Marcia Marcus, Alice Neel, Sylvia Sleigh @ Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York - "The Human Situation" Exhibition

The Human Situation: Marcia Marcus, Alice Neel, Sylvia Sleigh 

Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York

April 10 – June 21, 2025

Sylvia Sleigh 

The Blue Dress, 1970

Oil on canvas, 66½ × 34½ inches (168.9 × 87.6 cm) 

Collection of Audrey and Joseph Anastasi 

© Estate of Sylvia Sleigh, 

courtesy of the Estate of Sylvia Sleigh and Lévy Gorvy Dayan

Alice Neel 

Pregnant Nude, 1967

Oil on canvas, 36½ × 57¼ inches (92.7 × 145.4 cm)

Private Collection, New York, courtesy of AWG Art Advisory

© Estate of Alice Neel, 

courtesy of the Estate of Alice Neel and David Zwirner

Lévy Gorvy Dayan presents The Human Situation: Marcia Marcus, Alice Neel, Sylvia Sleigh. The exhibition, conceived by Saara Pritchard, marks the first focused presentation of Marcia Marcus (b. 1928), Alice Neel (1900–1984), and Sylvia Sleigh (1916–2010), who each worked in New York City and shared in its artistic circles in the dynamic decades of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. During this period, they portrayed mutual sitters, exhibited together, and participated in public discussions. Their representations of loved ones, friends, and acquaintances are distinctive in form and style, yet share in their evocation of the human spirit, capturing Sylvia Sleigh’s reflection “The human situation adds a certain poignancy to portraits...”

In 1973, paintings by the three figurative artists were on view in the unprecedented exhibition Women Choose Women, organized by Women in the Arts and presented at the New York Cultural Center. The three painters would exhibit together again in the following years, notably in Women’s Work: American Art 1974, Philadelphia Civic Center and In Her Own Image, Samuel S. Fleischer Art Memorial, administered by the Philadelphia Museum of Art (both part of Focus on Women in the Visual Arts, 1974)—as well as Sons and Others: Women Artists See Men, Queens Museum (1975). Marcia Marcus, Alice Neel, and Sylvia Sleigh too were early participants in the collaborative installation The Sister Chapel, PS1, New York (1978)—from which Marcia Marcus eventually withdrew due to teaching and other exhibition commitments—with Alice Neel and Sylvia Sleigh unveiling large-scale paintings.

In their works, each artist differentiated herself from prevailing modes of Abstract Expressionism, Pop, and Minimalism—capturing Neel’s predecessor Robert Henri’s principle “Paint what you feel. Paint what you see. Paint what is real to you.” Their distinguished images depicted many of the same artistic and critical figures, including David Bourdon, Sari Dienes, Red Grooms and Mimi Gross, and John Perreault, among others, as well as self-portraits. They also each painted or collaborated with writers and curators such as Lucy Lippard, Cindy Nemser, Linda Nochlin, Barbara Rose, Marcia Tucker, and Sleigh’s husband Lawrence Alloway.

While working at different phases of maturity in their practices during the 1960s and 1970s, they experienced the period’s socio-political movements, including for civil and women’s rights. This historical environment is described by Lucy Lippard in her exhibition catalogue introduction for Women Choose Women: 

“A largescale exhibition of women’s art in New York is necessary at this time for a variety of reasons: because so few women have up until now been taken seriously enough to be considered for, still less included in, museum group shows; because there are so few women in the major commercial galleries; because young women artists are lucky if they can find ten successful older women artists to whom to look as role models; because although seventy-five percent of the undergraduate art students are female, only two percent of their teachers are female. And above all—because the New York museums have been particularly discriminatory, usually under the guise of being discriminating.” 

Although the three artists aligned with and participated in feminist causes to varying degrees, the energies of the movement created a focus on women’s art, resulting in exhibitions, galleries such as AIR Gallery and Soho 20 Gallery, grassroots publications, organizations including Women’s Interart Center and Women’s Caucus for Art, and panel discussions, in which they each featured. The portraits by Marcia Marcus, Alice Neel, and Sylvia Sleigh gesture towards this critical art-historical moment, while illuminating for viewers each artist’s distinctive point of view. 

As a testament to their legacies, the exhibition features works by contemporary figurative painters Jenna Gribbon, Karolina Jabłońska, Chantal Joffe, Nikki Maloof, Wangari Mathenge, and Claire Tabouret, who carry forward the tradition of rendering lived images of self, family, friends, and the home. Presenting recent and new canvases created on the occasion of the exhibition, the contemporary artists share in the history and atmosphere of community, and expand upon the themes of womanhood, intimate portraiture, the nude, and the still life that underlie The Human Situation. 

