Today's rabbit hole is brought to you by the painter Alice Neel.
On Sunday I happened to hear part of an episode of Freakonomics Radio on MPR. Its purpose was to examine the oddity of the art market, and that's a fine topic in its own way. But I was more interested in the exemplar they were using: Alice Neel, whose painting Dr. Finger's Waiting Room recently sold at auction for $2.5 million, in contrast with the lack of value placed on her work during her life (1900–1984).
Before that episode, I had minimal knowledge of Neel and her work. I knew I liked what I had seen of it, that she often painted people in nonliteral ways. I had a vague idea that she was associated with feminist artists. Daughter Number Three-Point-One likes her. That was about it.
The part of the Freakonomics Radio show that sent me down the rabbit hole was about why Neel's work didn't take off during her lifetime. I had assumed it was run-of-the-mill sexism, but that wasn't the only reason.
Neel was a painter of social realism, depicting everyday people in everyday struggles. According to the show and the critics it cites, she was sidelined by the rise of abstract expressionism in the 1940s and ’50s, which was considered more cerebral (and masculine, it's worth noting). On top of that, the curator of the recent Metropolitan Museum of Art retrospective on Neel is quoted as saying:
The Cold War instrumentalized abstraction by museums and US government... [abstract paintings were] displayed as symbols of democracy and capitalism.
The State Department and CIA promoted exhibitions of abstract expressionist paintings as if to say, see, American artists are so free they can do stuff like this that no one understands! You couldn't even dream about doing this in a Communist regime. Again, quoting the curator: "And Neel was a communist and had been a communist since 1935."
Reading through the extensive biographical material on the Alice Neel website, I learned about the kind of woman who many people of recent decades assume didn't exist in the early to mid-20th century, one who did what she wanted with whomever she wanted. (If she couldn't dance, she didn't want to be part of your revolution.) She paid a price for it, physically, emotionally, financially: with deaths of children, suicide attempts, and physical abuse at some points, but she did it. And she painted what she wanted to paint, despite the Catholic Church, the WPA, the FBI, and anyone else. It sounds like her parents were always supportive, at least, and she seems to have been good at making and keeping friends and creating community.
A few moments to note.
Alice Neel brandishes aloft the torch which she and the members of the Artists Union along with her hope will eventually lead to enlightenment and the destruction of Fascism. One, depicting a workers’ parade, would be an excellent picture from the point of view of color, design and emotional significance if the big bold black-and-white sign carried by one of the marchers at the head of the parade, didn’t throw the rest of the composition completely out of gear by serving to tear a visual hole in the canvas.
Well, okay then. Note that the purpose of the exhibit was to "achieve unity of action among artists... to fight War, Fascism and Reaction, destroyers of art and culture." Sorry if you see that as a "hole in the canvas."
Between 1933 and 1943, Neel was paid (most of the time) by the WPA or one of its other letter-combination-versions, though the amount of money varied and they sometimes yanked their sponsorship. When the program was ended by Congress, she went onto literal public assistance through the mid-1950s.
An ArtNews review of one of her infrequent solo gallery exhibitions in 1944 was withering, saying her paintings have a "deliberate hideousness" and that the "intentional gaucherie of her figures" doesn't lend them expression.
A 1950 review of another solo exhibition compared her work to that of Munch (which seems apt to me). The reviewer wrote: her "portraits ... are almost vivisections." In a Daily Worker review of that show, written by a friend, Neel is quoted: "There isn’t much good portrait painting being done today, and I think it is because with all this war, commercialism and fascism, human beings have been steadily marked down in value, despised, rejected and degraded."
In October 1955 she was interviewed by FBI agents, having been under investigations since 1951. They described her in their files as "a romantic Bohemian type Communist." She asked them to sit for portraits. "They declined."
The last decade of her life started with a Whitney retrospective in 1974 that included 58 paintings. The next year there was a larger retrospective in Athens, Georgia, and six other solo exhibitions. She was very busy, and even appeared on Johnny Carson twice in the year before she died in October 1984.
The title of the recent retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which filled five galleries, was called The Art of Not Sitting Pretty. Steven Dubner from Freakonomics Radio asked the show's curator why now was the right time for the retrospective, and she said it was a combination of factors. There was enough "out there" about Neel, but not too much. Diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice are seen as important. And there hadn't had a large show of her work since the Philadelphia centennial exhibit in 2000.
An anarchic humanist. For a person with that descriptor, it sounds as though the Met exhibit tried to put Neel in a box too much (as this article makes clear). And it's ironic that rich people are now collecting the work of an anti-capitalist for its increasing value, made more valuable by the big retrospective show.
But the upside of it all is that her work is being seen more than ever.
Here's one more painting, of writer Alice Childress, from 1950. I imagine they knew each other in Harlem at the time:
2 comments:
In poetry people sometimes refer to "neglectorinos," poets whose work gets ignored by arbiters and gatekeepers (and then sometimes finds a new audience after the poet is dead). I remember being part of a panel at an academic conference, and one of us had to field a question from the audience: "If these poets were any good, wouldn’t we have heard of them already?" Uh, not necessarily.
The New York Times had a remarkable article last year about a Neel painting and its sitters.
It seems like there's a whole part of the art world (and the literary world?) devoted to finding the neglectorinos. At least, that seemed to be part of what was implied in the Freakonomics Radio show. In that case, there's a clear economic incentive in the gallery world to "discover" a lost artist and increase the value of their work. It's a bit different in the literary world.
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