Daily Art Appreciation
Alice Neel, like a cinematic auteur, collected throughout her career as a painter, a cast of recurring characters: friends, family, lovers, poets, artists, and strangers. Her expressionist portraits, like those of the New Objectivity painters of the Weimer Republic, exaggerate the sitters’ features, often to comical or cruel effect. But Neel’s portraits can also suggest extreme tenderness, generosity, and cultural understanding, depicting, “her belief that an individual’s body, posture, and physiogamy not only revealed personal idiosyncrasies, but embodied the character of an era,” (Hilary Robinson, . Feminism-art-theory: an Anthology, 1968–2000, Malden, 2001. p. 281).
The present works come from the collection of David and Sondra Brody, the respective son and widow of Neel’s lover’ Sam Brody, a Communist intellectual. Neel paints the Brody family with an even greater degree of intimacy and psychological understanding than her other subjects. Neel, explaining her artistic practice, says: “I became the person for a couple of hours, so when they leave and I am finished, I feel disoriented. I have no self. I don’t belong anywhere. I don’t know who or what I am. It’s terrible, this feeling, but it just comes because of this powerful identification I make with the person” (Alice Neel and Jeremy Lewison, Alice Neel: Painted Truths, Houston, 2010, p. 51). Neel’s ability to inhabit her subjects, especially those with whom she was close, is uncanny, and the present portraits are undeniable testaments to empathy.
Alice Neel first painted David Brody when he was four or five years old. Even as an infant he was thin; his build fascinated Neel and encouraged her to exaggerate his half-elegant, half-awkward mannerisms. The present work, painted in the summer of 1968 when David was ten years-old, shows him in convalescence, recovering from a major, live-saving kidney operation. Sondra suspects that the amorphous, blue shadow looming behind the green chair in which David sits is meant to indicate the presence of Sam, hovering, always-protective, a “force to be reckoned with,” who altered the air of any room he walked into. David’s hand, skeletal and contorted, was a famous Brody trait, and Neel’s depiction serves as a sort of clue to familial inheritance. David remembers sitting for the portrait in Neel’s 107th Street flat that overlooked Amsterdam Avenue and that the multiple-day process was “grueling.” Though only a small boy, David’s eyes — deep-set, liquid, probing — along with his crossed legs, indicated a precocity and haunting sadness at odds with his youth.
So important was the subject to Neel, she painted a second, nearly identical portrait, not long after the present original version (See Christie’s, New York, May 12, 2010, lot 169: Sold for $782,500).
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