LEVY GORVY DAYAN, NEW YORK

19 East 64th Street, New York City

www.levygorvydayan.com

Related Posts:

Marcia Marcus, Role Play: Paintings 1958-1973 @ Eric Firestone Gallery, New York, October 12 - December 2, 2017

Alice Neel: The Early Years @ David Zwirner, New York, September 9 - October 16, 2021

Alice Neel: Freedom @ David Zwirner, New York, February 26 - April 13, 2019

Alice Neel @ Philadelphia Museum of Art, February 18 - April 15, 2001

Sylvia Sleigh: Every leaf is precious @ Ortuzar, New York, February 12 – April 5, 2025

Alice Neel: The Early Years @ David Zwirner, New York

Alice Neel: The Early Years

David Zwirner, New York

September 9 — October 16, 2021

ALICE NEEL

Spanish Party, 1939 

© The Estate of Alice Neel

Courtesy The Estate of Alice Neel and David Zwirner

I paint to try to reveal the struggle, tragedy and joy of life.

—Alice Neel1

David Zwirner presents an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by ALICE NEEL (1900–1984) from the first decades of the artist’s influential career. The focused presentation centers on works from the 1930s through the 1950s, and includes interiors, memory paintings, New York City streetscapes, and portraits of family and others close to Alice Neel. At turns atmospheric, somber, and deeply personal, these works offer a chronological account of this significant period of Alice Neel’s life and work, and engage themes of interiority, intimacy, and the negotiation between private and public, which continue to resonate in our present moment. The Early Years is curated by gallery Senior Partner Bellatrix Hubert and Ginny Neel.

 

Painted from life and from memory in New York—first in Greenwich Village, and later in Spanish Harlem, where Alice Neel lived until 1962 before moving to the Upper West Side—the works in the exhibition examine the foundational decades of Alice Neel’s career, when she was struggling as an artist and mother during a time of social and economic upheaval and change. They reflect her commitment to figuration while abstraction was ascendant as well as her sensitivity and compassion toward her subjects. She is now widely acknowledged as one of the foremost American artists of the twentieth century, and these canvases and drawings register an introspective mood and the early personal struggles Alice Neel faced. 

The exhibition includes the evolving cityscapes and street views that reveal the grit and resilience of New York, where Alice Neel lived from the late 1920s until her death in 1984. Capturing the Depression era, her social-realist compositions from the 1930s show the economic conditions and disparities that permeated the city. In Under Brooklyn Bridge (1932), Alice Neel features men going about their work on an otherwise empty lower Manhattan street. The Cafeteria (1938) juxtaposes a haggard older woman with a youthful figure in evening finery seated beside her, as a waiter clears the table behind them. Alice Neel likewise presents the thrills of metropolitan life. The dreamlike Movie Lobby (1932), painted from memory, shows two women seen from a distance, arm in arm and enjoying a night out on the town, surrounded by the swirl of pattern and texture of a movie theater interior. In the atmospheric composition Spanish Party (1939), couples dance and children of all ages play at an apartment gathering in Spanish Harlem, where Alice Neel moved in 1938. Later images, such as the moonlit snowy scene depicted from life in Harlem Nocturne (1952), evoke her emotional connection to her neighborhood.

Also on view are canvases that reveal significant personal and emotional moments Neel experienced in her life. These include Alice and Her Child (1930), a rare self-portrait in which the artist is shown cradling a baby in a cemetery. Painted a few short years after the death of Alice Neel’s first daughter with Carlos Enríquez, Santillana, it memorializes her infant who died of diphtheria before her first birthday. The work’s setting, restrained color palette, overcast sky, and Alice Neel’s downturned eyes capture specific and universal feelings of maternal heartbreak and loss. The year in which the work was painted was a devastating one for the artist, Carlos Enríquez left her, taking their second daughter, Isabetta, with him to Cuba. Alice Neel suffered a nervous breakdown, which resulted in her hospitalization over the course of the next year. Dead Father (1946), another work painted from memory, was composed the day after her father’s funeral, and it presents his body in an open funeral casket, placing the viewer in the position of a mourner.

