Review: Alice Neel’s People
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s survey of paintings by Alice Neel titled People Come First is stunning. Several rooms on the museum’s second floor contain numerous figurative paintings and portraits made by an artist whose vibrant color palette provided the way in to every one of her pieces. While the display of paintings is more thematic and less chronological, it is easy to notice that Neel’s early works, from the 1930s, lacked the kind of all-encompassing depth that eventually surfaced in her paintings from later decades such as the 1970s.
The portraits from the late 1960s and 70s are grand. The sitters look out at the viewer from different vantage points. James Farmer, Richard Gibbs, Robbie Tillotson, and Irene Peslikis, for instance, each carry stark expressions of personal persuasion while others such as the Fuller Brush Man, the Black Boys, Geoffrey Hendricks with Brian Buczak, and Linda Nochlin appear far more engaging. The portrait of Andy Warhol made in 1970, following another invasive surgery, exudes an unbearable suffering seen in Neel’s earlier portrait of her mother titled, Last Sickness. (1953)
