Daily Art Appreciation
‘Alice Neel does not need my encomium. Her work declares an appetite for experience, has a patent and shaming honesty, is indifferent to rules and hierarchies. There is no: “Look mummy, I am thinking,” but she is very intelligent. She has courage, not least in her choice of sitters; it seems that, the more stressful the sitting, the better the painting. As I get older I feel, increasingly and dauntingly, that artists have to be heroes. Alice Neel is one of mine.’
Frank Auerbach quoted in Alice Neel: Painted Truths, exh. cat., The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2010, p.93.
Born in 1900, Neel spent more than half a century painting expressionistic portraits of extraordinary emotional depth. In the 1960s she moved from Spanish Harlem to the Upper West Side where she befriended and painted several major players in the New York art scene, including Andy Warhol (fig. 1). While at this stage Neel’s work finally began to gain prominence, critics tended to overlook her technical skills as a painter, instead focusing on her colourful character and personal life. As with most of Neel’s highly accomplished portraits, Susan Rossen is a work which to contemporary critics seemed conventional alongside the omnipresent styles of Abstract Expressionism and Pop, but which over time and upon closer examination has revealed itself as an expression of technical mastery and psychological depth.
While ostensibly a realist, Neel rejected academic exactitude and photographic likeness, never resting on straightforward reportage of the sitter’s appearance. Instead she transformed her figures through expressive brushwork and an almost Mannerist distortion or caricature, to achieve a vivid depiction of her sitter’s inner psychology. Her subjects’ countenances are painted in vivid hues, their heads are too large for their bodies, their limbs are lengthened, and their poses are distorted all in the service of garnering a sense of their inner being. Neel preferred painting her subjects off centre, the angle of their forms creating dynamic movement across the picture plane. In the present work, the figure is restricted within a chair, a motif which recurs frequently in Neel’s work, her body creating an S curve. Her head is slightly cocked and her face is not symmetrical, one eye seems more piercing then the other. This dominance of one eye has its roots in the teachings of Robert Henri. Henri was a leading figure in the Ashcan School and an accomplished portraitist, and was a teacher at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, which Neel attended.
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