That's Ms. Neel

by Michael Klein

 

 

In the mid 70s when I was studying art history at NYU and in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program, I had long hair, a moustache, and was deeply earnest. I worked various jobs to earn money: as a bookstore clerk at Barnes and Noble—long before it became a chain--and a short order cook at an Upper Eastside bar. I also worked weekends giving tours for the Whitney’s Education Dept. (I had challenged myself to get over a case of adolescent shyness that clung to me and speaking to the public twice on Saturdays and twice on Sundays was a sure fire cure!)

 

The two shows I was responsible for at the Whitney were a show organized by the English critic Lawrence Alloway on American Pop Art, and an Alice Neel retrospective of some 80 paintings. Our study group had organized another smaller show that was on then too: Frank O’Hara: A Poet Among Painters.

 

Looking back now, I can see that it would have made perfect sense for me to call Ms. Neel at the time to ask her questions about the works in the show. I could have asked her about her life; her thoughts about this, her first major museum show; gotten a few direct quotes from her or an anecdote or two, but I was naïve and pretty inexperienced in the workings of the art world and the ease with which artists are happy to talk about their work if asked. All I knew was that I could speak about her works and describe their styles, interpret what I had read, and lead the visitors through the show pointing out aspects of her paintings. Little did I know that behind each face was a story, that each of these portrayals of friends and colleagues was a unique statement in the style of painting and also unique to a woman who had no affiliation with any particular school, just to the life and artistic energy of New York.  She was part of that “other New York School of Painting” that included artists working outside the mainstream of social realism or abstract art and mid-century Abstract Expressionism. She, and a vast array of painters from Beauford Delaney, John Koch and Jacob Lawrence to Alex Katz and even Grace Hartigan, saw life in the world around them: the myriad of people and non-stop street life of New York City. Neel and her compatriots wanted to bring that subject matter into the studio, reflect on its character and then turn it into the expressive images of their respective canvases.

 

While life on the street was one of Neel’s themes, she also painted many an interior scene using her studio or home as the subject matter, but Neel’s portraits, in particular her portrayals of children, are among her strongest works. She focused on kids: the children of friends, the children of neighbors, children who were open to posing and allowing the painter to expose their tender emotions and fragile feelings. These are not the kids whose families pay to have portraits made for future generations to know their names, or their stations in life. They are the stoop sitters and hopscotch players that populate the side streets of Manhattan on a warm summer day. They are the kids of working class parents or poor families. Various biographical accounts suggest that Neel was a thinker, her political ideals formed by poverty and the general economic depression of the 30s and pre-war days in New York, and no doubt these kids were in many cases the innocent victims of the world in which they were born, a world mired in a global economic down turn and growing nationalism and racism.

 

Among the paintings of the Depression era, along with her portraits, are sooty cityscapes of upper Westside building facades and fire-escapes; snowy dark alleyways;  brooding  still lives of fruit, table tops and cheap cut crystal. And, one dark, somewhat crude painting of a workers' parade and rally. In the foreground of this painting one sees a placard that reads “Hitler Murders Jews,” a message in 1936 that the world was not willing to hear. Neel’s work expresses compassion and curiosity about the similar to the contemporary photographs of the late Helen Levitt; we can watch these kids but we are never really invited to participate in their games or conversations. Levitt’s’“ street photography” has the same immediacy and intimacy observed in Neel’s paintings. Like Levitt, Neel's inspirations come from  the world as she finds it: gritty, hard and unembellished.

 

Decades later this independent, progressive lady was still ahead of her time in many things and many ways, from her political stance to her social views. While most Americans in the 60s and 70s were struggling with the passage of the Voting Rights Act or witnessing the Stonewall riots or debating the case of Roe v. Wade, Neel continued to paint everyone without regard to race, age, gender or sexual orientation. She painted the rich and the poor, Black, White and Hispanic, art stars like Andy Warhol and Duane Hanson, art couples like the art critics David Bourdon and Gregory Battcock, and many, many women, including those on the national political scene such as Bella Abzug and Betty Friedan, or from New York artistic circles such as the Pop artist Marisol and the art historian Linda Nochlin. Nochlin’s radical and now historic 1971 essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” stands as a dictum about Neel. It wasn’t that there were no great women artists; it was that their access to the system was stymied. (In the immediate post-war era the artists were men, the critics were men, the dealers were men and the museums where it was all put together were run by men from good families.)  Neel’s 1974 retrospective, followed shortly the same year by a Joan Mitchell show at the Whitney, were rare occurrences -- solo shows by women artists organized by a major institution.