The great Alice Neel: 'I wanted to paint as a woman, but not as the oppressive, power-mad world thought a woman should paint'

In 1971, the art critic Linda Nochlin transformed the art history debate by asking: “Why have there been no great women artists?”, a question with profound implications for rethinking the gendered operations of criticism, curation, history and the art market, which conspired to define “greatness”. The notion remains a problem.

In London, a portrait of Nochlin and her daughter Daisy hangs in the Barbican Art Gallery exhibition Alice Neel: Hot Off the Griddle. In the last decade or so, the status of Neel has risen from relative obscurity as an outlier in modern art to the extent that a critical consensus of greatness frames her career, almost 40 years after her death.

The common theme of celebrations of Neel’s greatness is her empathetic but unyielding scrutiny of family, friends and neighbours within a radically diverse community. From the late 1920s until her death in 1984, Neel’s attention to the sentient, sensuous human subject – irrespective but mindful of race, gender, status and sexuality – was rare and undervalued, yet now seems prophetic.