exhibition/
https://deyoung.famsf.org/exhibitions/alice-neel
https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2021/alice-neel
https://www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/en/exhibitions/alice-neel-people-come-first