'Court painter of the underground': Alice Neel at Barbican
We take a look Hot Off The Griddle, the largest UK exhibition to date of the long-overlooked artist...
February 21, 2023
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It would be all too easy to mistake Alice Neel for a living artist. With figuration back in fashion, the ‘court painter of the underground’ comes to the Barbican as a speech bubble in contemporary discourse - a portraitist conscious of representation, identity, and how we look at each other.
Neel’s ‘anarchic humanism’ certainly drew her to depict individuals ‘regardless of race, class or gender’. But she always engaged with them as individuals, each meaning something to her personally, rather than a purposefully-diverse group of gay men and Black intellectuals.
This is the hurdle for Hot off the Griddle – to present the career of a great artist, whilst retaining the intimacy of her practice. So, curator Eleanor Nairne stays close to the artist, in a chronological show that’s as close as it comes to a visual biography.
We see and hear Neel in her own words, in quotes copied directly from out of her diary, articles, and documentary films. Her library is laid out as coffee-table literature, in a room which honours her life painting at home. Even the exhibition book is printed small enough to be read in bed. It’s beautiful to behold. But paying such close attention to Neel’s purpose as an artist misses the warmth and humour of her person – without which, we cannot feel nor understand her works.
Born in January 1900, Neel is read as a kind of social historian, her vivid portraits as visual sources of 20th century America. A precocious child of small-town Philadelphia, she ‘couldn’t stand Anglo-Saxons,’ nor ‘their soda-cracker lives and inhibitions,’ so followed life (and lovers) to Cuba, then New York City.
There too her progressive attitudes rankled; her demonic ‘Joe Gould’ shocked its public so much, they shut their eyes to it for forty years, until it was finally exhibited in the 1970s. It still bears the burns inflicted by her lover Kevin Doolittle, who fired 300 of her works on paper, and slashed 60 of her paintings, in a jealous fit of rage.
Subtle interventions give context, often from marginalised perspectives, and foreshadow developments in the artist’s life and career. This light touch favours those in the know; downstairs, Linda Nochlin and Mary Garrard sit comfortably together, but without mention of their work as leading feminist art historians. More visual cues, like the ‘Save Willie McGee’ protest paintings partnered with archive photographs, work better still.
In these many little rooms, we indulge in Neel’s early experiments. Her Cuban portraits are surprisingly soft, Greenwich Village gets a lick of Leonora Carrington-style surrealism, and street protests attended in the run up to World War II bear the heavy lines of revolutionary Mexican muralists.
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These portraits of local communities – both people and places – reveal Neel’s active participation, and how she articulated marginalisation as felt, again, by individuals. Gaining and losing love and family, Neel sometimes found herself a single mother with no secure income, and often struggled with her mental health. Griddle hints at how hard her life must have been at times but, like the pragmatist herself, never dwells on it.
In the late 1930s, Neel moved to East Harlem with her then husband, José Negrón. They could afford an eleven-windowed apartment, light enough to serve as a home studio. (We recall the opening line of Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs: ‘If you want to know how poor somebody was growing up, ask them how many windows they had.’).
During the Great Depression, Neel received $26.88 a week from the WPA, producing one 23x30 inch painting every six weeks. It was the first time the government recognised painting as a wage-earning labour, shaping her idea of her practice as a profession.
‘I got up at 7am in the morning to finish that,’ she remarks of her 1965 portrait of Archbishop Jean Jadot, in Nancy Baer’s 1978 documentary. ‘I feel like a factory worker.’ (It’s a panoply of pull quotes. She lightly grills the chair of General Motors, who makes ‘$5 million a year, but won’t even buy his own picture’.)
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Griddle goes hard on Neel’s ‘radical’ left-wing leanings. And certainly, she painted portraits at a time when figuration was not just unfashionable, but political. Whilst post-war America pushed towards abstraction – a Cold War construct in opposition to Russian realism – she embraced the body more than ever before. ‘A pioneer of socialist realism in American painting,’ in the words of one depicted, Mike Gold.
‘Human beings have been steadily marked down in value, despised, rejected and degraded,’ she wrote in the Daily Worker. Whilst Joseph McCarthy went out hunting witches, she hung a portrait of Vladimir Lenin hung in her kitchen and was soon the first living artist to have a retrospective in the Soviet Union.
Neel’s politics, like her art, was driven by a belief in people, her ‘love of humanity’. Her gaze has none of the voyeurism nor nihilism of her contemporaries. Where Oskar Kokoschka langoured in the ‘illness of society,’ her practice was more constructive, exposing inequality in order to correct it. She only lamented the ‘little wretches’ we’d become in the hope of the ‘magnificent creatures’ we might be.
‘I paint my time using people as evidence,’ she claimed, but her portraits of others aren’t projections of herself. Nor was her self-perception as a ‘collector of souls’ really accurate. There was nothing acquisitional nor transactional about her relationships, though they defined her practice.
Hot Off The Griddle says surprisingly little about how sexual relationships attracted Neel to figuration. (Helen Molesworth puts her pull towards the male body in plainer terms: ‘She paints like someone who likes to fuck.’) Nor do we see much of Neel as a mother herself; Richard and Hartley, her two surviving children and family, were central to her recent well-condensed show at Victoria Miro.
Great rooms downstairs are populated by the works of a mature, confident and ambitious artist. Power hierarchies are still inverted - Abdul Rahman, a local taxi driver, comes before Andy Warhol - but we also see more modern works, with strikingly modern non-finitos. A woman sits pregnant with expectation; her round stomach directly contrasts with her flat reflection.
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Its chronology is disrupted only once, and at first, in a room singularly dedicated to one of her final works. Her first self-portrait was painted over five years and finished at the age of 80. Naked, individual, it embodies Neel’s lifelong commitment to tell it ‘as it is’. Giving the older woman a room of her own, when she never had her own professional studio, feels incredibly powerful.
Starting here reminds us of how late her recognition came. Neel was 62 years old when the first article about her was published, Nairne nudges those attending the press view. With few solo exhibitions before the 1970s, she would enjoy 60 before her death in 1984 (her European debut didn’t follow for another twenty years). In the lectures and speeches given in her late years, Neel would often have to be persuaded down from the stage. Only when we hear her directly, that we can comprehend her vitality.
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Last year, Griddle’s ‘cousin’ exhibition, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, was also structured in two sections, based around class and gender struggles. And though Griddle would have us believe gender, race, and civil rights activists were all racing to keep up with Neel, it never rushes into anachronism.
Whilst acknowledging the binary representations of women, Neel bickered with the same feminists who prized her to public acclaim. (The Barbican neither claims her as one, nor reduces itself to the performative feminism of the Carolee Schneemann exhibition shop).
By portraying the specific, she captured the plurality of people’s experiences – including womanhood. Her legacy is to show us how people can be both or many things – and contradictorily so. An American and a communist. A believer of individuals, and a pillar of the local community. An advocate of women’s rights, and a hopeless romantic. A radical and a conservative: ‘I’m not against abstraction. Do you know what I’m against? Saying that Man himself has no importance.’
Hot Off The Griddle bears the marks of a labour of love, and it is clear to see how difficult curating Neel’s largest UK exhibition must have been. Neel’s portraits are singularly stupendous, but hung together, on such a large scale, the individual is alienated (to borrow the lingo of a card-carrying communist). By clustering works together, banishing all individual captions to the guidebook – an essential companion - Griddle risks isolating her sitters and standers, movers and shakers, within an imagined community.
So how can we display a self-proclaimed ‘collector of souls’, when she never really saw souls as things to be collected? Or curate a gallery of rogues, rather than a ‘rogues’ gallery’?
If the art world is ready to cluster round single Vermeers at the Rijksmuseum, then it should certainly do the same for Alice Neel.
Alice Neel: Hot Off The Griddle is on show at the Barbican until 21 May 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
It would be all too easy to mistake Alice Neel for a living artist. With figuration back in fashion, the ‘court painter of the underground’ comes to the Barbican as a speech bubble in contemporary discourse - a portraitist conscious of representation, identity, and how we look at each other.
Neel’s ‘anarchic humanism’ certainly drew her to depict individuals ‘regardless of race, class or gender’. But she always engaged with them as individuals, each meaning something to her personally, rather than a purposefully-diverse group of gay men and Black intellectuals.
This is the hurdle for Hot off the Griddle – to present the career of a great artist, whilst retaining the intimacy of her practice. So, curator Eleanor Nairne stays close to the artist, in a chronological show that’s as close as it comes to a visual biography.
We see and hear Neel in her own words, in quotes copied directly from out of her diary, articles, and documentary films. Her library is laid out as coffee-table literature, in a room which honours her life painting at home. Even the exhibition book is printed small enough to be read in bed. It’s beautiful to behold. But paying such close attention to Neel’s purpose as an artist misses the warmth and humour of her person – without which, we cannot feel nor understand her works.
Born in January 1900, Neel is read as a kind of social historian, her vivid portraits as visual sources of 20th century America. A precocious child of small-town Philadelphia, she ‘couldn’t stand Anglo-Saxons,’ nor ‘their soda-cracker lives and inhibitions,’ so followed life (and lovers) to Cuba, then New York City.
There too her progressive attitudes rankled; her demonic ‘Joe Gould’ shocked its public so much, they shut their eyes to it for forty years, until it was finally exhibited in the 1970s. It still bears the burns inflicted by her lover Kevin Doolittle, who fired 300 of her works on paper, and slashed 60 of her paintings, in a jealous fit of rage.
Subtle interventions give context, often from marginalised perspectives, and foreshadow developments in the artist’s life and career. This light touch favours those in the know; downstairs, Linda Nochlin and Mary Garrard sit comfortably together, but without mention of their work as leading feminist art historians. More visual cues, like the ‘Save Willie McGee’ protest paintings partnered with archive photographs, work better still.
In these many little rooms, we indulge in Neel’s early experiments. Her Cuban portraits are surprisingly soft, Greenwich Village gets a lick of Leonora Carrington-style surrealism, and street protests attended in the run up to World War II bear the heavy lines of revolutionary Mexican muralists.
These portraits of local communities – both people and places – reveal Neel’s active participation, and how she articulated marginalisation as felt, again, by individuals. Gaining and losing love and family, Neel sometimes found herself a single mother with no secure income, and often struggled with her mental health. Griddle hints at how hard her life must have been at times but, like the pragmatist herself, never dwells on it.
