Alice Neel

Writing the first major book on Alice Neel, Patricia Hills put together a text of her conversations with Neel.  In the book Neel talks with charm and wit and utter frankness about her 83 years, most of them lived in New York City.  Her riveting portraits, wonderful still lives, and stark interiors, as reproduced in this volume, tell us even more.  Never compromising, Alice has steadfastly kept to one goal:  to paint people honestly, as she sees them.  By painting individuals with all their idiosyncrasies, she also records universal constants, thus capturing “the specific person plus the Zeitgeist [spirit of the age].”  

Neel’s early Depression and WPA paintings are interspersed with flamboyant nudes and portraits of her friends and lovers.  Out of her stay in Spanish Harlem emerge Latin American children and the casual acquaintances she met on the streets of her neighborhood.  Then, suddenly, there are wonderful, delicate flower paintings in light, cheerful colors.

Neel is well known for her paintings of prominent figures in the art and business communities.  Before our eyes parade Andy Warhol, Red Grooms, Henry Geldzahler, Marisol, John Gruen, Ellie Poindexter, Isabel Bishop, Raphael and Moses Soyer, Duane Hanson, Virgil Thomson, and Linda Nochlin—plus a scientist, a politician, a poet, a Fuller Brush man, a taxi driver, a sailor, a labor leader, always her family, and many more.  

Alice Neel’s narrative is spicy and very moving, and it brings to life this arresting collection of people of our time, with their failings, delights, feelings, and aspirations. 

Published by Harry N. Abrams, 1983. Text here adapted from the jacket cover.