Anarchist Humanism:Alice Neel @ the Barbican.

"All my life I wanted to do a nude self-portrait, but I put it off till now when people would accuse me of insanity rather than vanity" - Alice Neel

Self-Portrait (1980)

A nude portrait of a woman in her mid-seventies. What a way to start a show. It says something about Alice Neel that she waited until that age until she 'dared' paint herself naked but it also says something about the Barbican and the way they're telling the story of her life and her career in their Alice Neel:Hot Off The Griddle show.

Back in July 2017 I visited a (free) Alice Neel retrospective at the Victoria Miro Gallery - and I wrote about it too. There will, no doubt, be some repetition her and, most likely, there will be some contradiction too but the Barbican's (paying) show was considerably more extensive than the Victoria Miro one. If equally fascinating.

Born on the 28th January 1900, Neel liked to say she was just four weeks younger than the century. She described herself as having "hypersensitivity and the will of the devil" and these attributes, she felt, were key to being a good artist. If not, initially, a successful one. Neel worked in portraiture, mostly in New York, at a time when abstraction was all the rage.

Since her death in 1984, her work has been reappraised and she has been dubbed 'the court painter of the underground' for her vivid portraits of people who were, during her lifetime, often considered to be leading marginal existences. Operating on the perimeter of mainstream life. Rarely painted.

The Barbican's journey begins in Havana, Cuba where Neel and her husband, the Cuban artist Carlos Enrique Gomez, moved after getting married in 1925. It was her first trip abroad, having grown up in small town Pennsylvania, and she was profoundly struck by the light and colours of the Caribbean. She became a mother, to Santillana del Mar, in 1926 but still found plenty of time to paint. Her husband and an unnamed French Girl may have been typical subject matter but Neel also painted beggars she saw on the street. Already, she was looking around her and refusing to ignore the truth in her work.

French Girl (1920s)

Carlos Enriquez (1926)

Beggars, Havana, Cuba (1926)

Back in New York's Greenwich Village in the 1930s, Neel had a nervous breakdown and spent time in psychiatric hospitals. As she put it herself:- "I didn't do anything but fall apart and go to pieces". Santillana had died of diptheria at just eleven months old and Enriquez had taken their second daughter, Isabetta, back to Cuba to live with his family.

The pain Neel must have undergone would have been unbearable, unimaginable, and the only way out of it turned out to be by consuming herself with her art. From now on, Neel would be a singular artist. She would do things her way.

She fell  into the beatnik scene and made images that some would have found scandalous. Not least Joe Gould and his friends with their todgers out, sometimes multiple todgers. Bronx Bacchus appears to have a very long, thin, one and Ethel Ashton's not leaving much to the imagination either. She even painted herself having a piss (so the 1980 nude wasn't her first nude self-portrait after all) with her friend John Rothschild keeping up that solid male tradition of urinating into the sink.

Joe Gould (1933)

Bronx Bacchus (1929)

Ethel Ashton (1930)

Christopher Lazare (1932)

Untitled (Alice Neel and John Rothschild in the Bathroom) (1935)

But as Neel came out of her depression, America went into one. A great depression that followed the Wall Street Crash of 1929. As part of his New Deal programme, Franklin D. Roosevelt launched the Public Works of Art Project in 1933 and Neel signed up as soon as possible. She was paid $26.88 a week in return for producing one painting (of an agreed size) every day.

Nude paintings, however, were not accepted So instead Neel took to capturing scenes of New York's adversity. She became so politically involved she was even arrested for picketing. The paintings from this time, like 1933's Cityscape and 1936's Uneeda Biscuit Strike, are rather excellent. Imagine if Lowry visited New York. They're quite beautiful even when they're showing some very worrying times. None more worrying than street protests about the rise of the Nazis.

Cityscape (1933)

Uneeda Biscuit Strike (1936)

Longshoremen, Returning from Work (1936)

Berenice Abbott - 'El', Second and Third Avenue Lines (1936)

Nazis Murder Jews (1936)

While the world was going to shit, Neel's life was picking up. She'd met the Puerto Rican nightclub singer Jose Negron and they'd moved to Spanish Harlem together. Into a 'tremendous' apartment with ample studio space and, crucially, light for Neel to work. But, in what is starting to look like a pattern, Jose left Neel when their son Richard was only three months old.