In the late 1930s, Neel moved to East Harlem with her then husband, José Negrón. They could afford an eleven-windowed apartment, light enough to serve as a home studio. (We recall the opening line of Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs: ‘If you want to know how poor somebody was growing up, ask them how many windows they had.’).
During the Great Depression, Neel received $26.88 a week from the WPA, producing one 23x30 inch painting every six weeks. It was the first time the government recognised painting as a wage-earning labour, shaping her idea of her practice as a profession.
‘I got up at 7am in the morning to finish that,’ she remarks of her 1965 portrait of Archbishop Jean Jadot, in Nancy Baer’s 1978 documentary. ‘I feel like a factory worker.’ (It’s a panoply of pull quotes. She lightly grills the chair of General Motors, who makes ‘$5 million a year, but won’t even buy his own picture’.)
Griddle goes hard on Neel’s ‘radical’ left-wing leanings. And certainly, she painted portraits at a time when figuration was not just unfashionable, but political. Whilst post-war America pushed towards abstraction – a Cold War construct in opposition to Russian realism – she embraced the body more than ever before. ‘A pioneer of socialist realism in American painting,’ in the words of one depicted, Mike Gold.
‘Human beings have been steadily marked down in value, despised, rejected and degraded,’ she wrote in the Daily Worker. Whilst Joseph McCarthy went out hunting witches, she hung a portrait of Vladimir Lenin hung in her kitchen and was soon the first living artist to have a retrospective in the Soviet Union.
Neel’s politics, like her art, was driven by a belief in people, her ‘love of humanity’. Her gaze has none of the voyeurism nor nihilism of her contemporaries. Where Oskar Kokoschka langoured in the ‘illness of society,’ her practice was more constructive, exposing inequality in order to correct it. She only lamented the ‘little wretches’ we’d become in the hope of the ‘magnificent creatures’ we might be.
‘I paint my time using people as evidence,’ she claimed, but her portraits of others aren’t projections of herself. Nor was her self-perception as a ‘collector of souls’ really accurate. There was nothing acquisitional nor transactional about her relationships, though they defined her practice.
Hot Off The Griddle says surprisingly little about how sexual relationships attracted Neel to figuration. (Helen Molesworth puts her pull towards the male body in plainer terms: ‘She paints like someone who likes to fuck.’) Nor do we see much of Neel as a mother herself; Richard and Hartley, her two surviving children and family, were central to her recent well-condensed show at Victoria Miro.
Great rooms downstairs are populated by the works of a mature, confident and ambitious artist. Power hierarchies are still inverted - Abdul Rahman, a local taxi driver, comes before Andy Warhol - but we also see more modern works, with strikingly modern non-finitos. A woman sits pregnant with expectation; her round stomach directly contrasts with her flat reflection.
Its chronology is disrupted only once, and at first, in a room singularly dedicated to one of her final works. Her first self-portrait was painted over five years and finished at the age of 80. Naked, individual, it embodies Neel’s lifelong commitment to tell it ‘as it is’. Giving the older woman a room of her own, when she never had her own professional studio, feels incredibly powerful.
Starting here reminds us of how late her recognition came. Neel was 62 years old when the first article about her was published, Nairne nudges those attending the press view. With few solo exhibitions before the 1970s, she would enjoy 60 before her death in 1984 (her European debut didn’t follow for another twenty years). In the lectures and speeches given in her late years, Neel would often have to be persuaded down from the stage. Only when we hear her directly, that we can comprehend her vitality.
Last year, Griddle’s ‘cousin’ exhibition, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, was also structured in two sections, based around class and gender struggles. And though Griddle would have us believe gender, race, and civil rights activists were all racing to keep up with Neel, it never rushes into anachronism.
Whilst acknowledging the binary representations of women, Neel bickered with the same feminists who prized her to public acclaim. (The Barbican neither claims her as one, nor reduces itself to the performative feminism of the Carolee Schneemann exhibition shop).
By portraying the specific, she captured the plurality of people’s experiences – including womanhood. Her legacy is to show us how people can be both or many things – and contradictorily so. An American and a communist. A believer of individuals, and a pillar of the local community. An advocate of women’s rights, and a hopeless romantic. A radical and a conservative: ‘I’m not against abstraction. Do you know what I’m against? Saying that Man himself has no importance.’
Hot Off The Griddle bears the marks of a labour of love, and it is clear to see how difficult curating Neel’s largest UK exhibition must have been. Neel’s portraits are singularly stupendous, but hung together, on such a large scale, the individual is alienated (to borrow the lingo of a card-carrying communist). By clustering works together, banishing all individual captions to the guidebook – an essential companion - Griddle risks isolating her sitters and standers, movers and shakers, within an imagined community.
So how can we display a self-proclaimed ‘collector of souls’, when she never really saw souls as things to be collected? Or curate a gallery of rogues, rather than a ‘rogues’ gallery’?
If the art world is ready to cluster round single Vermeers at the Rijksmuseum, then it should certainly do the same for Alice Neel.
Alice Neel: Hot Off The Griddle is on show at the Barbican until 21 May 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
It would be all too easy to mistake Alice Neel for a living artist. With figuration back in fashion, the ‘court painter of the underground’ comes to the Barbican as a speech bubble in contemporary discourse - a portraitist conscious of representation, identity, and how we look at each other.
Neel’s ‘anarchic humanism’ certainly drew her to depict individuals ‘regardless of race, class or gender’. But she always engaged with them as individuals, each meaning something to her personally, rather than a purposefully-diverse group of gay men and Black intellectuals.
This is the hurdle for Hot off the Griddle – to present the career of a great artist, whilst retaining the intimacy of her practice. So, curator Eleanor Nairne stays close to the artist, in a chronological show that’s as close as it comes to a visual biography.
We see and hear Neel in her own words, in quotes copied directly from out of her diary, articles, and documentary films. Her library is laid out as coffee-table literature, in a room which honours her life painting at home. Even the exhibition book is printed small enough to be read in bed. It’s beautiful to behold. But paying such close attention to Neel’s purpose as an artist misses the warmth and humour of her person – without which, we cannot feel nor understand her works.
Born in January 1900, Neel is read as a kind of social historian, her vivid portraits as visual sources of 20th century America. A precocious child of small-town Philadelphia, she ‘couldn’t stand Anglo-Saxons,’ nor ‘their soda-cracker lives and inhibitions,’ so followed life (and lovers) to Cuba, then New York City.
There too her progressive attitudes rankled; her demonic ‘Joe Gould’ shocked its public so much, they shut their eyes to it for forty years, until it was finally exhibited in the 1970s. It still bears the burns inflicted by her lover Kevin Doolittle, who fired 300 of her works on paper, and slashed 60 of her paintings, in a jealous fit of rage.
Subtle interventions give context, often from marginalised perspectives, and foreshadow developments in the artist’s life and career. This light touch favours those in the know; downstairs, Linda Nochlin and Mary Garrard sit comfortably together, but without mention of their work as leading feminist art historians. More visual cues, like the ‘Save Willie McGee’ protest paintings partnered with archive photographs, work better still.
In these many little rooms, we indulge in Neel’s early experiments. Her Cuban portraits are surprisingly soft, Greenwich Village gets a lick of Leonora Carrington-style surrealism, and street protests attended in the run up to World War II bear the heavy lines of revolutionary Mexican muralists.
These portraits of local communities – both people and places – reveal Neel’s active participation, and how she articulated marginalisation as felt, again, by individuals. Gaining and losing love and family, Neel sometimes found herself a single mother with no secure income, and often struggled with her mental health. Griddle hints at how hard her life must have been at times but, like the pragmatist herself, never dwells on it.
In the late 1930s, Neel moved to East Harlem with her then husband, José Negrón. They could afford an eleven-windowed apartment, light enough to serve as a home studio. (We recall the opening line of Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs: ‘If you want to know how poor somebody was growing up, ask them how many windows they had.’).
During the Great Depression, Neel received $26.88 a week from the WPA, producing one 23x30 inch painting every six weeks. It was the first time the government recognised painting as a wage-earning labour, shaping her idea of her practice as a profession.
‘I got up at 7am in the morning to finish that,’ she remarks of her 1965 portrait of Archbishop Jean Jadot, in Nancy Baer’s 1978 documentary. ‘I feel like a factory worker.’ (It’s a panoply of pull quotes. She lightly grills the chair of General Motors, who makes ‘$5 million a year, but won’t even buy his own picture’.)
Griddle goes hard on Neel’s ‘radical’ left-wing leanings. And certainly, she painted portraits at a time when figuration was not just unfashionable, but political. Whilst post-war America pushed towards abstraction – a Cold War construct in opposition to Russian realism – she embraced the body more than ever before. ‘A pioneer of socialist realism in American painting,’ in the words of one depicted, Mike Gold.
‘Human beings have been steadily marked down in value, despised, rejected and degraded,’ she wrote in the Daily Worker. Whilst Joseph McCarthy went out hunting witches, she hung a portrait of Vladimir Lenin hung in her kitchen and was soon the first living artist to have a retrospective in the Soviet Union.
Neel’s politics, like her art, was driven by a belief in people, her ‘love of humanity’. Her gaze has none of the voyeurism nor nihilism of her contemporaries. Where Oskar Kokoschka langoured in the ‘illness of society,’ her practice was more constructive, exposing inequality in order to correct it. She only lamented the ‘little wretches’ we’d become in the hope of the ‘magnificent creatures’ we might be.
‘I paint my time using people as evidence,’ she claimed, but her portraits of others aren’t projections of herself. Nor was her self-perception as a ‘collector of souls’ really accurate. There was nothing acquisitional nor transactional about her relationships, though they defined her practice.
Hot Off The Griddle says surprisingly little about how sexual relationships attracted Neel to figuration. (Helen Molesworth puts her pull towards the male body in plainer terms: ‘She paints like someone who likes to fuck.’) Nor do we see much of Neel as a mother herself; Richard and Hartley, her two surviving children and family, were central to her recent well-condensed show at Victoria Miro.
Great rooms downstairs are populated by the works of a mature, confident and ambitious artist. Power hierarchies are still inverted - Abdul Rahman, a local taxi driver, comes before Andy Warhol - but we also see more modern works, with strikingly modern non-finitos. A woman sits pregnant with expectation; her round stomach directly contrasts with her flat reflection.
Its chronology is disrupted only once, and at first, in a room singularly dedicated to one of her final works. Her first self-portrait was painted over five years and finished at the age of 80. Naked, individual, it embodies Neel’s lifelong commitment to tell it ‘as it is’. Giving the older woman a room of her own, when she never had her own professional studio, feels incredibly powerful.
