Moderna Museet Now introduces Alice Neel ~ 'Collector of Souls'

Written by Monte Kasmet Saturday, 20 August 2011 21:39

Stockholm, Sweden - The American artist Alice Neel (1900-1984) is the first to be featured in the new exhibition series Moderna Museet Now. Her imposing portraits and self-portraits earned her influence and acclaim, despite private and professional hardships. In the 1950s, she was under investigation for alleged contacts with the Communist Party. In the years when pop art and abstract expressionism dominated the art scene, her psychologically realistic style was not in great repute, and she lived on welfare.

Alice Neel was a rebel, socially and politically aware, and also entertaining: the year she died she appeared on the legendary Johnny Carson talk show twice – most likely a record for a visual artist – and was photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe.

Alice Neel’s paintings from the 1960s and 70s portray the New York art scene at the time. At the Abstract Artists Club she met the poet Frank O’Hara, later to become curator at the Museum of Modern Art, and portrayed him. This painting, one of the eleven shown at Moderna Museet, was reproduced in Art News, and an article in the same publication led to her breakthrough. She was soon painting other famous artists, including Duane Hanson and Andy Warhol.

Alice Neel was fascinated by the psychology and sociology of the person she was painting. With a keen eye she portrayed the touching side of the individual, along with their weaknesses. “Regardless of whether I am painting or not, I have an immense fascination for humanity. Even when I’m not working, I’m analyzing people,” she once commented.

Moderna Museet Now is a series of small scale exhibitions of contemporary art, occasionally featuring historically interesting oeuvres. This new series comprises some four exhibitions per year.Curator: Jeremy Lewison, former director of the collections at Tate, London, where he curated numerous exhibitions, including Barnett Newman and Jackson Pollock. Curator Moderna Museet Now: Magnus af Petersens. 

Films will be shown in the Cinema every weekend at 10 am – 6 pm from 6 September to 7 December: Den mänskliga komedin, a film about Alice Neel by Lars Lambert. (DVD, 34 min, 1993) and Alice Neel Documentary, by Andrew Neel (DVD, 82 min, 2006).

Alice Neel was a pioneer among American women artists. Doggedly pursuing a career as a painter of people or, in her own words, ‘a collector of souls’, Neel was never fashionable nor in step with avant-garde movements. Although one can identify stylistic influences on her early work, particularly from northern Europe and Scandinavia – for example Otto Dix and Edvard Munch – she painted in a style and with an approach distinctively her own.

Candour is probably the overriding characteristic of Neel’s art. Her depiction of Don Perlis, an artist, and his son Jonathan, a variation on the theme of mother and child that preoccupied her throughout her career, does not flinch from the portrayal of Jonathan’s disability. He is a wounded creature.

Born in 1900, Neel’s early career was severely marked by a personal crisis precipitated by the death of her first born at the age of two and her failing marriage to a Cuban painter, Carlos Enriquez. Her second child by Carlos was taken into care by his parents in Cuba. By 1930 she suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized. On leaving she returned to painting and began to paint her friends like Nadya and Nona. Nadya’s real name was Edna Meisner but, as a graphologist, she took an alias to sound more exotic. For Neel she ‘represented decadence’ which is a characteristic of German Neue Sachlichkeit painting.

Nadya and Nona, 1933, is one of Neel’s earliest nudes. For a female artist it was a provocative, daring subject raising issues of lesbianism that recall a masterpiece of realism by Gustave Courbet, Sleep, but deliberately eschewing the erotic, seductive overtones of the voyeuristic, male gaze. Neel’s two women display contrasting characteristics; Nadya, unappealingly grim-faced but open and confident, facing the viewer, Nona hiding her sexual features and clutching the pillow with apprehension. Neel’s psychological penetration is evident at a very early stage in her career, as well as her tendency to project her own feelings onto her subjects.
In the 1930s Neel lived in Greenwich Village and mixed mostly in literary and left wing circles. A member of the Artists’ Congress, in 1933 she enrolled in the Public Works of Art Program, a government funded project intended to give out-of-work artists financial support in return for works of art. When this was disbanded she signed up to the Works Progress Administration by which she was required to paint urban scenes. In addition many of her paintings in this period have strong autobiographical allusions relating to childbirth, infant mortality, urban poverty and political protest.

On the Upper East Side, as well as her friends, Neel painted neighbors and chance acquaintances. The truth she was after was all around her; immigrants suffering hardship during the economic depression and war. The Spanish Family, 1943, which recalls Manet’s Gare St Lazare in its depiction of a mother and child in front of railings, is typical of Neel’s unsentimental portrayal of low life. Whereas Manet took an oblique view of the figures, Neel faced them head on, not flinching from confrontation with the immigrant family’s plight.

The portrayal of a mother and children, absent a father, might signify an unconscious self-identification. In 1941 Neel gave birth to a second son, Hartley, fathered by the photographer and film-maker, Sam Brody. Brody lived off and on with Neel over the next two decades but undoubtedly the responsibility for bringing up the children was left to Neel. The boys loomed large in her life and she painted intense portraits of them such as Richard at Age Five, 1944. Neel rarely received commissions to paint portraits and her works, when she managed to sell them, commanded low prices. Her solo shows in 1938 and 1944 were not a success.

In the 1950s Neel was under investigation owing to her periodic involvement with the Communist Party. These were anxious times for left wing sympathisers. As the painter, Jospeh Solman, wrote in the brochure for her 1950 exhibition: ‘At times, an element of foreboding, akin to that in the work of Munch, creeps into her work; and there are portraits that are almost vivisections.’

O’Hara was an active homosexual which was hazardous in the United States. Homosexuality was regarded as a mental illness and a criminal offence. In subsequent years, Neel painted many portraits of homosexual men and women. Neel’s choice of sitters seems in part to have been strategic but she left an unparalleled painted record of the New York scene in the 1960s and 1970s. Her success was marked by a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974, a rare honour for a female artist, and she became something of a feminist icon in the heyday of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Uninhibited by convention Neel took on a subject that hitherto had been almost exclusively the domain of male artists, the female nude.  

Since her death in 1984 there has been a revival of interest in Neel’s art, not least because of renewed interest in figurative painting and a realisation that there are many different ways to narrate the history of modern art. Among contemporary painters Marlene Dumas and Elizabeth Peyton regard her as a crucial, pioneering influence. As Peyton has written: ‘It is very hard to comprehend the depth of the struggle that Alice Neel went through to make her paintings. It is painful to think about that, and it always makes me angry. How could anyone deny the importance of what she did?’ . . By Jeremy Lewison

Visit :   www.modernamuseet.se/v4/templates/template6.asp?lang=Eng&id=1745

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