Alice Neel’s Portraiture and Politics
Alice Neel, Nazis Murder Jews, 1936, oil on canvas, 107 × 76 cm. Courtesy: © The Estate of Alice Neel, David Zwirner and Victoria Miro
I was ready to be disappointed by ‘Alice Neel: Un regard engagé’ (An Engaged Eye). Firstly, the small retrospective of the American painter’s work, currently on view at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, is located on the mezzanine level – not on the sprawling sixth-floor spaces usually reserved for the museum’s prestigious blockbuster exhibitions. Secondly, Neel was not just any American artist: she was a committed, card-carrying member of the American Communist Party. A quick survey of Neel’s institutional exhibition history – from her inclusion in ‘Women Artists, 1550–1950’ at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1976 to her major solo retrospective, ‘Alice Neel: People Come First’, at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2021 – indicates that her work is often reduced to either belonging to a tradition of women artists interested in women’s things or as a mere aspect of her activism. Given this track record, I didn’t see why the Pompidou show would be any different. Thankfully, I was wrong. The exhibition strikes a balance between showcasing Neel as an artist of her time and as the author of her own particular brand of expressionist figuration.