Starting here reminds us of how late her recognition came. Neel was 62 years old when the first article about her was published, Nairne nudges those attending the press view. With few solo exhibitions before the 1970s, she would enjoy 60 before her death in 1984 (her European debut didn’t follow for another twenty years). In the lectures and speeches given in her late years, Neel would often have to be persuaded down from the stage. Only when we hear her directly, that we can comprehend her vitality.
Last year, Griddle’s ‘cousin’ exhibition, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, was also structured in two sections, based around class and gender struggles. And though Griddle would have us believe gender, race, and civil rights activists were all racing to keep up with Neel, it never rushes into anachronism.
Whilst acknowledging the binary representations of women, Neel bickered with the same feminists who prized her to public acclaim. (The Barbican neither claims her as one, nor reduces itself to the performative feminism of the Carolee Schneemann exhibition shop).
By portraying the specific, she captured the plurality of people’s experiences – including womanhood. Her legacy is to show us how people can be both or many things – and contradictorily so. An American and a communist. A believer of individuals, and a pillar of the local community. An advocate of women’s rights, and a hopeless romantic. A radical and a conservative: ‘I’m not against abstraction. Do you know what I’m against? Saying that Man himself has no importance.’
Hot Off The Griddle bears the marks of a labour of love, and it is clear to see how difficult curating Neel’s largest UK exhibition must have been. Neel’s portraits are singularly stupendous, but hung together, on such a large scale, the individual is alienated (to borrow the lingo of a card-carrying communist). By clustering works together, banishing all individual captions to the guidebook – an essential companion - Griddle risks isolating her sitters and standers, movers and shakers, within an imagined community.
So how can we display a self-proclaimed ‘collector of souls’, when she never really saw souls as things to be collected? Or curate a gallery of rogues, rather than a ‘rogues’ gallery’?
If the art world is ready to cluster round single Vermeers at the Rijksmuseum, then it should certainly do the same for Alice Neel.
Alice Neel: Hot Off The Griddle is on show at the Barbican until 21 May 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
It would be all too easy to mistake Alice Neel for a living artist. With figuration back in fashion, the ‘court painter of the underground’ comes to the Barbican as a speech bubble in contemporary discourse - a portraitist conscious of representation, identity, and how we look at each other.
Neel’s ‘anarchic humanism’ certainly drew her to depict individuals ‘regardless of race, class or gender’. But she always engaged with them as individuals, each meaning something to her personally, rather than a purposefully-diverse group of gay men and Black intellectuals.
This is the hurdle for Hot off the Griddle – to present the career of a great artist, whilst retaining the intimacy of her practice. So, curator Eleanor Nairne stays close to the artist, in a chronological show that’s as close as it comes to a visual biography.
We see and hear Neel in her own words, in quotes copied directly from out of her diary, articles, and documentary films. Her library is laid out as coffee-table literature, in a room which honours her life painting at home. Even the exhibition book is printed small enough to be read in bed. It’s beautiful to behold. But paying such close attention to Neel’s purpose as an artist misses the warmth and humour of her person – without which, we cannot feel nor understand her works.
Born in January 1900, Neel is read as a kind of social historian, her vivid portraits as visual sources of 20th century America. A precocious child of small-town Philadelphia, she ‘couldn’t stand Anglo-Saxons,’ nor ‘their soda-cracker lives and inhibitions,’ so followed life (and lovers) to Cuba, then New York City.
There too her progressive attitudes rankled; her demonic ‘Joe Gould’ shocked its public so much, they shut their eyes to it for forty years, until it was finally exhibited in the 1970s. It still bears the burns inflicted by her lover Kevin Doolittle, who fired 300 of her works on paper, and slashed 60 of her paintings, in a jealous fit of rage.
Subtle interventions give context, often from marginalised perspectives, and foreshadow developments in the artist’s life and career. This light touch favours those in the know; downstairs, Linda Nochlin and Mary Garrard sit comfortably together, but without mention of their work as leading feminist art historians. More visual cues, like the ‘Save Willie McGee’ protest paintings partnered with archive photographs, work better still.
In these many little rooms, we indulge in Neel’s early experiments. Her Cuban portraits are surprisingly soft, Greenwich Village gets a lick of Leonora Carrington-style surrealism, and street protests attended in the run up to World War II bear the heavy lines of revolutionary Mexican muralists.
These portraits of local communities – both people and places – reveal Neel’s active participation, and how she articulated marginalisation as felt, again, by individuals. Gaining and losing love and family, Neel sometimes found herself a single mother with no secure income, and often struggled with her mental health. Griddle hints at how hard her life must have been at times but, like the pragmatist herself, never dwells on it.
In the late 1930s, Neel moved to East Harlem with her then husband, José Negrón. They could afford an eleven-windowed apartment, light enough to serve as a home studio. (We recall the opening line of Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs: ‘If you want to know how poor somebody was growing up, ask them how many windows they had.’).
During the Great Depression, Neel received $26.88 a week from the WPA, producing one 23x30 inch painting every six weeks. It was the first time the government recognised painting as a wage-earning labour, shaping her idea of her practice as a profession.
‘I got up at 7am in the morning to finish that,’ she remarks of her 1965 portrait of Archbishop Jean Jadot, in Nancy Baer’s 1978 documentary. ‘I feel like a factory worker.’ (It’s a panoply of pull quotes. She lightly grills the chair of General Motors, who makes ‘$5 million a year, but won’t even buy his own picture’.)
Griddle goes hard on Neel’s ‘radical’ left-wing leanings. And certainly, she painted portraits at a time when figuration was not just unfashionable, but political. Whilst post-war America pushed towards abstraction – a Cold War construct in opposition to Russian realism – she embraced the body more than ever before. ‘A pioneer of socialist realism in American painting,’ in the words of one depicted, Mike Gold.
‘Human beings have been steadily marked down in value, despised, rejected and degraded,’ she wrote in the Daily Worker. Whilst Joseph McCarthy went out hunting witches, she hung a portrait of Vladimir Lenin hung in her kitchen and was soon the first living artist to have a retrospective in the Soviet Union.
Neel’s politics, like her art, was driven by a belief in people, her ‘love of humanity’. Her gaze has none of the voyeurism nor nihilism of her contemporaries. Where Oskar Kokoschka langoured in the ‘illness of society,’ her practice was more constructive, exposing inequality in order to correct it. She only lamented the ‘little wretches’ we’d become in the hope of the ‘magnificent creatures’ we might be.
‘I paint my time using people as evidence,’ she claimed, but her portraits of others aren’t projections of herself. Nor was her self-perception as a ‘collector of souls’ really accurate. There was nothing acquisitional nor transactional about her relationships, though they defined her practice.
Hot Off The Griddle says surprisingly little about how sexual relationships attracted Neel to figuration. (Helen Molesworth puts her pull towards the male body in plainer terms: ‘She paints like someone who likes to fuck.’) Nor do we see much of Neel as a mother herself; Richard and Hartley, her two surviving children and family, were central to her recent well-condensed show at Victoria Miro.
Great rooms downstairs are populated by the works of a mature, confident and ambitious artist. Power hierarchies are still inverted - Abdul Rahman, a local taxi driver, comes before Andy Warhol - but we also see more modern works, with strikingly modern non-finitos. A woman sits pregnant with expectation; her round stomach directly contrasts with her flat reflection.
Its chronology is disrupted only once, and at first, in a room singularly dedicated to one of her final works. Her first self-portrait was painted over five years and finished at the age of 80. Naked, individual, it embodies Neel’s lifelong commitment to tell it ‘as it is’. Giving the older woman a room of her own, when she never had her own professional studio, feels incredibly powerful.
Starting here reminds us of how late her recognition came. Neel was 62 years old when the first article about her was published, Nairne nudges those attending the press view. With few solo exhibitions before the 1970s, she would enjoy 60 before her death in 1984 (her European debut didn’t follow for another twenty years). In the lectures and speeches given in her late years, Neel would often have to be persuaded down from the stage. Only when we hear her directly, that we can comprehend her vitality.
Last year, Griddle’s ‘cousin’ exhibition, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, was also structured in two sections, based around class and gender struggles. And though Griddle would have us believe gender, race, and civil rights activists were all racing to keep up with Neel, it never rushes into anachronism.
Whilst acknowledging the binary representations of women, Neel bickered with the same feminists who prized her to public acclaim. (The Barbican neither claims her as one, nor reduces itself to the performative feminism of the Carolee Schneemann exhibition shop).
By portraying the specific, she captured the plurality of people’s experiences – including womanhood. Her legacy is to show us how people can be both or many things – and contradictorily so. An American and a communist. A believer of individuals, and a pillar of the local community. An advocate of women’s rights, and a hopeless romantic. A radical and a conservative: ‘I’m not against abstraction. Do you know what I’m against? Saying that Man himself has no importance.’
Hot Off The Griddle bears the marks of a labour of love, and it is clear to see how difficult curating Neel’s largest UK exhibition must have been. Neel’s portraits are singularly stupendous, but hung together, on such a large scale, the individual is alienated (to borrow the lingo of a card-carrying communist). By clustering works together, banishing all individual captions to the guidebook – an essential companion - Griddle risks isolating her sitters and standers, movers and shakers, within an imagined community.
So how can we display a self-proclaimed ‘collector of souls’, when she never really saw souls as things to be collected? Or curate a gallery of rogues, rather than a ‘rogues’ gallery’?
If the art world is ready to cluster round single Vermeers at the Rijksmuseum, then it should certainly do the same for Alice Neel.
Alice Neel: Hot Off The Griddle is on show at the Barbican until 21 May 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
It would be all too easy to mistake Alice Neel for a living artist. With figuration back in fashion, the ‘court painter of the underground’ comes to the Barbican as a speech bubble in contemporary discourse - a portraitist conscious of representation, identity, and how we look at each other.
Neel’s ‘anarchic humanism’ certainly drew her to depict individuals ‘regardless of race, class or gender’. But she always engaged with them as individuals, each meaning something to her personally, rather than a purposefully-diverse group of gay men and Black intellectuals.
This is the hurdle for Hot off the Griddle – to present the career of a great artist, whilst retaining the intimacy of her practice. So, curator Eleanor Nairne stays close to the artist, in a chronological show that’s as close as it comes to a visual biography.
