Alice Neel

American, 1900–1984

BiographyBorn in Merion Square, Pennsylvania in 1900, Neel was the daughter of a railroad clerk, and grew up in the small Pennsylvania town of Colwyn. She attended the Philadelphia School of Design (now Moore College of Art). During a summer session at the Chester Springs Art School, she met Carlos Enriguez, a wealthy Cuban, whom she married after graduation in 1925. The two had a daughter and moved to Cuba, and then returned to New York, where their daughter died of diptheria. Neel and Carlos had a second daughter in 1928. Shortly after, Carlos took the child, abandoning Neel and triggering her nervous breakdown. Following treatment in Pennsylvania, Neel returned to New York, where she lived with Kenneth Doolittle, a former sailor, in Greenwich Village.

From then on, Neel continued to develop themes she had already addressed in the 1920s--portraits of famous, odd, and often poor people, as well as still lifes and cityscapes--laid down in thick, dark layers of paint, in a style that drew from 1930s North American realism and Latin American social realism and expressionism. Neel's personal life continued to be unconventional and difficult (she had several children, fathered by several different men). Her painting, which differed sharply from the art fashionable in New York during the 1940s and '50s, did not achieve recognition until the early '60s, when Neel was over sixty.

While the breadth of her work was represented in various exhibitions and retrospectives, it was chiefly her portraits of the 1960s and '70s, with their brighter palette, thin surface of paint, and fluid lines, that secured her reputation as a painter who "catches humanity's moment of greatest doubt and suspends the thought forever on a flat and fragile mirror-like plane."8 In the 1970s she gave frequent slide lectures of her work.

Alice Neel died in New York in 1984.