 

The exhibition features portraits of those closest to Alice Neel, including lovers, family members, friends, and intellectual peers. These are the works for which she is best known, and she would return to these subjects throughout her career. On view are a number of significant paintings of Alice Neel’s children that speak to the intertwined and at times conflicting roles she held of mother and working artist. Her studio was the home she shared with her sons, who are depicted as young children in their Spanish Harlem apartment in Christmas, Hartley and Richard (c. 1943–1944), a disquieting, domestic holiday scene. Another canvas, Sam and Hartley (c. 1945), shows her youngest son being clutched tightly by his father, the photographer and filmmaker Sam Brody, who was Alice Neel’s partner between 1940 and 1958. The image is pervaded by an emotional, tense atmosphere. Alice Neel’s portraits of her family form a kind of record of her personal sphere and chronicle her children’s maturation. Among the works on view are the artist’s tender portraits of Hartley and Richard as earnest teenagers in the 1950s, poised for adulthood.

Alice Neel: People Come First, a major traveling retrospective, is on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, through August 1, 2021, and will subsequently travel to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2021–2022) and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (2022). In 2022, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, will present Alice Neel: Un regard engagé.

The artist’s work is included in numerous museum collections internationally. David Zwirner has represented The Estate of Alice Neel since 2008, and the present exhibition marks the sixth solo exhibition of the artist’s work at the gallery.

1. Alice Neel, quoted in “The Art of Portraiture, in the Words of Four New York Artists,” The New York Times (October 31, 1976), p. D29.

DAVID ZWIRNER

537 West 20th Street, New York

www.davidzwirner.com

Updated 09/10/2022

Close-Up @ Fondation Beyeler, Riehen / Bâle : Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Lotte Laserstein, Frida Kahlo, Alice Neel, Marlene Dumas, Cindy Sherman, Elizabeth Peyton

CLOSE-UP

Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Lotte Laserstein, Frida Kahlo, Alice Neel, Marlene Dumas, Cindy Sherman, Elizabeth Peyton

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen / Bâle

19 septembre 2021 – 2 janvier 2022

MARLENE DUMAS

Teeth, 2018

Huile sur toile, 40 x 30 cm

Collection privée Madrid 

© Marlene Dumas 

Courtesy the Artist and David Zwirner

Photo: Kerry McFate

BERTHE MORISOT

Jeune femme au divan, 1885

Huile sur toile, 61 x 50.2 cm

Tate, London

Bequeathed by the Hon. Mrs A.E. Pleydell-Bouverie

through the Friends of the Tate Gallery 1968

Photo © Tate

L’exposition présente des œuvres de neuf femmes artistes dont l’œuvre occupe une position éminente dans l’histoire de l’art moderne depuis 1870 jusqu’à aujourd’hui. C’est l’époque où, pour la première fois, il devint possible à des femmes en Europe et en Amérique de développer une activité artistique professionnelle sur une large base.

Au centre de l’exposition figurent des artistes qui ont en commun leur intérêt pour la représentation d’êtres humains, le portrait dans ses différentes déclinaisons et l’autoportrait. La Française Berthe Morisot et l’Américaine Mary Cassatt, toutes deux actives dans les années 1870 et 1880 à Paris, qui était alors la capitale de la création artistique la plus avancée; l’Allemande Paula Modersohn-Becker de 1900 à 1907 entre la petite ville provinciale de Worpswede, dans le Nord de l’Allemagne, et la métropole parisienne; l’Allemande Lotte Laserstein de 1925 à 1933 dans le Berlin de la République de Weimar; la Mexicaine Frida Kahlo depuis la fin des années 1920 jusque vers 1950, à Mexico City, pendant la période mouvementée de la consolidation de la révolution mexicaine; l’Américaine Alice Neel depuis la fin des années 1920 jusqu’au début des années 1980, d’abord à Cuba, puis à Manhattan, de Greenwich Village au Upper West Side en passant par Spanish Harlem; Marlene Dumas, née en Afrique du Sud, qui a grandiau Cap au plus fort de l'Apartheid, et vit depuis 1976 à Amsterdam; en même temps l’Américaine Cindy Sherman à New York, pôle occidental d’une nouvelle génération d’artistes contemporains; et enfin l’Américaine Elizabeth Peyton depuis les années 1990, entre New York et l’Europe de l’Ouest.

L’exposition s’intéresse particulièrement au regard posé par ces artistes sur leurs environnements, tel qu’il s’exprime dans leurs portraits et leurs tableaux de figures. La réunion de certaines de ces œuvres permet de découvrir comment ce regard a changé entre 1870 et aujourd’hui et par quoi il se caractérise.