We see and hear Neel in her own words, in quotes copied directly from out of her diary, articles, and documentary films. Her library is laid out as coffee-table literature, in a room which honours her life painting at home. Even the exhibition book is printed small enough to be read in bed. It’s beautiful to behold. But paying such close attention to Neel’s purpose as an artist misses the warmth and humour of her person – without which, we cannot feel nor understand her works.
Born in January 1900, Neel is read as a kind of social historian, her vivid portraits as visual sources of 20th century America. A precocious child of small-town Philadelphia, she ‘couldn’t stand Anglo-Saxons,’ nor ‘their soda-cracker lives and inhibitions,’ so followed life (and lovers) to Cuba, then New York City.
There too her progressive attitudes rankled; her demonic ‘Joe Gould’ shocked its public so much, they shut their eyes to it for forty years, until it was finally exhibited in the 1970s. It still bears the burns inflicted by her lover Kevin Doolittle, who fired 300 of her works on paper, and slashed 60 of her paintings, in a jealous fit of rage.
Subtle interventions give context, often from marginalised perspectives, and foreshadow developments in the artist’s life and career. This light touch favours those in the know; downstairs, Linda Nochlin and Mary Garrard sit comfortably together, but without mention of their work as leading feminist art historians. More visual cues, like the ‘Save Willie McGee’ protest paintings partnered with archive photographs, work better still.
In these many little rooms, we indulge in Neel’s early experiments. Her Cuban portraits are surprisingly soft, Greenwich Village gets a lick of Leonora Carrington-style surrealism, and street protests attended in the run up to World War II bear the heavy lines of revolutionary Mexican muralists.
These portraits of local communities – both people and places – reveal Neel’s active participation, and how she articulated marginalisation as felt, again, by individuals. Gaining and losing love and family, Neel sometimes found herself a single mother with no secure income, and often struggled with her mental health. Griddle hints at how hard her life must have been at times but, like the pragmatist herself, never dwells on it.
In the late 1930s, Neel moved to East Harlem with her then husband, José Negrón. They could afford an eleven-windowed apartment, light enough to serve as a home studio. (We recall the opening line of Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs: ‘If you want to know how poor somebody was growing up, ask them how many windows they had.’).
During the Great Depression, Neel received $26.88 a week from the WPA, producing one 23x30 inch painting every six weeks. It was the first time the government recognised painting as a wage-earning labour, shaping her idea of her practice as a profession.
‘I got up at 7am in the morning to finish that,’ she remarks of her 1965 portrait of Archbishop Jean Jadot, in Nancy Baer’s 1978 documentary. ‘I feel like a factory worker.’ (It’s a panoply of pull quotes. She lightly grills the chair of General Motors, who makes ‘$5 million a year, but won’t even buy his own picture’.)
Griddle goes hard on Neel’s ‘radical’ left-wing leanings. And certainly, she painted portraits at a time when figuration was not just unfashionable, but political. Whilst post-war America pushed towards abstraction – a Cold War construct in opposition to Russian realism – she embraced the body more than ever before. ‘A pioneer of socialist realism in American painting,’ in the words of one depicted, Mike Gold.
‘Human beings have been steadily marked down in value, despised, rejected and degraded,’ she wrote in the Daily Worker. Whilst Joseph McCarthy went out hunting witches, she hung a portrait of Vladimir Lenin hung in her kitchen and was soon the first living artist to have a retrospective in the Soviet Union.
Neel’s politics, like her art, was driven by a belief in people, her ‘love of humanity’. Her gaze has none of the voyeurism nor nihilism of her contemporaries. Where Oskar Kokoschka langoured in the ‘illness of society,’ her practice was more constructive, exposing inequality in order to correct it. She only lamented the ‘little wretches’ we’d become in the hope of the ‘magnificent creatures’ we might be.
‘I paint my time using people as evidence,’ she claimed, but her portraits of others aren’t projections of herself. Nor was her self-perception as a ‘collector of souls’ really accurate. There was nothing acquisitional nor transactional about her relationships, though they defined her practice.
Hot Off The Griddle says surprisingly little about how sexual relationships attracted Neel to figuration. (Helen Molesworth puts her pull towards the male body in plainer terms: ‘She paints like someone who likes to fuck.’) Nor do we see much of Neel as a mother herself; Richard and Hartley, her two surviving children and family, were central to her recent well-condensed show at Victoria Miro.
Great rooms downstairs are populated by the works of a mature, confident and ambitious artist. Power hierarchies are still inverted - Abdul Rahman, a local taxi driver, comes before Andy Warhol - but we also see more modern works, with strikingly modern non-finitos. A woman sits pregnant with expectation; her round stomach directly contrasts with her flat reflection.
Its chronology is disrupted only once, and at first, in a room singularly dedicated to one of her final works. Her first self-portrait was painted over five years and finished at the age of 80. Naked, individual, it embodies Neel’s lifelong commitment to tell it ‘as it is’. Giving the older woman a room of her own, when she never had her own professional studio, feels incredibly powerful.
Starting here reminds us of how late her recognition came. Neel was 62 years old when the first article about her was published, Nairne nudges those attending the press view. With few solo exhibitions before the 1970s, she would enjoy 60 before her death in 1984 (her European debut didn’t follow for another twenty years). In the lectures and speeches given in her late years, Neel would often have to be persuaded down from the stage. Only when we hear her directly, that we can comprehend her vitality.
Last year, Griddle’s ‘cousin’ exhibition, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, was also structured in two sections, based around class and gender struggles. And though Griddle would have us believe gender, race, and civil rights activists were all racing to keep up with Neel, it never rushes into anachronism.
Whilst acknowledging the binary representations of women, Neel bickered with the same feminists who prized her to public acclaim. (The Barbican neither claims her as one, nor reduces itself to the performative feminism of the Carolee Schneemann exhibition shop).
By portraying the specific, she captured the plurality of people’s experiences – including womanhood. Her legacy is to show us how people can be both or many things – and contradictorily so. An American and a communist. A believer of individuals, and a pillar of the local community. An advocate of women’s rights, and a hopeless romantic. A radical and a conservative: ‘I’m not against abstraction. Do you know what I’m against? Saying that Man himself has no importance.’
Hot Off The Griddle bears the marks of a labour of love, and it is clear to see how difficult curating Neel’s largest UK exhibition must have been. Neel’s portraits are singularly stupendous, but hung together, on such a large scale, the individual is alienated (to borrow the lingo of a card-carrying communist). By clustering works together, banishing all individual captions to the guidebook – an essential companion - Griddle risks isolating her sitters and standers, movers and shakers, within an imagined community.
So how can we display a self-proclaimed ‘collector of souls’, when she never really saw souls as things to be collected? Or curate a gallery of rogues, rather than a ‘rogues’ gallery’?
If the art world is ready to cluster round single Vermeers at the Rijksmuseum, then it should certainly do the same for Alice Neel.
Alice Neel: Hot Off The Griddle is on show at the Barbican until 21 May 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
It would be all too easy to mistake Alice Neel for a living artist. With figuration back in fashion, the ‘court painter of the underground’ comes to the Barbican as a speech bubble in contemporary discourse - a portraitist conscious of representation, identity, and how we look at each other.
Neel’s ‘anarchic humanism’ certainly drew her to depict individuals ‘regardless of race, class or gender’. But she always engaged with them as individuals, each meaning something to her personally, rather than a purposefully-diverse group of gay men and Black intellectuals.
This is the hurdle for Hot off the Griddle – to present the career of a great artist, whilst retaining the intimacy of her practice. So, curator Eleanor Nairne stays close to the artist, in a chronological show that’s as close as it comes to a visual biography.
We see and hear Neel in her own words, in quotes copied directly from out of her diary, articles, and documentary films. Her library is laid out as coffee-table literature, in a room which honours her life painting at home. Even the exhibition book is printed small enough to be read in bed. It’s beautiful to behold. But paying such close attention to Neel’s purpose as an artist misses the warmth and humour of her person – without which, we cannot feel nor understand her works.
Born in January 1900, Neel is read as a kind of social historian, her vivid portraits as visual sources of 20th century America. A precocious child of small-town Philadelphia, she ‘couldn’t stand Anglo-Saxons,’ nor ‘their soda-cracker lives and inhibitions,’ so followed life (and lovers) to Cuba, then New York City.
There too her progressive attitudes rankled; her demonic ‘Joe Gould’ shocked its public so much, they shut their eyes to it for forty years, until it was finally exhibited in the 1970s. It still bears the burns inflicted by her lover Kevin Doolittle, who fired 300 of her works on paper, and slashed 60 of her paintings, in a jealous fit of rage.
Subtle interventions give context, often from marginalised perspectives, and foreshadow developments in the artist’s life and career. This light touch favours those in the know; downstairs, Linda Nochlin and Mary Garrard sit comfortably together, but without mention of their work as leading feminist art historians. More visual cues, like the ‘Save Willie McGee’ protest paintings partnered with archive photographs, work better still.
In these many little rooms, we indulge in Neel’s early experiments. Her Cuban portraits are surprisingly soft, Greenwich Village gets a lick of Leonora Carrington-style surrealism, and street protests attended in the run up to World War II bear the heavy lines of revolutionary Mexican muralists.
These portraits of local communities – both people and places – reveal Neel’s active participation, and how she articulated marginalisation as felt, again, by individuals. Gaining and losing love and family, Neel sometimes found herself a single mother with no secure income, and often struggled with her mental health. Griddle hints at how hard her life must have been at times but, like the pragmatist herself, never dwells on it.
In the late 1930s, Neel moved to East Harlem with her then husband, José Negrón. They could afford an eleven-windowed apartment, light enough to serve as a home studio. (We recall the opening line of Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs: ‘If you want to know how poor somebody was growing up, ask them how many windows they had.’).
During the Great Depression, Neel received $26.88 a week from the WPA, producing one 23x30 inch painting every six weeks. It was the first time the government recognised painting as a wage-earning labour, shaping her idea of her practice as a profession.
‘I got up at 7am in the morning to finish that,’ she remarks of her 1965 portrait of Archbishop Jean Jadot, in Nancy Baer’s 1978 documentary. ‘I feel like a factory worker.’ (It’s a panoply of pull quotes. She lightly grills the chair of General Motors, who makes ‘$5 million a year, but won’t even buy his own picture’.)
Griddle goes hard on Neel’s ‘radical’ left-wing leanings. And certainly, she painted portraits at a time when figuration was not just unfashionable, but political. Whilst post-war America pushed towards abstraction – a Cold War construct in opposition to Russian realism – she embraced the body more than ever before. ‘A pioneer of socialist realism in American painting,’ in the words of one depicted, Mike Gold.
