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.
Unlike the self-portrait, there’s no wit here. Warhol’s face is beautifully described in pink, peach and green, with trademark Neel blue lines defining its contours. And it’s almost beatific. When Neel was dying in 1984, she asked the great photographer Robert Mapplethorpe to photograph her as if she was taking her final breath. This rings true for Neel’s vision of Warhol: it’s like a death mask. I’ve seen both paintings before, but still they shock and move me as much as ever.
This is the second major London exhibition of Neel’s work, after the Whitechapel’s 13 years ago. That was her first major show in Europe. This one has come from the Pompidou in Paris; Neel’s star has only risen in those intervening years. She achieved some fame in her lifetime in the US – a big show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; endearing appearances on Johnny Carson’s chat show. But that was hard won.
She began in earnest as a painter in Cuba alongside her husband Carlos Enríquez, creating intense, fluid portraits of him and people she encountered in Havana. Soon their relationship ended in tragedy: a daughter died of diphtheria and Enríquez took another to live with his family in Havana. After a period of mental illness, Neel recovered and spent time in bohemian Greenwich Village, depicting the Village eccentric Joe Gould (a painting with some five penises) and making tender watercolours of herself with her lover John Rothschild – one with her peeing in the loo, him in the sink.
She also captured the fervent atmosphere of New York in the 1930s and 1940s, with its labour disputes and protests against racial injustice and fascism, and made intense portraits of everyday people around her in Spanish Harlem, as well as the artistic and communist community – she was investigated by the FBI for her own communist leanings, though described herself as an anarchic humanist.
Anarchic humanist figuration was out of step with the art world, though, especially in the post-war years, when Abstract Expressionism dominated. Add to that a misogynist establishment and it’s perhaps not surprising that it wasn’t until the 1960s that Neel achieved due recognition. There’s a wonderful moment in the show where you head into the airier, larger downstairs galleries from the more compressed upstairs rooms, and you feel a surge of new confidence.
Late Neel is relentlessly impressive: expanses of canvas left bare and chunks of the figures barely drawn in while others are immaculately detailed. In every painting, there’s an anchor that pulls you in, though, whether in the pose, details of dress, or Neel’s endlessly fascinating treatment of hands. Always, you feel a communion between artist and sitter, as Neel seeks to paint “what the world has done to them and their retaliation”.
Apparently, the process could be painful for Neel. She was “utterly myself”, she said, when she painted and sought to tell her truth with the brush, even seeing it as a form of therapy. It’s almost as if in every painting, she is laid as bare as she is in the self-portrait.
But she was years ahead of her time. There’s nothing remote about these paintings, decades after they were made: her struggles and her subjects remain current. Unlike so many of her contemporaries and even followers, the community we see in her work is enormously diverse in race, class and sexuality. They still speak to us. No wonder contemporary painters can’t get enough of her. That humanism, anarchic or otherwise, is enthrallingly abundant.
