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ROOMS ARE NOT THAT IMPORTANT in Alice Neel; His focus was people. Confirming the clear-eyed compassion she feels for people from all walks of life, Neel’s work reveals the deep interiority of her subjects, with vivid, almost cartoon-like depictions of wide-angle eyes, sunken chins, and speckled skin in green or its shades. spotted with blue-violet veins and exaggerated, spider-like fingers. Settings in works of art are often just suggestions: the shade of a blue wall, the outline of a sofa – the room recedes while the figure remains.
It can be confusing, then, to recognize some of these settings in the artist’s last residence in New York City—the 1,000-square-foot Upper West Side apartment he moved to in 1962 and has remained largely unchanged since his death in 1984. 84 years old. In the absence of one person, material details emerge sharply: The artist’s blue paint-speckled apron hangs from his easel in the front room. His palette, globs of pigment now dried into almost colorless crusts, rests on an old page recently torn from The New York Times. Familiar furniture — for example, olive green sofa from “Linda Nochlin and Daisy” (1973) and the ocher velvet chair “Margaret Evans Pregnant” (1978) — arranged in a circle. A His photograph by Robert MapplethorpeIt hangs by the front door, thought to have been taken a few days before he died. The apartment is part museum, part time capsule, part home, part parish.
In each of Neel’s New York residences—from Greenwich Village to Spanish Harlem and the Upper West Side—the artist painted his subjects at home, whether they were celebrities. Andy Warholor kids from the neighborhood, “Two Girls, Spanish Harlem” (1959). Therefore, his home has always been his workspace – a necessary collaborator.
Neel’s youngest son, Hartley, 80, and wife Ginny, 77, now occasionally live in the Upper West Side apartment. (Neel had four children: Isabetta and Santillana, Cuban painter Carlos Enríquez Gómez, Neel’s only husband; Richard, Puerto Rican musician José Santiago Negrón, and Hartley with photographer and filmmaker Sam Brody.) While Hartley and Ginny were in Manhattan. they stay there (they live in Vermont) and open the apartment for invited guests. He plans to officially show it to the public. The front room, living room, kitchen, and Hartley’s old bedroom are just as Neel left them. “I remember walking in the door and saying, ‘Take off your jacket. I want to paint you like this'” says Ginny. “This apartment was living with Alice.”
Neel’s inimitable portraits—he didn’t like to use that term for his paintings, instead calling them “paintings of people”—are notable both for their choice of subject (Black and Puerto Rican children, expectant mothers, and gay couples, in other words, not people). , which adorned the gallery walls at the time), and also for its psychological depth. Inside 2007 documentary About Neel’s life filmmaker Andrew Neel, the artist’s grandson and writer Hartley and Ginny’s son Phillip Bonosky about his work, he said: “Time does not indicate that. You react instantly as if they were alive – as if they were now.” The desire to capture a person exactly as he saw them was what drives Neel. it feels like a home.”
The idea of protecting artists’ homes and studios isn’t new: Paint splatters on the floorboards of Jackson Pollock’s house. East Hampton, NY, studio; Frida Kahlo’s clothes on display La Casa Azul in the city of Mexico; a wall-sized bulletin board Louise Bourgeois’ Chelsea mansion covered with his drawings and photographs; Claude Monet’s water garden It attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors each year in Giverny, France; and Francis Bacon’s London studio it required an excavation by archaeologists to preserve the thousands of pieces left to the moulder. While these spaces enable us to understand the special genius of an artist, they remind us that even they have to deal with the mundaneness of life. Wandering around Neel’s house seeing fresh cakes and coffee at the same table that appears in Neel’s painting.Geoffrey Hendricks and Brian” (1978), it is observed that for Neel, making art and daily life are always intertwined.
Neel grew up in Colwyn, Pa., just outside of Philadelphia. He showed an affinity for painting at an early age by drawing flowers around his family home. In the early 1920s, as a student at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, she took a life drawing class; She was among the first American women to be allowed to study nude models in art school. Artist Robert Henri, who taught there before Neel arrived, was a lasting influence; Henri was an advocate of the Ashcan School, an early 20th-century movement that rejected the vague gestures of Impressionism in favor of simpler realism. Through Neel’s eyes, this realism would become a realism in which New Yorkers see themselves and their city reflected.