‘Human beings have been steadily marked down in value, despised, rejected and degraded,’ she wrote in the Daily Worker. Whilst Joseph McCarthy went out hunting witches, she hung a portrait of Vladimir Lenin hung in her kitchen and was soon the first living artist to have a retrospective in the Soviet Union.
Neel’s politics, like her art, was driven by a belief in people, her ‘love of humanity’. Her gaze has none of the voyeurism nor nihilism of her contemporaries. Where Oskar Kokoschka langoured in the ‘illness of society,’ her practice was more constructive, exposing inequality in order to correct it. She only lamented the ‘little wretches’ we’d become in the hope of the ‘magnificent creatures’ we might be.
‘I paint my time using people as evidence,’ she claimed, but her portraits of others aren’t projections of herself. Nor was her self-perception as a ‘collector of souls’ really accurate. There was nothing acquisitional nor transactional about her relationships, though they defined her practice.
Hot Off The Griddle says surprisingly little about how sexual relationships attracted Neel to figuration. (Helen Molesworth puts her pull towards the male body in plainer terms: ‘She paints like someone who likes to fuck.’) Nor do we see much of Neel as a mother herself; Richard and Hartley, her two surviving children and family, were central to her recent well-condensed show at Victoria Miro.
Great rooms downstairs are populated by the works of a mature, confident and ambitious artist. Power hierarchies are still inverted - Abdul Rahman, a local taxi driver, comes before Andy Warhol - but we also see more modern works, with strikingly modern non-finitos. A woman sits pregnant with expectation; her round stomach directly contrasts with her flat reflection.
Its chronology is disrupted only once, and at first, in a room singularly dedicated to one of her final works. Her first self-portrait was painted over five years and finished at the age of 80. Naked, individual, it embodies Neel’s lifelong commitment to tell it ‘as it is’. Giving the older woman a room of her own, when she never had her own professional studio, feels incredibly powerful.
Starting here reminds us of how late her recognition came. Neel was 62 years old when the first article about her was published, Nairne nudges those attending the press view. With few solo exhibitions before the 1970s, she would enjoy 60 before her death in 1984 (her European debut didn’t follow for another twenty years). In the lectures and speeches given in her late years, Neel would often have to be persuaded down from the stage. Only when we hear her directly, that we can comprehend her vitality.
Last year, Griddle’s ‘cousin’ exhibition, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, was also structured in two sections, based around class and gender struggles. And though Griddle would have us believe gender, race, and civil rights activists were all racing to keep up with Neel, it never rushes into anachronism.
Whilst acknowledging the binary representations of women, Neel bickered with the same feminists who prized her to public acclaim. (The Barbican neither claims her as one, nor reduces itself to the performative feminism of the Carolee Schneemann exhibition shop).
By portraying the specific, she captured the plurality of people’s experiences – including womanhood. Her legacy is to show us how people can be both or many things – and contradictorily so. An American and a communist. A believer of individuals, and a pillar of the local community. An advocate of women’s rights, and a hopeless romantic. A radical and a conservative: ‘I’m not against abstraction. Do you know what I’m against? Saying that Man himself has no importance.’
Hot Off The Griddle bears the marks of a labour of love, and it is clear to see how difficult curating Neel’s largest UK exhibition must have been. Neel’s portraits are singularly stupendous, but hung together, on such a large scale, the individual is alienated (to borrow the lingo of a card-carrying communist). By clustering works together, banishing all individual captions to the guidebook – an essential companion - Griddle risks isolating her sitters and standers, movers and shakers, within an imagined community.
So how can we display a self-proclaimed ‘collector of souls’, when she never really saw souls as things to be collected? Or curate a gallery of rogues, rather than a ‘rogues’ gallery’?
If the art world is ready to cluster round single Vermeers at the Rijksmuseum, then it should certainly do the same for Alice Neel.
Alice Neel: Hot Off The Griddle is on show at the Barbican until 21 May 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
It would be all too easy to mistake Alice Neel for a living artist. With figuration back in fashion, the ‘court painter of the underground’ comes to the Barbican as a speech bubble in contemporary discourse - a portraitist conscious of representation, identity, and how we look at each other.
Neel’s ‘anarchic humanism’ certainly drew her to depict individuals ‘regardless of race, class or gender’. But she always engaged with them as individuals, each meaning something to her personally, rather than a purposefully-diverse group of gay men and Black intellectuals.
This is the hurdle for Hot off the Griddle – to present the career of a great artist, whilst retaining the intimacy of her practice. So, curator Eleanor Nairne stays close to the artist, in a chronological show that’s as close as it comes to a visual biography.
We see and hear Neel in her own words, in quotes copied directly from out of her diary, articles, and documentary films. Her library is laid out as coffee-table literature, in a room which honours her life painting at home. Even the exhibition book is printed small enough to be read in bed. It’s beautiful to behold. But paying such close attention to Neel’s purpose as an artist misses the warmth and humour of her person – without which, we cannot feel nor understand her works.
Born in January 1900, Neel is read as a kind of social historian, her vivid portraits as visual sources of 20th century America. A precocious child of small-town Philadelphia, she ‘couldn’t stand Anglo-Saxons,’ nor ‘their soda-cracker lives and inhibitions,’ so followed life (and lovers) to Cuba, then New York City.
There too her progressive attitudes rankled; her demonic ‘Joe Gould’ shocked its public so much, they shut their eyes to it for forty years, until it was finally exhibited in the 1970s. It still bears the burns inflicted by her lover Kevin Doolittle, who fired 300 of her works on paper, and slashed 60 of her paintings, in a jealous fit of rage.
Subtle interventions give context, often from marginalised perspectives, and foreshadow developments in the artist’s life and career. This light touch favours those in the know; downstairs, Linda Nochlin and Mary Garrard sit comfortably together, but without mention of their work as leading feminist art historians. More visual cues, like the ‘Save Willie McGee’ protest paintings partnered with archive photographs, work better still.
In these many little rooms, we indulge in Neel’s early experiments. Her Cuban portraits are surprisingly soft, Greenwich Village gets a lick of Leonora Carrington-style surrealism, and street protests attended in the run up to World War II bear the heavy lines of revolutionary Mexican muralists.
These portraits of local communities – both people and places – reveal Neel’s active participation, and how she articulated marginalisation as felt, again, by individuals. Gaining and losing love and family, Neel sometimes found herself a single mother with no secure income, and often struggled with her mental health. Griddle hints at how hard her life must have been at times but, like the pragmatist herself, never dwells on it.
In the late 1930s, Neel moved to East Harlem with her then husband, José Negrón. They could afford an eleven-windowed apartment, light enough to serve as a home studio. (We recall the opening line of Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs: ‘If you want to know how poor somebody was growing up, ask them how many windows they had.’).
During the Great Depression, Neel received $26.88 a week from the WPA, producing one 23x30 inch painting every six weeks. It was the first time the government recognised painting as a wage-earning labour, shaping her idea of her practice as a profession.
‘I got up at 7am in the morning to finish that,’ she remarks of her 1965 portrait of Archbishop Jean Jadot, in Nancy Baer’s 1978 documentary. ‘I feel like a factory worker.’ (It’s a panoply of pull quotes. She lightly grills the chair of General Motors, who makes ‘$5 million a year, but won’t even buy his own picture’.)
Griddle goes hard on Neel’s ‘radical’ left-wing leanings. And certainly, she painted portraits at a time when figuration was not just unfashionable, but political. Whilst post-war America pushed towards abstraction – a Cold War construct in opposition to Russian realism – she embraced the body more than ever before. ‘A pioneer of socialist realism in American painting,’ in the words of one depicted, Mike Gold.
‘Human beings have been steadily marked down in value, despised, rejected and degraded,’ she wrote in the Daily Worker. Whilst Joseph McCarthy went out hunting witches, she hung a portrait of Vladimir Lenin hung in her kitchen and was soon the first living artist to have a retrospective in the Soviet Union.
Neel’s politics, like her art, was driven by a belief in people, her ‘love of humanity’. Her gaze has none of the voyeurism nor nihilism of her contemporaries. Where Oskar Kokoschka langoured in the ‘illness of society,’ her practice was more constructive, exposing inequality in order to correct it. She only lamented the ‘little wretches’ we’d become in the hope of the ‘magnificent creatures’ we might be.
‘I paint my time using people as evidence,’ she claimed, but her portraits of others aren’t projections of herself. Nor was her self-perception as a ‘collector of souls’ really accurate. There was nothing acquisitional nor transactional about her relationships, though they defined her practice.
Hot Off The Griddle says surprisingly little about how sexual relationships attracted Neel to figuration. (Helen Molesworth puts her pull towards the male body in plainer terms: ‘She paints like someone who likes to fuck.’) Nor do we see much of Neel as a mother herself; Richard and Hartley, her two surviving children and family, were central to her recent well-condensed show at Victoria Miro.
Great rooms downstairs are populated by the works of a mature, confident and ambitious artist. Power hierarchies are still inverted - Abdul Rahman, a local taxi driver, comes before Andy Warhol - but we also see more modern works, with strikingly modern non-finitos. A woman sits pregnant with expectation; her round stomach directly contrasts with her flat reflection.
Its chronology is disrupted only once, and at first, in a room singularly dedicated to one of her final works. Her first self-portrait was painted over five years and finished at the age of 80. Naked, individual, it embodies Neel’s lifelong commitment to tell it ‘as it is’. Giving the older woman a room of her own, when she never had her own professional studio, feels incredibly powerful.
Starting here reminds us of how late her recognition came. Neel was 62 years old when the first article about her was published, Nairne nudges those attending the press view. With few solo exhibitions before the 1970s, she would enjoy 60 before her death in 1984 (her European debut didn’t follow for another twenty years). In the lectures and speeches given in her late years, Neel would often have to be persuaded down from the stage. Only when we hear her directly, that we can comprehend her vitality.
Last year, Griddle’s ‘cousin’ exhibition, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, was also structured in two sections, based around class and gender struggles. And though Griddle would have us believe gender, race, and civil rights activists were all racing to keep up with Neel, it never rushes into anachronism.
Whilst acknowledging the binary representations of women, Neel bickered with the same feminists who prized her to public acclaim. (The Barbican neither claims her as one, nor reduces itself to the performative feminism of the Carolee Schneemann exhibition shop).
