Alice Neel was a painter of fearless and tender portraits. Although apparently direct and uncomplicated, her paintings of people alone, of couples and families and mothers and children, not only unpick the dynamics between her sitters but also their complicity with the artist. In her long career, she painted everyone from black radicals, academics and intellectuals to Latin American families and kids in Spanish Harlem. She left most of her painting of a black conscript unfinished when he went off to Vietnam, in the hope of his return (he did come back, but never sat for her again). She painted New York’s bohemia, art critics and lovers. She painted demonstrations and street life, police violence against strikers, a young man stricken with tuberculosis, celebrations and poverty.
