NEW YORK, WHERE PAINTER ALICE NEEL lived for most of her life, was more than her home. It was her career, her passion, her commitment and her most returned to subject. She was obsessed with the city – and not for the glamour of Park Lane or bright lights of Broadway – but for the everyday realities of marginalised residents in poor neighbourhoods.
Throughout her career, which spanned some 60 years and much of the twentieth century, Neel championed the underdog, often committing to canvas those rarely, if ever, portrayed in art, saying “I love to paint people who have been torn to shreds by the rat race in New York.” Her paintings gave overlooked people dignity and humanity – and the chance to be seen.
Now, a new exhibition at London’s Barbican Art Gallery, will show some 70 paintings from public and private collections all over the world, as well as letters and photography, giving audiences fresh insight into her extraordinary life and career. Her work is clearly social and political commentary and is still as powerful today as it ever was, consisting of figurative paintings of herself, friends, lovers, famous artists and complete strangers. However, according to curator, Eleanor Nairne, Neel hated the word portrait. “She preferred to call them pictures of people,” she says. “It’s symptomatic of her unstuffy approach to painting: she didn’t want something formal or contrived, she wanted to capture the heart of a person, just as they are, with or without their clothing. And that’s no easy thing to do. Sometimes she liked to joke that she was ‘a collector of souls’ and I think that’s why people respond so powerfully to her work.”