By portraying the specific, she captured the plurality of people’s experiences – including womanhood. Her legacy is to show us how people can be both or many things – and contradictorily so. An American and a communist. A believer of individuals, and a pillar of the local community. An advocate of women’s rights, and a hopeless romantic. A radical and a conservative: ‘I’m not against abstraction. Do you know what I’m against? Saying that Man himself has no importance.’
Hot Off The Griddle bears the marks of a labour of love, and it is clear to see how difficult curating Neel’s largest UK exhibition must have been. Neel’s portraits are singularly stupendous, but hung together, on such a large scale, the individual is alienated (to borrow the lingo of a card-carrying communist). By clustering works together, banishing all individual captions to the guidebook – an essential companion - Griddle risks isolating her sitters and standers, movers and shakers, within an imagined community.
So how can we display a self-proclaimed ‘collector of souls’, when she never really saw souls as things to be collected? Or curate a gallery of rogues, rather than a ‘rogues’ gallery’?
If the art world is ready to cluster round single Vermeers at the Rijksmuseum, then it should certainly do the same for Alice Neel.
Alice Neel: Hot Off The Griddle is on show at the Barbican until 21 May 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
It would be all too easy to mistake Alice Neel for a living artist. With figuration back in fashion, the ‘court painter of the underground’ comes to the Barbican as a speech bubble in contemporary discourse - a portraitist conscious of representation, identity, and how we look at each other.
Neel’s ‘anarchic humanism’ certainly drew her to depict individuals ‘regardless of race, class or gender’. But she always engaged with them as individuals, each meaning something to her personally, rather than a purposefully-diverse group of gay men and Black intellectuals.
This is the hurdle for Hot off the Griddle – to present the career of a great artist, whilst retaining the intimacy of her practice. So, curator Eleanor Nairne stays close to the artist, in a chronological show that’s as close as it comes to a visual biography.
We see and hear Neel in her own words, in quotes copied directly from out of her diary, articles, and documentary films. Her library is laid out as coffee-table literature, in a room which honours her life painting at home. Even the exhibition book is printed small enough to be read in bed. It’s beautiful to behold. But paying such close attention to Neel’s purpose as an artist misses the warmth and humour of her person – without which, we cannot feel nor understand her works.
Born in January 1900, Neel is read as a kind of social historian, her vivid portraits as visual sources of 20th century America. A precocious child of small-town Philadelphia, she ‘couldn’t stand Anglo-Saxons,’ nor ‘their soda-cracker lives and inhibitions,’ so followed life (and lovers) to Cuba, then New York City.
There too her progressive attitudes rankled; her demonic ‘Joe Gould’ shocked its public so much, they shut their eyes to it for forty years, until it was finally exhibited in the 1970s. It still bears the burns inflicted by her lover Kevin Doolittle, who fired 300 of her works on paper, and slashed 60 of her paintings, in a jealous fit of rage.
Subtle interventions give context, often from marginalised perspectives, and foreshadow developments in the artist’s life and career. This light touch favours those in the know; downstairs, Linda Nochlin and Mary Garrard sit comfortably together, but without mention of their work as leading feminist art historians. More visual cues, like the ‘Save Willie McGee’ protest paintings partnered with archive photographs, work better still.
In these many little rooms, we indulge in Neel’s early experiments. Her Cuban portraits are surprisingly soft, Greenwich Village gets a lick of Leonora Carrington-style surrealism, and street protests attended in the run up to World War II bear the heavy lines of revolutionary Mexican muralists.
These portraits of local communities – both people and places – reveal Neel’s active participation, and how she articulated marginalisation as felt, again, by individuals. Gaining and losing love and family, Neel sometimes found herself a single mother with no secure income, and often struggled with her mental health. Griddle hints at how hard her life must have been at times but, like the pragmatist herself, never dwells on it.
In the late 1930s, Neel moved to East Harlem with her then husband, José Negrón. They could afford an eleven-windowed apartment, light enough to serve as a home studio. (We recall the opening line of Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs: ‘If you want to know how poor somebody was growing up, ask them how many windows they had.’).
During the Great Depression, Neel received $26.88 a week from the WPA, producing one 23x30 inch painting every six weeks. It was the first time the government recognised painting as a wage-earning labour, shaping her idea of her practice as a profession.
‘I got up at 7am in the morning to finish that,’ she remarks of her 1965 portrait of Archbishop Jean Jadot, in Nancy Baer’s 1978 documentary. ‘I feel like a factory worker.’ (It’s a panoply of pull quotes. She lightly grills the chair of General Motors, who makes ‘$5 million a year, but won’t even buy his own picture’.)
Griddle goes hard on Neel’s ‘radical’ left-wing leanings. And certainly, she painted portraits at a time when figuration was not just unfashionable, but political. Whilst post-war America pushed towards abstraction – a Cold War construct in opposition to Russian realism – she embraced the body more than ever before. ‘A pioneer of socialist realism in American painting,’ in the words of one depicted, Mike Gold.
‘Human beings have been steadily marked down in value, despised, rejected and degraded,’ she wrote in the Daily Worker. Whilst Joseph McCarthy went out hunting witches, she hung a portrait of Vladimir Lenin hung in her kitchen and was soon the first living artist to have a retrospective in the Soviet Union.
Neel’s politics, like her art, was driven by a belief in people, her ‘love of humanity’. Her gaze has none of the voyeurism nor nihilism of her contemporaries. Where Oskar Kokoschka langoured in the ‘illness of society,’ her practice was more constructive, exposing inequality in order to correct it. She only lamented the ‘little wretches’ we’d become in the hope of the ‘magnificent creatures’ we might be.
‘I paint my time using people as evidence,’ she claimed, but her portraits of others aren’t projections of herself. Nor was her self-perception as a ‘collector of souls’ really accurate. There was nothing acquisitional nor transactional about her relationships, though they defined her practice.
Hot Off The Griddle says surprisingly little about how sexual relationships attracted Neel to figuration. (Helen Molesworth puts her pull towards the male body in plainer terms: ‘She paints like someone who likes to fuck.’) Nor do we see much of Neel as a mother herself; Richard and Hartley, her two surviving children and family, were central to her recent well-condensed show at Victoria Miro.
Great rooms downstairs are populated by the works of a mature, confident and ambitious artist. Power hierarchies are still inverted - Abdul Rahman, a local taxi driver, comes before Andy Warhol - but we also see more modern works, with strikingly modern non-finitos. A woman sits pregnant with expectation; her round stomach directly contrasts with her flat reflection.
Its chronology is disrupted only once, and at first, in a room singularly dedicated to one of her final works. Her first self-portrait was painted over five years and finished at the age of 80. Naked, individual, it embodies Neel’s lifelong commitment to tell it ‘as it is’. Giving the older woman a room of her own, when she never had her own professional studio, feels incredibly powerful.
Starting here reminds us of how late her recognition came. Neel was 62 years old when the first article about her was published, Nairne nudges those attending the press view. With few solo exhibitions before the 1970s, she would enjoy 60 before her death in 1984 (her European debut didn’t follow for another twenty years). In the lectures and speeches given in her late years, Neel would often have to be persuaded down from the stage. Only when we hear her directly, that we can comprehend her vitality.
Last year, Griddle’s ‘cousin’ exhibition, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, was also structured in two sections, based around class and gender struggles. And though Griddle would have us believe gender, race, and civil rights activists were all racing to keep up with Neel, it never rushes into anachronism.
Whilst acknowledging the binary representations of women, Neel bickered with the same feminists who prized her to public acclaim. (The Barbican neither claims her as one, nor reduces itself to the performative feminism of the Carolee Schneemann exhibition shop).
By portraying the specific, she captured the plurality of people’s experiences – including womanhood. Her legacy is to show us how people can be both or many things – and contradictorily so. An American and a communist. A believer of individuals, and a pillar of the local community. An advocate of women’s rights, and a hopeless romantic. A radical and a conservative: ‘I’m not against abstraction. Do you know what I’m against? Saying that Man himself has no importance.’
Hot Off The Griddle bears the marks of a labour of love, and it is clear to see how difficult curating Neel’s largest UK exhibition must have been. Neel’s portraits are singularly stupendous, but hung together, on such a large scale, the individual is alienated (to borrow the lingo of a card-carrying communist). By clustering works together, banishing all individual captions to the guidebook – an essential companion - Griddle risks isolating her sitters and standers, movers and shakers, within an imagined community.
So how can we display a self-proclaimed ‘collector of souls’, when she never really saw souls as things to be collected? Or curate a gallery of rogues, rather than a ‘rogues’ gallery’?
If the art world is ready to cluster round single Vermeers at the Rijksmuseum, then it should certainly do the same for Alice Neel.
Alice Neel: Hot Off The Griddle is on show at the Barbican until 21 May 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
It would be all too easy to mistake Alice Neel for a living artist. With figuration back in fashion, the ‘court painter of the underground’ comes to the Barbican as a speech bubble in contemporary discourse - a portraitist conscious of representation, identity, and how we look at each other.
Neel’s ‘anarchic humanism’ certainly drew her to depict individuals ‘regardless of race, class or gender’. But she always engaged with them as individuals, each meaning something to her personally, rather than a purposefully-diverse group of gay men and Black intellectuals.
This is the hurdle for Hot off the Griddle – to present the career of a great artist, whilst retaining the intimacy of her practice. So, curator Eleanor Nairne stays close to the artist, in a chronological show that’s as close as it comes to a visual biography.
We see and hear Neel in her own words, in quotes copied directly from out of her diary, articles, and documentary films. Her library is laid out as coffee-table literature, in a room which honours her life painting at home. Even the exhibition book is printed small enough to be read in bed. It’s beautiful to behold. But paying such close attention to Neel’s purpose as an artist misses the warmth and humour of her person – without which, we cannot feel nor understand her works.
Born in January 1900, Neel is read as a kind of social historian, her vivid portraits as visual sources of 20th century America. A precocious child of small-town Philadelphia, she ‘couldn’t stand Anglo-Saxons,’ nor ‘their soda-cracker lives and inhibitions,’ so followed life (and lovers) to Cuba, then New York City.
There too her progressive attitudes rankled; her demonic ‘Joe Gould’ shocked its public so much, they shut their eyes to it for forty years, until it was finally exhibited in the 1970s. It still bears the burns inflicted by her lover Kevin Doolittle, who fired 300 of her works on paper, and slashed 60 of her paintings, in a jealous fit of rage.
Subtle interventions give context, often from marginalised perspectives, and foreshadow developments in the artist’s life and career. This light touch favours those in the know; downstairs, Linda Nochlin and Mary Garrard sit comfortably together, but without mention of their work as leading feminist art historians. More visual cues, like the ‘Save Willie McGee’ protest paintings partnered with archive photographs, work better still.