FONDATION BEYELER

Baselstrasse 77, CH-4125 Riehen

www.fondationbeyeler.ch

Alice Neel: Freedom @ David Zwirner, New York

Alice Neel: Freedom

David Zwirner, New York

February 26 — April 13, 2019

ALICE NEEL

Joe Gould, 1933. 

© The Estate of Alice Neel 

Courtesy The Estate of Alice Neel and David Zwirner

Art is two things: a search for a road and a search for freedom. It’s very hard to get freedom. You know all these things in life keep crawling over you all the time, so it’s very hard to feel free.

—Alice Neel1

David Zwirner presents an exhibition of paintings and significant works on paper by ALICE NEEL (1900–1984).

Spanning six decades of the artist’s career, Alice Neel: Freedom is organized by Ginny Neel of The Estate of Alice Neel. The exhibition focuses on the artist’s portrayal of the nude figure and the ways in which Alice Neel resolutely challenged traditional perceptions of sexuality, motherhood, and beauty.

One of the foremost American figurative painters of the twentieth century, Alice Neel was a humanist—she was fascinated by people. She loved to paint them in all their complexities—to penetrate and reveal their fears and anxieties, their defiance and survival. She also loved to paint the unadorned human figure, and her nude portraits explore the body with frankness while celebrating the individuality of each of her subjects. Alice Neel broke through conventional gender expectations and restrictions in order to paint the way she saw the world, and these paintings exemplify the courage and the freedom with which she approached her work and her life. In their mastery of form, color, and implied social commentary, these works are as relevant today as when they were painted.

The exhibition comprises significant loans drawn from museum and private collections. Among the earliest works on view is Well Baby Clinic (1928–1929). Painted from memory by the artist shortly after having given birth to her second daughter, the work is as much personal as it is political in that it presents an ambivalent and deeply nuanced image of childbirth. Of this painting, Alice Neel would later recall her interest in "the purity of the nurses’ outfits, and the white walls of the hospital, so neat, and then sloppy humanity there, all ragged at the edges."2

Also included in the show are tender representations of infancy and childhood, such as Andrew (1978), a portrait of Alice Neel’s infant grandson, and Isabetta (1934), which depicts her young daughter at six years of age. Other works in the exhibition, including Symbols (Doll and Apple) (1932; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Margaret Evans Pregnant (1978; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston), and the mother and child portrait Betty Homitzky and Jevin (1968) further complicate and challenge how pregnancy and motherhood could be envisioned and represented.

Among the works on view are depictions of friends and acquaintances, such as Nadya Nude (1933), shown lying on a bed of patterned and draped fabric. The pose is echoed in paintings such as John Perreault (1972; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), which depicts the art critic and curator unclothed. These works upend and challenge the art-historical trope of the reclining nude with Alice Neel’s singular gaze and approach to the figure. Also included is Joe Gould (1933), which presents the eccentric bohemian with multiple penises, a painting that is at once shocking and affectionate.

As Helen Molesworth notes in a newly commissioned essay published in the accompanying exhibition catalogue, "Some of Neel’s abiding questions were: What is the gaze we have for nakedness? What is nakedness without sex? Is there a gaze that encompasses sexuality but is not necessarily about desire? Can desire exist without objectification? These questions are perhaps more apposite now than ever.… Perhaps this is why these pictures feel so relevant now. They are images of nakedness that are neither pornographic nor pathological, medical, clinical, patronizing, nor demeaning.… These are pictures of what it looks like to be curious about people when they are naked."3

ALICE NEEL was born in 1900 in Merion Square, Pennsylvania, and died in 1984 in New York. Although she exhibited sporadically early in her career, her work has been shown widely from the 1960s onwards. In 1971, a comprehensive solo exhibition of Alice Neel’s paintings was held at her alma mater, Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, and in 1974, she had her first retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. It was followed by a large-scale presentation of eighty-three paintings in 1975 at the Georgia Museum of Art, The University of Georgia, Athens. In 1978, the Graham Gallery, New York, organized the first retrospective dedicated to the artist’s works on paper, and in 1979, a survey of her paintings was co-hosted by the Universit of Bridgeport and The Silvermine Guild of Artists in Connecticut.