For most of Neel’s sixty-year career, his interest in figurative painting was considered anachronistic and antiquated, unable to keep up with the artistic preoccupations of the 20th century: Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, postmodernism—everything but portraiture. Therefore, he earned little money from his painting and raised his children with government assistance; the family would hide their phones and televisions during benefits inspections (this was a time when caseworkers stopped by occasionally to see if any property disqualified a family from receiving benefits checks). He was also no stranger to grief; His first child, Santillana, died of diphtheria before he was 1 year old. (Today, only two of Neel’s children survive: along with Hartley, Richard is also getting rid of their mother and lives in New York.) His second child, Isabetta. He was taken back to Cuba by his father when he was 1½ years old. Neel believed they would only be apart for a month, but mother and daughter did not see each other again until Isabetta was 5 years old (they would later become estranged).
Neel’s opposition to the dominant artistic styles of her time is reflected in her resistance to societal norms towards women. In 1975, a year after Whitney presented her first major retrospective of Neel, critic Laura Mulvey coined the term “male gaze” to coin the term “male gaze”.Visual Pleasure and Narrative CinemaThis lends language to what Neel’s paintings have subverted for decades, revealing at least one reason why his work has been routinely rejected. Throughout her life, other artists despised her: Men were embarrassed to be included in group performances that featured her work. (Artist Alex Katz once referred to her as an “angry housewife.”) In the mid-20th century, middle-class white women were expected to either depend on their husbands for financial security or find a “proper” job, such as a job. teacher or nurse. Neither did Neel.
When she moved to Harlem in 1938, it was another rejection of the status quo, seen by some as career suicide. Greenwich Village, where Neel had previously resided, would continue to be the center of the “men’s club for Abstract Expressionist stuff,” as Hartley puts it. where an artist was must be, or said conventional wisdom. But Neel, already feeling like an outsider, didn’t like conventions of any kind. “I hate today’s relevance,” the artist wrote in Alfred Leslie’s anthology.hasty papersIn 1960, “everything was put in the box.” When she moved out of town, she encountered greater diversity, an incongruity that has driven her work for decades, trendy or not.
In March, the Metropolitan Museum of Art showcased Neel’s art and radical humanity.Alice Neel: People Come First” is one of the largest retrospectives of his work to date, comprising over a hundred paintings and drawings. This month, David Zwirner will present the gallery representing Neel’s estate. a collection of the artist’s early worksIncluding streetscapes and portraits in the West 20th Street area in New York City. The continued and growing interest in Neel’s paintings can be seen as inevitable – his focus on those living on the fringes of society speaks directly to our cultural moment – but the advocacy of his family and fellow supporters has played a vital role in bringing new audiences to his work. . The fact that Hartley’s mother defended her work on her own has been important to her enduring relevance (her persistence enabled Whitney’s plans for a Neel retrospective to come true in 1974, 10 years before she died), and protecting her home gave the artist the opportunity for much of her life to be rejected. sense of permanence within the canon.
THAT NEEL SUCCESSFUL from inside her apartment resonates particularly well today, after a year when most Americans were confined to their homes. Seeing paintbrushes in an empty Maxwell House coffee can, lesser-known sculptural pieces set on the mantelpiece, piano in a corner – all this is testament to years of creative energy without much attention or approval. However, keeping Neel’s home as it is is more for future generations. “Leaving your mother is so hard,” Hartley says. This, perhaps more than anything else, is why Neel’s paints keep drying on the table. Hartley says she always wanted to protect the apartment, but Ginny remembers it differently: “You somehow don’t get through the closet,” she says. “You keep putting it off and then ‘Why change it?’ is happening. We really couldn’t give up on him.”
In 1970, after Ginny and Hartley’s wedding, Neel installed his easel in his son’s old bedroom to paint an empty chair sitting by the north-facing window. the name of the picture”Loneliness”and accepted it as a self-portrait. Neel’s legacy is his ability to capture the presence of his caretakers; this is a quality that still lives on in his vast work. But the apartment, like other artists’ spaces, is the record of absence, the remnant of a life preserved after it has been lived. Neel also understood this absence as an essential part of our humanity – the feeling of loss after everyone leaves the room; Nothing remained but a chair leaning against the window, solitude and the desire to hold on to the lost.
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