In these many little rooms, we indulge in Neel’s early experiments. Her Cuban portraits are surprisingly soft, Greenwich Village gets a lick of Leonora Carrington-style surrealism, and street protests attended in the run up to World War II bear the heavy lines of revolutionary Mexican muralists.
These portraits of local communities – both people and places – reveal Neel’s active participation, and how she articulated marginalisation as felt, again, by individuals. Gaining and losing love and family, Neel sometimes found herself a single mother with no secure income, and often struggled with her mental health. Griddle hints at how hard her life must have been at times but, like the pragmatist herself, never dwells on it.
In the late 1930s, Neel moved to East Harlem with her then husband, José Negrón. They could afford an eleven-windowed apartment, light enough to serve as a home studio. (We recall the opening line of Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs: ‘If you want to know how poor somebody was growing up, ask them how many windows they had.’).
During the Great Depression, Neel received $26.88 a week from the WPA, producing one 23x30 inch painting every six weeks. It was the first time the government recognised painting as a wage-earning labour, shaping her idea of her practice as a profession.
‘I got up at 7am in the morning to finish that,’ she remarks of her 1965 portrait of Archbishop Jean Jadot, in Nancy Baer’s 1978 documentary. ‘I feel like a factory worker.’ (It’s a panoply of pull quotes. She lightly grills the chair of General Motors, who makes ‘$5 million a year, but won’t even buy his own picture’.)
Griddle goes hard on Neel’s ‘radical’ left-wing leanings. And certainly, she painted portraits at a time when figuration was not just unfashionable, but political. Whilst post-war America pushed towards abstraction – a Cold War construct in opposition to Russian realism – she embraced the body more than ever before. ‘A pioneer of socialist realism in American painting,’ in the words of one depicted, Mike Gold.
‘Human beings have been steadily marked down in value, despised, rejected and degraded,’ she wrote in the Daily Worker. Whilst Joseph McCarthy went out hunting witches, she hung a portrait of Vladimir Lenin hung in her kitchen and was soon the first living artist to have a retrospective in the Soviet Union.
Neel’s politics, like her art, was driven by a belief in people, her ‘love of humanity’. Her gaze has none of the voyeurism nor nihilism of her contemporaries. Where Oskar Kokoschka langoured in the ‘illness of society,’ her practice was more constructive, exposing inequality in order to correct it. She only lamented the ‘little wretches’ we’d become in the hope of the ‘magnificent creatures’ we might be.
‘I paint my time using people as evidence,’ she claimed, but her portraits of others aren’t projections of herself. Nor was her self-perception as a ‘collector of souls’ really accurate. There was nothing acquisitional nor transactional about her relationships, though they defined her practice.
Hot Off The Griddle says surprisingly little about how sexual relationships attracted Neel to figuration. (Helen Molesworth puts her pull towards the male body in plainer terms: ‘She paints like someone who likes to fuck.’) Nor do we see much of Neel as a mother herself; Richard and Hartley, her two surviving children and family, were central to her recent well-condensed show at Victoria Miro.
Great rooms downstairs are populated by the works of a mature, confident and ambitious artist. Power hierarchies are still inverted - Abdul Rahman, a local taxi driver, comes before Andy Warhol - but we also see more modern works, with strikingly modern non-finitos. A woman sits pregnant with expectation; her round stomach directly contrasts with her flat reflection.
Its chronology is disrupted only once, and at first, in a room singularly dedicated to one of her final works. Her first self-portrait was painted over five years and finished at the age of 80. Naked, individual, it embodies Neel’s lifelong commitment to tell it ‘as it is’. Giving the older woman a room of her own, when she never had her own professional studio, feels incredibly powerful.
Starting here reminds us of how late her recognition came. Neel was 62 years old when the first article about her was published, Nairne nudges those attending the press view. With few solo exhibitions before the 1970s, she would enjoy 60 before her death in 1984 (her European debut didn’t follow for another twenty years). In the lectures and speeches given in her late years, Neel would often have to be persuaded down from the stage. Only when we hear her directly, that we can comprehend her vitality.
Last year, Griddle’s ‘cousin’ exhibition, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, was also structured in two sections, based around class and gender struggles. And though Griddle would have us believe gender, race, and civil rights activists were all racing to keep up with Neel, it never rushes into anachronism.
Whilst acknowledging the binary representations of women, Neel bickered with the same feminists who prized her to public acclaim. (The Barbican neither claims her as one, nor reduces itself to the performative feminism of the Carolee Schneemann exhibition shop).
By portraying the specific, she captured the plurality of people’s experiences – including womanhood. Her legacy is to show us how people can be both or many things – and contradictorily so. An American and a communist. A believer of individuals, and a pillar of the local community. An advocate of women’s rights, and a hopeless romantic. A radical and a conservative: ‘I’m not against abstraction. Do you know what I’m against? Saying that Man himself has no importance.’
Hot Off The Griddle bears the marks of a labour of love, and it is clear to see how difficult curating Neel’s largest UK exhibition must have been. Neel’s portraits are singularly stupendous, but hung together, on such a large scale, the individual is alienated (to borrow the lingo of a card-carrying communist). By clustering works together, banishing all individual captions to the guidebook – an essential companion - Griddle risks isolating her sitters and standers, movers and shakers, within an imagined community.
So how can we display a self-proclaimed ‘collector of souls’, when she never really saw souls as things to be collected? Or curate a gallery of rogues, rather than a ‘rogues’ gallery’?
If the art world is ready to cluster round single Vermeers at the Rijksmuseum, then it should certainly do the same for Alice Neel.
Alice Neel: Hot Off The Griddle is on show at the Barbican until 21 May 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
It would be all too easy to mistake Alice Neel for a living artist. With figuration back in fashion, the ‘court painter of the underground’ comes to the Barbican as a speech bubble in contemporary discourse - a portraitist conscious of representation, identity, and how we look at each other.
Neel’s ‘anarchic humanism’ certainly drew her to depict individuals ‘regardless of race, class or gender’. But she always engaged with them as individuals, each meaning something to her personally, rather than a purposefully-diverse group of gay men and Black intellectuals.
This is the hurdle for Hot off the Griddle – to present the career of a great artist, whilst retaining the intimacy of her practice. So, curator Eleanor Nairne stays close to the artist, in a chronological show that’s as close as it comes to a visual biography.
We see and hear Neel in her own words, in quotes copied directly from out of her diary, articles, and documentary films. Her library is laid out as coffee-table literature, in a room which honours her life painting at home. Even the exhibition book is printed small enough to be read in bed. It’s beautiful to behold. But paying such close attention to Neel’s purpose as an artist misses the warmth and humour of her person – without which, we cannot feel nor understand her works.
Born in January 1900, Neel is read as a kind of social historian, her vivid portraits as visual sources of 20th century America. A precocious child of small-town Philadelphia, she ‘couldn’t stand Anglo-Saxons,’ nor ‘their soda-cracker lives and inhibitions,’ so followed life (and lovers) to Cuba, then New York City.
There too her progressive attitudes rankled; her demonic ‘Joe Gould’ shocked its public so much, they shut their eyes to it for forty years, until it was finally exhibited in the 1970s. It still bears the burns inflicted by her lover Kevin Doolittle, who fired 300 of her works on paper, and slashed 60 of her paintings, in a jealous fit of rage.
Subtle interventions give context, often from marginalised perspectives, and foreshadow developments in the artist’s life and career. This light touch favours those in the know; downstairs, Linda Nochlin and Mary Garrard sit comfortably together, but without mention of their work as leading feminist art historians. More visual cues, like the ‘Save Willie McGee’ protest paintings partnered with archive photographs, work better still.
In these many little rooms, we indulge in Neel’s early experiments. Her Cuban portraits are surprisingly soft, Greenwich Village gets a lick of Leonora Carrington-style surrealism, and street protests attended in the run up to World War II bear the heavy lines of revolutionary Mexican muralists.
These portraits of local communities – both people and places – reveal Neel’s active participation, and how she articulated marginalisation as felt, again, by individuals. Gaining and losing love and family, Neel sometimes found herself a single mother with no secure income, and often struggled with her mental health. Griddle hints at how hard her life must have been at times but, like the pragmatist herself, never dwells on it.
In the late 1930s, Neel moved to East Harlem with her then husband, José Negrón. They could afford an eleven-windowed apartment, light enough to serve as a home studio. (We recall the opening line of Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs: ‘If you want to know how poor somebody was growing up, ask them how many windows they had.’).
During the Great Depression, Neel received $26.88 a week from the WPA, producing one 23x30 inch painting every six weeks. It was the first time the government recognised painting as a wage-earning labour, shaping her idea of her practice as a profession.
‘I got up at 7am in the morning to finish that,’ she remarks of her 1965 portrait of Archbishop Jean Jadot, in Nancy Baer’s 1978 documentary. ‘I feel like a factory worker.’ (It’s a panoply of pull quotes. She lightly grills the chair of General Motors, who makes ‘$5 million a year, but won’t even buy his own picture’.)
Griddle goes hard on Neel’s ‘radical’ left-wing leanings. And certainly, she painted portraits at a time when figuration was not just unfashionable, but political. Whilst post-war America pushed towards abstraction – a Cold War construct in opposition to Russian realism – she embraced the body more than ever before. ‘A pioneer of socialist realism in American painting,’ in the words of one depicted, Mike Gold.
‘Human beings have been steadily marked down in value, despised, rejected and degraded,’ she wrote in the Daily Worker. Whilst Joseph McCarthy went out hunting witches, she hung a portrait of Vladimir Lenin hung in her kitchen and was soon the first living artist to have a retrospective in the Soviet Union.
Neel’s politics, like her art, was driven by a belief in people, her ‘love of humanity’. Her gaze has none of the voyeurism nor nihilism of her contemporaries. Where Oskar Kokoschka langoured in the ‘illness of society,’ her practice was more constructive, exposing inequality in order to correct it. She only lamented the ‘little wretches’ we’d become in the hope of the ‘magnificent creatures’ we might be.
‘I paint my time using people as evidence,’ she claimed, but her portraits of others aren’t projections of herself. Nor was her self-perception as a ‘collector of souls’ really accurate. There was nothing acquisitional nor transactional about her relationships, though they defined her practice.
