Painting. Painting! I love it. Abstract, figurative, I love it all. I want it, I need it, and I got it. Two shows on display in London currently couldn’t offer a better chance to understand how painting can work and succeed, both representational and not, than Alice Neel’s retrospective at the Barbican (Hot off the Griddle, until May 21st) and Action Gesture Paint at the Whitechapel (Women Artists and Global Abstraction, 1940-70, until May 7th).
I’ll start with Neel’s showing. I was unaware that I was so aware of her portraits until I came across the picture of ‘Andy Warhol, 1970’ mid-way around the spaces. He’s seated toward the end of a couch (and sofas appear a lot in her paintings, as do chairs), with his hands in his lap, looking up, though his eyes are closed. It’s as if he’s thinking gently, and to help him in this, has shielded his sight from theIt’s astonishing to see the way great painters carefully observe and then depict the range of hues actually visible in the world; skin isn’t just pink. Lastly, whilst I’m discussing colour here, I’ll point out the pale baby blue of the background, behind Warhol’s left shoulder, as a shadow, which actually appears as a wing, the kind we might imagine an angel might have, with the paint itself tapering off as we move down the canvas. The rest of the surface is pretty much bare. There is the outline of the furniture, some filling in behind his legs, but really that’s it.