To celebrate the centenary of the artist’s birth, the Philadelphia Museum of Art organized Alice Neel, a solo exhibition of Alice Neel’s work, which debuted in 2000 at the Whitney Museum of American Art before traveling to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, among other venues. In 2010, the survey exhibition Alice Neel: Painted Truths was organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and traveled to the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and Moderna Museet Malmö, Sweden. In 2016, the Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki, presented Alice Neel: Painter of Modern Life, which traveled to the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, and the Fondation Vincent van Gogh in Arles, France, before concluding at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg. The artist’s work is included in numerous museum collections internationally. David Zwirner has represented The Estate of Alice Neel since 2008, and Alice Neel: Freedom marks the fifth solo exhibition of the artist’s work at the gallery.

1. Alice Neel, quoted in Patricia Hills, Alice Neel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1983), p. 18.

2. Ibid., p. 23.

3. Helen Molesworth, "Looking with and Looking at Alice Neel," in Alice Neel: Freedom. Exh. cat. (New York: David Zwirner Books, 2019), pp. 16–17.

Alice Neel: Freedom

Exhibition Catalogue

Autor: Molesworth Helen

New York: David Zwirner Books, 2019

DAVID ZWIRNER

537 West 20th Street, New York

www.davidzwirner.com

Updated 09/10/2022

Alice Neel Exhibition at Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

Alice Neel

Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

26 February - 11 April 2015

Xavier Hufkens presents the gallery’s first exhibition dedicated to the work of Alice Neel (1900-1984). Drawn from the artist’s estate, the presentation includes paintings from all periods of Neel’s career, together with a selection of drawings. This is the first showing of her work in Belgium.

Born in Philadelphia in 1900, Alice Neel trained at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women and carved out a career as an artist in New York, often in difficult circumstances. Neel’s dedication to the ‘unfashionable’ art of portrait painting and social realism – and this during the decades of abstract expressionism, pop art and minimalism – ensured that her work remained permanently out of kilter with avant-garde artistic developments. To quote Jeremy Lewison, advisor to the Alice Neel Estate, ‘she was isolated in a sea of changing styles’. While this was reflected in a lack of commercial and critical success during her most productive years, a retrospective organised by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974 confirmed a groundswell of belated recognition. After her death in 1984, critical interest in Neel’s work further intensified and led to a series of landmark exhibitions in Europe. Alice Neel is today recognised as one of the greatest American figurative painters of the twentieth century.

Alice Neel’s posthumous success is intimately connected to her profound social conscience and idiosyncratic choice of sitters. Working across six decades of radical social and political upheaval, Neel’s approach to her art was uncompromising and unwavering. Passionately interested in the trials and tribulations of everyday life, and the desperate struggle to survive in what she called the ‘rat race of New York’, Alice Neel interacted with people from all walks of life. A self-described ‘collector of souls’, Alice Neel’s work provides an illuminating insight into the cultural, countercultural and multicultural circles in which she moved. Furthermore, she often tackled subjects that were perceived as ‘risky’ during her lifetime: Alice Neel is known for painting gay people long before homosexuality was legalised, transvestites, members of the poor, immigrant communities in Spanish Harlem (where she lived), candid portraits of nursing and pregnant women as well as unflinching male and female nudes.

Among Alice Neel’s greatest gifts were her remarkable mastery of her chosen medium and her unique ability to plumb the inner psychological depths of her sitters, whom she always painted from life. She began painting in the 1920s but it was not till the early 1930s that she really got into her stride, a period represented in the exhibition by her sober portrait Martin Jay (1932). When she moved from Greenwich Village to Spanish Harlem in 1938, she turned her attention to the local immigrant community, many of whom lived on the margins of society and were afflicted by the poverty of the Depression years. Alvin Simon (1959) and Mother and Child (1962) are classic works of this type. Neel’s gradual acceptance into the art world saw her not only begin to paint her fellow artists, but also a whole host of other figures involved in the vibrant New York art scene of the 1960s and 70s. Her portraits of the writer, poet and editor Michael Benedikt (1967) and the graphic designer and scenographer Ron Kajiwara (1970) are typical in this respect. Alice Neel also painted infants and members of her own family. Three portraits of children, painted at different periods of her life, and one of her daughter-in-law Ginny, a frequent sitter, are also on display.

While Alice Neel perfectly captured the zeitgeist of her age, the visceral honesty and analytical clarity of her work renders it both timeless and universal. Reflecting upon painting, she explained: ‘It was more than a profession. It was even a therapy, for there I just told it as it was. It takes a lot of courage in life to tell it how it is.’