Neel stayed in the area and stayed friendly with his family. "I love you Harlem", Neel wrote in her diary, "for the rich deep vein of human feeling buried under your fire engines". Finding herself now in a financially precarious system, she identified with the strivers and the hustle of the neighbourhood and painted those that lived there with a sense of empathy rather than sympathy. Some of the faces are haunted by the grim reality of their life, others are resistant, others still exuberant and buoyant. All, of course, feel very real.

Puerto Rico Libre! (1936)

A Quiet Summer's Day (c.1963)

Spanish Party (1939)

Black Spanish-American Family (1950)

The Spanish Family (1943)

As well as locals from her neighbourhood, Neel began to paint people she admired for their political commitments. These included the Marxist filmmaker Sam Brody (who became her partner and father of her son, Hartley) and the communist intellectual Harold Cruse. She considered, at the height of abstraction, portraiture to be a political act. She had no issue with abstract art but she didn't want to remove 'man' from art. Above all else, she was a lover of humanity.

Neel had joined the Communist Party as early as 1935 but post-war, the Cold War had introduced a feverish anxiety into American society and anyone with left wing politics was deemed suspicious. A situation that sadly continues to this day. Neel was investigated by the FBI whose files describe her, not unfairly, as " romantic Bohemian type communist". When two agents arrived to interview her in 1955, she asked if they'd like her to paint them. They politely declined.

Neel kept an image of Lenin on her kitchen wall until the end of her life and liked to describe herself as an 'anarchic humanist'. It seems a pretty good description of her work. Tender human portraits side by side with rowdy protests and wakes for deceased feminist campaigners. Neel saw the world as it was and not how she wanted it to be.

Mercedes Arroyo (1952)

Horace Cayton (1949)

Harold Cruse (c.1950)

Save Willie McGee (c.1950)

Death of Mother Bloor (c.1951)

Rita and Hubert (1954)

Which, of course, can sometimes make life difficult. In 1958,. she began to see a therapist for the first time. Dr Anthony Sterrett encouraged her to be even more ambitious in her work. She plucked up the courage to ask Frank O'Hara (then a curator at the Museum of Modern Art) to sit for her and soon she started to become reasonably well known. As she put it, she finally got before the world.

Social justice movements and second wave feminism were in the air and Neel was already ahead of the game. Critics described her work as 'extraordinarily alive', said her paintings 'cast a spell', and she even got a recently shot Andy Warhol to sit for her in a none too flattering portrait. She was on a roll. Her work from this era is bolder, freer, more colourful, more expressive. It's almost as if she's enjoying herself.

Frank O'Hara (1960)

Mother and Child (1962)

Wellesley Girls (1967)

Pregnant Julie and Algis (1967)

Ruth Nude (1964)

Black Draftee (James Hunter) (1965)

Andy Warhol (1970)

Marxist Girl (Irene Peslikis) (1972)

Geoffrey Hendricks and Brian (1978)

Cindy Nemser and Chuck (1975)

 Gus Hall (1981)

Neel told an interviewer that her paintings were 'reckless' but I reckon she said that with her tongue firmly in her cheek. Her paintings, by this time, had agency and Neel herself had agency. That meant that her sitters, be they Marxists like Irene Peslikis or gay couples like Geoffrey Hendricks and Brian, had agency too. Andy Warhol aside, you get the feeling these people enjoyed being painted by Neel. She did them proud not by flattery but by truth.

In fact, Neel claimed to not even know what flattery was. She quoted Keats:- "beauty is truth, truth beauty". In 1981 she became the first living artist to have a retrospective in the USSR and even into her eighties she continued to paint those she admired and those that society sometimes shunned. Like performance artist and sex activist Annie Sprinkle. 

Alice Neel loved life and she loved people. She held strong political beliefs because she loved life and she loved people and she wanted the best for everyone. Even, eventually, herself. In her final years she would ring friends out of the blue and simply say to them "guess what? I'm alive". She was too - and so were her paintings.

Annie Sprinkle (1982)