Hot Off The Griddle says surprisingly little about how sexual relationships attracted Neel to figuration. (Helen Molesworth puts her pull towards the male body in plainer terms: ‘She paints like someone who likes to fuck.’) Nor do we see much of Neel as a mother herself; Richard and Hartley, her two surviving children and family, were central to her recent well-condensed show at Victoria Miro.
Great rooms downstairs are populated by the works of a mature, confident and ambitious artist. Power hierarchies are still inverted - Abdul Rahman, a local taxi driver, comes before Andy Warhol - but we also see more modern works, with strikingly modern non-finitos. A woman sits pregnant with expectation; her round stomach directly contrasts with her flat reflection.
Its chronology is disrupted only once, and at first, in a room singularly dedicated to one of her final works. Her first self-portrait was painted over five years and finished at the age of 80. Naked, individual, it embodies Neel’s lifelong commitment to tell it ‘as it is’. Giving the older woman a room of her own, when she never had her own professional studio, feels incredibly powerful.
Starting here reminds us of how late her recognition came. Neel was 62 years old when the first article about her was published, Nairne nudges those attending the press view. With few solo exhibitions before the 1970s, she would enjoy 60 before her death in 1984 (her European debut didn’t follow for another twenty years). In the lectures and speeches given in her late years, Neel would often have to be persuaded down from the stage. Only when we hear her directly, that we can comprehend her vitality.
Last year, Griddle’s ‘cousin’ exhibition, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, was also structured in two sections, based around class and gender struggles. And though Griddle would have us believe gender, race, and civil rights activists were all racing to keep up with Neel, it never rushes into anachronism.
Whilst acknowledging the binary representations of women, Neel bickered with the same feminists who prized her to public acclaim. (The Barbican neither claims her as one, nor reduces itself to the performative feminism of the Carolee Schneemann exhibition shop).
By portraying the specific, she captured the plurality of people’s experiences – including womanhood. Her legacy is to show us how people can be both or many things – and contradictorily so. An American and a communist. A believer of individuals, and a pillar of the local community. An advocate of women’s rights, and a hopeless romantic. A radical and a conservative: ‘I’m not against abstraction. Do you know what I’m against? Saying that Man himself has no importance.’
Hot Off The Griddle bears the marks of a labour of love, and it is clear to see how difficult curating Neel’s largest UK exhibition must have been. Neel’s portraits are singularly stupendous, but hung together, on such a large scale, the individual is alienated (to borrow the lingo of a card-carrying communist). By clustering works together, banishing all individual captions to the guidebook – an essential companion - Griddle risks isolating her sitters and standers, movers and shakers, within an imagined community.
So how can we display a self-proclaimed ‘collector of souls’, when she never really saw souls as things to be collected? Or curate a gallery of rogues, rather than a ‘rogues’ gallery’?
If the art world is ready to cluster round single Vermeers at the Rijksmuseum, then it should certainly do the same for Alice Neel.
Alice Neel: Hot Off The Griddle is on show at the Barbican until 21 May 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
It would be all too easy to mistake Alice Neel for a living artist. With figuration back in fashion, the ‘court painter of the underground’ comes to the Barbican as a speech bubble in contemporary discourse - a portraitist conscious of representation, identity, and how we look at each other.
Neel’s ‘anarchic humanism’ certainly drew her to depict individuals ‘regardless of race, class or gender’. But she always engaged with them as individuals, each meaning something to her personally, rather than a purposefully-diverse group of gay men and Black intellectuals.
This is the hurdle for Hot off the Griddle – to present the career of a great artist, whilst retaining the intimacy of her practice. So, curator Eleanor Nairne stays close to the artist, in a chronological show that’s as close as it comes to a visual biography.
We see and hear Neel in her own words, in quotes copied directly from out of her diary, articles, and documentary films. Her library is laid out as coffee-table literature, in a room which honours her life painting at home. Even the exhibition book is printed small enough to be read in bed. It’s beautiful to behold. But paying such close attention to Neel’s purpose as an artist misses the warmth and humour of her person – without which, we cannot feel nor understand her works.
Born in January 1900, Neel is read as a kind of social historian, her vivid portraits as visual sources of 20th century America. A precocious child of small-town Philadelphia, she ‘couldn’t stand Anglo-Saxons,’ nor ‘their soda-cracker lives and inhibitions,’ so followed life (and lovers) to Cuba, then New York City.
There too her progressive attitudes rankled; her demonic ‘Joe Gould’ shocked its public so much, they shut their eyes to it for forty years, until it was finally exhibited in the 1970s. It still bears the burns inflicted by her lover Kevin Doolittle, who fired 300 of her works on paper, and slashed 60 of her paintings, in a jealous fit of rage.
Subtle interventions give context, often from marginalised perspectives, and foreshadow developments in the artist’s life and career. This light touch favours those in the know; downstairs, Linda Nochlin and Mary Garrard sit comfortably together, but without mention of their work as leading feminist art historians. More visual cues, like the ‘Save Willie McGee’ protest paintings partnered with archive photographs, work better still.
In these many little rooms, we indulge in Neel’s early experiments. Her Cuban portraits are surprisingly soft, Greenwich Village gets a lick of Leonora Carrington-style surrealism, and street protests attended in the run up to World War II bear the heavy lines of revolutionary Mexican muralists.
These portraits of local communities – both people and places – reveal Neel’s active participation, and how she articulated marginalisation as felt, again, by individuals. Gaining and losing love and family, Neel sometimes found herself a single mother with no secure income, and often struggled with her mental health. Griddle hints at how hard her life must have been at times but, like the pragmatist herself, never dwells on it.
In the late 1930s, Neel moved to East Harlem with her then husband, José Negrón. They could afford an eleven-windowed apartment, light enough to serve as a home studio. (We recall the opening line of Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs: ‘If you want to know how poor somebody was growing up, ask them how many windows they had.’).
During the Great Depression, Neel received $26.88 a week from the WPA, producing one 23x30 inch painting every six weeks. It was the first time the government recognised painting as a wage-earning labour, shaping her idea of her practice as a profession.
‘I got up at 7am in the morning to finish that,’ she remarks of her 1965 portrait of Archbishop Jean Jadot, in Nancy Baer’s 1978 documentary. ‘I feel like a factory worker.’ (It’s a panoply of pull quotes. She lightly grills the chair of General Motors, who makes ‘$5 million a year, but won’t even buy his own picture’.)
Griddle goes hard on Neel’s ‘radical’ left-wing leanings. And certainly, she painted portraits at a time when figuration was not just unfashionable, but political. Whilst post-war America pushed towards abstraction – a Cold War construct in opposition to Russian realism – she embraced the body more than ever before. ‘A pioneer of socialist realism in American painting,’ in the words of one depicted, Mike Gold.
‘Human beings have been steadily marked down in value, despised, rejected and degraded,’ she wrote in the Daily Worker. Whilst Joseph McCarthy went out hunting witches, she hung a portrait of Vladimir Lenin hung in her kitchen and was soon the first living artist to have a retrospective in the Soviet Union.
Neel’s politics, like her art, was driven by a belief in people, her ‘love of humanity’. Her gaze has none of the voyeurism nor nihilism of her contemporaries. Where Oskar Kokoschka langoured in the ‘illness of society,’ her practice was more constructive, exposing inequality in order to correct it. She only lamented the ‘little wretches’ we’d become in the hope of the ‘magnificent creatures’ we might be.
‘I paint my time using people as evidence,’ she claimed, but her portraits of others aren’t projections of herself. Nor was her self-perception as a ‘collector of souls’ really accurate. There was nothing acquisitional nor transactional about her relationships, though they defined her practice.
Hot Off The Griddle says surprisingly little about how sexual relationships attracted Neel to figuration. (Helen Molesworth puts her pull towards the male body in plainer terms: ‘She paints like someone who likes to fuck.’) Nor do we see much of Neel as a mother herself; Richard and Hartley, her two surviving children and family, were central to her recent well-condensed show at Victoria Miro.
Great rooms downstairs are populated by the works of a mature, confident and ambitious artist. Power hierarchies are still inverted - Abdul Rahman, a local taxi driver, comes before Andy Warhol - but we also see more modern works, with strikingly modern non-finitos. A woman sits pregnant with expectation; her round stomach directly contrasts with her flat reflection.
Its chronology is disrupted only once, and at first, in a room singularly dedicated to one of her final works. Her first self-portrait was painted over five years and finished at the age of 80. Naked, individual, it embodies Neel’s lifelong commitment to tell it ‘as it is’. Giving the older woman a room of her own, when she never had her own professional studio, feels incredibly powerful.
Starting here reminds us of how late her recognition came. Neel was 62 years old when the first article about her was published, Nairne nudges those attending the press view. With few solo exhibitions before the 1970s, she would enjoy 60 before her death in 1984 (her European debut didn’t follow for another twenty years). In the lectures and speeches given in her late years, Neel would often have to be persuaded down from the stage. Only when we hear her directly, that we can comprehend her vitality.
Last year, Griddle’s ‘cousin’ exhibition, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, was also structured in two sections, based around class and gender struggles. And though Griddle would have us believe gender, race, and civil rights activists were all racing to keep up with Neel, it never rushes into anachronism.
Whilst acknowledging the binary representations of women, Neel bickered with the same feminists who prized her to public acclaim. (The Barbican neither claims her as one, nor reduces itself to the performative feminism of the Carolee Schneemann exhibition shop).
By portraying the specific, she captured the plurality of people’s experiences – including womanhood. Her legacy is to show us how people can be both or many things – and contradictorily so. An American and a communist. A believer of individuals, and a pillar of the local community. An advocate of women’s rights, and a hopeless romantic. A radical and a conservative: ‘I’m not against abstraction. Do you know what I’m against? Saying that Man himself has no importance.’
Hot Off The Griddle bears the marks of a labour of love, and it is clear to see how difficult curating Neel’s largest UK exhibition must have been. Neel’s portraits are singularly stupendous, but hung together, on such a large scale, the individual is alienated (to borrow the lingo of a card-carrying communist). By clustering works together, banishing all individual captions to the guidebook – an essential companion - Griddle risks isolating her sitters and standers, movers and shakers, within an imagined community.
So how can we display a self-proclaimed ‘collector of souls’, when she never really saw souls as things to be collected? Or curate a gallery of rogues, rather than a ‘rogues’ gallery’?
If the art world is ready to cluster round single Vermeers at the Rijksmuseum, then it should certainly do the same for Alice Neel.
Alice Neel: Hot Off The Griddle is on show at the Barbican until 21 May 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
