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Kinship: Alice Neel Looks at the Family
2/14/1998 - 3/29/1998
An exhibition of portraits of the family by Alice Neel, one of
the finest painters of her generation, is at the Norton Museum of
Art February 14 through March 29, 1998. Both critics and the
subjects of her paintings have written of Neel's ability to portray
the dynamics of relationships. "Kinships" focuses on particular
family relationships: siblings, domestic pairs, parents and
children, and members of her own family. The exhibition was
organized by the Tacoma Art Museum, and is sponsored by The
Elizabeth Norton Society.
Born in 1900, Alice Neel worked as a figurative painter during the
decades of WPA realism, postwar abstract expressionism, and 1970s
minimalism. She persevered in her work despite a turbulent personal
life that included a year of hospitalization after a nervous
breakdown, the destruction in 1934 of over two hundred and fifty
paintings and drawings, and little attention to her work until the
1960s. Her art demonstrates a vigorous working manner, an unsparing
skill in observation and a generous tolerance for the
unpredictability of human nature.
Neel disliked being called a portraitist, but rather labeled herself
as a "collector of souls." She believed that each person has an
identity, an essential core of personality, and it was this that she
sought to reveal in her paintings. She often captured aspects of
relationships of which her subjects were not aware, and combined in
her work her stringent analysis of their interactions with a broad
acceptance of the depth of human emotions. She painted her subjects
as distinct individuals, in the poses that were natural to them;
poses that, in Neel's words, "involve ... all their character and
social standing ... what the world has done to them, and their
retaliation."
The compositions, as well as the subjects' body language, of such
works as The Black Spanish American Family or Annemarie and Georgie,
allows the viewer to observe how family members draw together
tenderly or reluctantly, look away, touch one another, draw back, or
open up. The arms of the parents often encircle their children in
Neel's paintings. The early Mother and Child, Havana, 1926, uses
this pose to depict a simple, secure relationship.
However, in later works, such as Mother and Child (Nancy and
Olivia), 1967, the poses are more attuned to the ambivalent emotions
present in the relationship. Don Perlis and Jonathan, 1982, is a
portrait of Neel's artist friend and his mentally disabled son. The
father's tenderness for Jonathan fills the painting, in which he
cradles the boy in his left arm. The warm colors and loose
application of paint hide neither the shadowed look on the father's
face, nor the gentle vacantness on the son's.
Neel's early work tended to depict generalized relationships, but as
her later work deepened, she embraced the particular. She didn't
paint "the gay couple," or "the art world couple;" instead, she
painted unique individuals, as her titles relate: Geoffrey Hendricks
and Brian or Cindy Nemser and Chuck. Each subject has a clear
individualism. She respected the distinct character of each person
without sentimentalizing him or her.
The importance of the family for Neel is reflected in her portraits
of her sons and their wives and children, some of her best known
subjects. Last Sickness, 1952, painted in the year before her
mother's death, is intimate and unsentimental, a daughter's record
of her strong mother's decline. In Richard in the Era of the
Corporation, Neel expresses concern for a son driven by the
pressures of a corporate career.
Alice Neel studied at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women,
now the Moore College of Art. She married Cuban artist Carlos
Enriquez in 1925 and moved to Cuba with him where her first child,
Santillana, was born. Another daughter was born in 1928. In the
early 1930s, Neel returned to New York, where she joined the Public
Works of Art Project and later the Federal Art Project. Few of her
works from this period remain, however, for in 1934, a man with whom
she was living destroyed hundreds of paintings and drawings. Two
sons were born in 1939 and 1941. Finally in the 1960s, sixty year
old Neel began to receive national attention. A major retrospective
of her portraits was held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in
1974, and in 1976 she was elected to the American Academy and
Institute of Arts and Letters. President Jimmy Carter awarded her
with a National Women's Caucus for Award in 1979.
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The Norton Museum
of Art is a major cultural attraction in Florida.
The Museum is internationally known for its distinguished permanent
collection featuring
19th and 20th century European and American art, Chinese, contemporary art and photography.
From its founding the Norton has been famous for its masterpieces
of 19th century and 20th century painting
and sculpture by European artists such as Brancusi, Gauguin, Matisse,
Miró, Monet, Picasso
and by Americans such as Davis, Hassam, Hopper, Manship, O'Keeffe,
Pollock and Sheeler.
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