Alice Neel
Neel’s painting of six-year-old Sabrina is alive with restless tension. The child – poised at the edge of her seat as if to stand, fingers fiddling, lips shaping a question – seems about to move. Even the skirt of the chair appears almost to shift in a passing draught. Painted in Neel’s home, Sabrina is a study of childlike vulnerability. To the artist, the work is not so much a portrait, a term she disliked for its formality, but rather one of her “pictures of people” – revealing, particular, curious for its idiosyncrasies. The neighbourhood girl, seen sitting on the mustard yellow chair in which several of the artist’s subjects appear, is not so much drawn in paint than drawn out by paint. The picture is less a likeness of Sabrina than the feeling of Sabrina: hesitant, uncertain, watchful. Such is Neel’s brush, which transcribes more than appearance, capturing momentary expressions and fleeting gestures.
b.1900, Merion Square; d.1984, New York
Alice Neel found fame late in life. It was only in the late 1960s, buoyed by the counterculture of the time, that she began making a living as an artist. Her figurative paintings – insensible to modernist fashions – had until then been dismissed as naïve and sentimental. Yet it was this commitment to figuration that established Neel as a foremost American painter. She became an incidental chronicler of New York, the city where she lived and painted for six decades. “What a treasure of goodness / And life shambles,” she wrote in a poem to Spanish Harlem, “Your poverty and your loves.” All these things, this goodness and its shambles, found expression on Neel’s canvas. While she painted landscapes and still lives, it is her portraits for which she is remembered, with their stark intimacy and feeling, picturing the wretched and well-off, the famous and forgotten, friends and strangers. Over the many years, her work became a history of the city’s cultural ascendancy, with all its eccentricities and curiosities, its vulnerabilities and vanities. This was New York before Aids, before 9/11, before the subways were safe – a city of beatniks and broken glass.