In recent years, Alice Neel’s work has been the subject of a major survey of paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (touring to the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and Moderna Museet, Malmö, 2010) and a retrospective exhibition of drawings at the Nordiska Akvarellmeuseet, Skärhamn (2013). Smaller solo exhibitions have been held at Victoria Miro, London (2014), the Gallery Hyundai, Seoul, Korea (2013), David Zwirner, New York (2012) and Aurel Scheibler, Berlin (2011). Her work has been included in many important group shows, most recently Face Value. Portraiture in the Age of Abstraction, National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C. (2014), Paint Made Flesh at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville (touring to the Phillips Collection, Washington D.C., and the Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, 2008) and Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles (touring to PS1, New York and Vancouver Art Gallery, 2007). Her work has also been written about extensively.

XAVIER HUFKENS 

6 rue St-Georges | St-Jorisstraat, 1050 Brussels 

www.xavierhufkens.com

Alice Neel Retrospective at Philadelphia Museum of Art

Alice Neel
Philadelphia Museum of Art
February 18 - April 15, 2001

Alice Neel's daring portraits of people and places are among the most insightful images in 20th-century American art. To celebrate the centennial of her birth, the Philadelphia Museum of Art has organized Alice Neel, the first full-scale examination of her inspiring and provocative life and work. Organized with the full cooperation of the artist's family, this exhibition features 75 paintings and watercolors, many of which have never been previously exhibited. 

Born in 1900 in suburban Philadelphia, Alice Neel led a rich and complicated life, filled with friends, lovers, family, fellow artists, and a strong sense of community and social activism. A 1925 graduate of the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art and Design), Alice Neel spent a year in Havana, then moved with her husband to New York City, where she remained the rest of her life. In the 1930s, her subjects included the colorful Greenwich Village poets and writers, as well as friends and family. Neel's revolutionary nude portraits of figures such as her young daughter Isabetta and the bohemian icon Joe Gould are still audacious images. Employed by the W.P.A. during the Great Depression, Neel painted scenes of the city street that reflect her trenchant concern for the dispossessed: striking workers, impoverished families, and the homeless. Among the highlights of Alice Neel are works from the Depression era that have never been exhibited previously in a museum.

During the postwar era, when the tide of the art world had turned toward abstraction, Alice Neel remained committed to the representation of the human figure. She was steadfast in depicting the world around her with compassion, acuity and freedom. Alice Neel always displayed her empathy for her subjects--from her young sons or her dying mother to left-wing activists. Portraits of her neighbors in Spanish Harlem employ humor and insight to great effect--both tender and unforgiving at once.

In the early 1960s Alice Neel received her first recognition outside a small circle of admirers. Her astounding emergence, late in life, corresponded with the dawning of the women's movement and with the art world's reawakened interest in the human figure. Alice Neel's work of the next two decades reflects her increasing celebrity. Her portraits of fellow artists--including Andy Warhol, Frank O'Hara, Robert Smithson, and Faith Ringgold--document a professional world in which Alice Neel was suddenly a seemingly improbable star. It was during these years that Alice Neel perfected the style for which she is now best remembered: large-scale portraits in the realist tradition of Thomas Eakins and Robert Henri, but newly inventive and unforgettably direct.

A centennial salute from the artist's native city of Philadelphia, whose culture and Museum she treasured, Alice Neel marks an opportune moment for a first full appraisal. With the new century comes a reevaluation of the modernist canon, which emphasized abstraction at the expense of adventurous figurative artists. The present-day resurgence of portraiture as a vibrant field for both veteran and emerging artists confirms Alice Neel's ongoing legacy.

Alice Neel is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with essays and entries by Ann Temkin, The Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Assistant Curator Susan Rosenberg, and Richard Flood, Chief Curator at the Walker Art Center. Temkin discusses Alice Neel's interconnection of life and art; Rosenberg explores Neel's artistic roots in the 1930s; and Flood focuses on the art-world portraits of the 1960s and '70s. The catalogue also includes reminiscences by Alice Neel's subjects, and the first detailed chronology of Alice Neel's life, richly illustrated with many never-before-published photographs.

Alice Neel debuts at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, from June 29 through September 17, 2000, and continue its national tour at the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, October 7 through December 31, 2000; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, February 18 through April 15, 2001; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, June 10 through September 2, 2001.

Alice Neel was organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art with the support of The William Penn Foundation, The Pew Charitable Trusts, Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro, The Women's Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Alice's List, a consortium of individual donors. Corporate sponsorship was provided by AT&T.

PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART
26th Street and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA 19130
www.philamuseum.org