By TammyJo Eckhart
Name a great professional painter, and the odds are you will struggle to name a woman. There are many reasons we do not know the name of women in the arts, even though both practical and decorative arts have been part of the lives of women and girls for millennia, with weaving and needlepoint often considered women’s work. In the United States, middle and upper class girls were routinely encouraged to practice painting as well, though they were rarely allowed to become professional artists. Expectations did not change much in the 20th century, so a portraitist like Alice Neel had to keep practicing until her work finally garnered attention.
Neel was born on January 28, 1900 to a middleclass family in Pennsylvania. Her father, George Washington Neel, was an accountant, while her mother, Alice Concross Hartley Neel, appears to have been a housewife.
Neel’s family, especially her mother, did not value her talent as a professional artist. Reading various accounts of Neel’s life, it is clear that her family had sexist views of what their five children could and should do. It also seems as if her mother had mental health issues that affected Neel’s entire life. Emotional struggles are not uncommon among artists of any type, so difficulties in relationships during Neel’s adult life are not surprising; the fact that she eventually got professional help that did more than drug her up and stifle her work is rare.
Even without her family’s support, Neel began as a portraitist as many painters do: with family and friends as subjects. Like most artists, Neel felt the need to create regardless of what her family wished. While helping to support her family financially after graduating from Darby High School in Colwyn, Pennsylvania, she also took night class in art for three years in Philadelphia, less than 10 miles away.
As is common for most painters, she didn’t confine herself to just one style or one subject type. The early years of art education are about learning and copying techniques and understanding the main elements of art. Impressionism was popular when Neel attended the Fine Art program at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women from 1921-25, yet she worked in the Ashcan School of Realism, which focused on scenes from daily life. Daily life and everyday people continued to be the subjects of Neel’s painting, but over time she developed her own unique technique that was a turn from realism.
Even though Neel would later claim that she went to an all-women’s college to avoid the distractions of men, she met her husband, Cuban painter Carlos Enríquez, in 1924 and married him right after earning her degree. Neel followed her husband back to Cuba and joined with the avant-garde movement that promoted experimentation not only in the arts but also in social and political ideas. Even if she struggled to make those ideals part of her everyday life, she would follow them in terms of subject matter and friendships for the rest of her life.
Neel and Enríquez had two daughters. The first, Santillana, died of diphtheria after the couple moved to New York City. Today parents routinely have children vaccinated against diphtheria, but it was a major cause of childhood death for centuries. The couple’s second daughter, Isabella, was stolen from Neel by her husband when he disappeared in 1930 with the child less than two years after her birth. The loss of both of her daughters and a string of difficult romantic and sexual relationships may explain use of nude portraits that tackled issues of pregnancy and sexuality in both symbolic and literal ways. Nevertheless, she became one of the first artists hired by the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) during the Great Depression. Still adhering to the style of her college years, she created street scenes and portraits of early critics of capitalism and consumerism Mother Bloor, Kenneth Fearing, and Pat Whalen.
Neel never officially joined organizations such as the Communist Party, but she hung out with a Bohemian crowd. In 1938, she moved to the area of NYC we now call Spanish Harlem, which was home to intellectual and social movements similar to those she experienced in Cuba in the 1920s. In the 21st century, her non-PWAP works, often nude portraits, are praised for their brutal honesty or even described as feminist, but during the 1930s and into the 1960s, they were often denigrated by critics who wanted to see idealized female bodies.
After the public works programs stopped, Neel had to turn to illustrating and private portraits to try to support herself and two sons. While never divorcing Enríque, both of them had active sexual lives, and Neel was a single mother. It took effort, but Neel used multiple income streams, even if her formal art exhibits all but disappeared for two decades.
As her friends became mothers, too, she convinced them to let her paint them in their full glory, pregnant and nude, worried and confident, as women were. Neel also painted men and women whose lives might seem to be quite different from her white middle class upbringing and artistic background. Whether they were black intellectuals like Harold Cruse or the average family where she lived, Neel painted what she saw in everyone she could get to sit for her.
With Second Wave Feminism renewing interest in women’s rights, Neel’s work started to gain attention again, but she wasn’t always accepted by feminists either. When Neel was hired in 1970 to paint Kate Millett for the cover of Time, Millett refused to sit for the portrait, so it was done based on a photograph. Neel used her new brush with fame to help promote the work of women and minority artists, too, even picketing the Whitney Museum because it refused to hire or consult black scholars and curators to help with an exhibit titled Contemporary Black Artists in 1971.
Neel’s work also started to gain professional respect in the 1970s. The American Academy and the Institute of Arts and Letters welcomed her into their ranks in 1976. In 1979, she was given the National Women’s Caucus for Art award along with Isabel Bishop, Selma Burke, Louise Nevelson, and Georgia O’Keeffe.
Eventually, Neel developed an expressionist style using distorted drawing and unique colors, drawing the subject’s personality, career, and life out through the invocation of emotion in the viewer but drawing upon the emotions of the sitter. She was interested in the humanity of others and routinely studied the people around her. As any good portraitist would, she took time to observe and talk with her subjects so that what she created was not merely a reflection of the light but of their “soul.” While art critics call her work expressionism, she never stopped seeing herself as a realist, even if that was challenging the social norms that still exist in America today.
Even though Neel died on October 13, 1984, her work lives on in many museums and galleries around the world. If you would like to check out her work online, please consult the official Alice Neel website or watch the documentary about her life, created by her grandson Andrew Neel in 2007.