Linda Nochlin and Daisy 1970
oil on canvas
55.5" x 44" (141 cm x 111.8 cm)

Alice Neel (1900-1984). Musuem of Fine Arts, Boston.

Alice Neel was born in 1900 in a small town outside Philadelphia. In 1921, she enrolled in the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art and Design). In 1925, Neel married the Cuban painter Carlos Enriquez; the couple lived in Havana, where Neel gave birth to their first daughter, Santillana, who died of diphtheria one year later. Neel and Enriquez moved to New York in 1927, where she bore her second child, Isabetta. The next few years brought a series of hardships, including the end of her marriage, separation from her daughter, a nervous breakdown, a suicide attempt, and the destruction of her work by a jealous lover. In 1938, Neel moved uptown to Spanish Harlem, where she raised two sons--Richard, born in 1939, and Hartley, born in 1941--and where she lived and worked for the next 20 years.

Details of Neel's early years in Cuba and New York City have, until now, remained obscure. Employed by the W.P.A. during the Great Depression, Neel painted scenes of the city streets, including the impoverished and the homeless. Her paintings of the 1930s also initiated a lifelong exploration of portraiture, the form for which she is best known. Her evolution over the next five decades reflects a commitment to depict the world with compassion, acuity, and freedom.Neel's revelatory paintings from the decades between 1930 and 1960 shed new light on the body of work for which she is most famous: the portraits created in the last two decades of her life. Many of these portraits document the vibrant art world of which she suddenly found herself a celebrated member. She painted the poets, artists, performers and critics she knew, including Frank O'Hara, Robert Smithson, Faith Ringgold, Marisol, Jackie Curtis, and Meyer Schapiro, as well as her famous and haunting portrait of Andy Warhol (1970), whom she depicted shirtless, exposing the scars from the attempt made on his life. Neel's keen observation and sense of the uncanny are equally powerful
in her still lifes and interiors, such as the unexpected image of a capon defrosting in the sink (Thanksgiving, 1965).

In the 1970s, Neel became a celebrity, an enormously popular public speaker, and appeared twice on "The Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson. Her paintings continued to present a disconcerting blend of intimacy and monumentality. Referring to her portraits, she paraphrased Gogol, and called herself "a collector of souls." A few months before her death in 1984, while discussing her portraits with Henry Geldzahler in Interview, Neel responded to the description of her as a "translator" by saying, "That's what I really am, yes. A sympathetic, or sometimes not so sympathetic translator.

(From "The Art of Alice Neel", Whitney Musuem of American Art.)