Detail of Rita and Hubert, 1954 by Alice Neel
(Picture: The Estate of Alice Neel)Among the many arresting, unforgettable moments in this marvellous survey are two portraits of artists in states of undress. In one, the first painting we see, Alice Neel paints herself, aged 80, naked, sitting on a striped chair that we see time and again in her late period (she made it in 1980, and would die four years later). She holds a paintbrush in one hand, a rag in another, but omits the canvas itself, perhaps to expose the rawness of her being more, to force us to look harder. Once we meet her gaze, we realise she’s in conversational mood: she’s arching an eyebrow. “Well, what do you make of this?” she seems to ask.
Then there’s a portrait of Andy Warhol, from a decade earlier. This is not the celebrity Andy, the glitzy Pop king feted by all of New York. It is wounded Andy, huge scars across his torso, a corset above his waist, a man barely held together after the shooting that nearly killed him a few years earlier.
