Up close and personal with Alice Neel. FREEDOM (David Zwirner Books)

“When you’re an artist you’re searching for freedom; you never find it,’cause there ain’t any freedom. But at least you search for it. In fact, art could be called the search.”

“Art is two things: a search for a road and a search for freedom. You know all these things in life keep crawling over you all the time, so it’s very hard to feel free.”

–Alice Neel

I met Alice Neel at her Whitney retrospective in 1974. A year out of art school, I was working for a  San Francisco paper actually called Art News. She offered to take me through the exhibition and made the point she wanted NO review about her work that ignored the life that made it. ( At this time, art criticism “deconstructed” art as separate from the artist). Alice pointed to a portrait of a guitar player and explained how she ran off with him to Spanish Harlem. He left her but she stayed because it was cheap and she had kids.

 Alice liked  painting neighbors, who worked hard to feed their kids.  She mentioned how difficult it was to have a child die. The WPA saved her when she was broke. She had a job painting and regular money. Below some neighbors.

 Alice wasn’t sentimental about mothes and their children. It was very difficult as shown in these two early WPA works, a well-baby clinic, and a mother and children.

At her iconic portrait of Andy Warhol, she did a full stop, and in an almost hushed voice said his body was a map. The road she traced,  a finger above the canvas, was the scar where Valerie Solanos shot him. “Why would anyone want to hurt Andy?” she asked. He was shy but would come to her place to talk. He told her funny stories. But he was isolated, very alone. ou could see that on his body.  She had painted a desert.

At the end of my tour, I thanked her and took some steps. She came close and said. “Make it when you’re young. When I was 35, this show would have changed my life. Now it makes little difference. My life is made. But I come here every day. I like to see the reactions of people to my work.” I looked down, her legs were swollen. The trek to the Whitney cost her something.

Ptredictably, my article was rejected as “too humanistic.” The editor chastized me, “a person’s subjective experience had litle to do with how the art was constructed.” Since I’m a dissenter, it was with great pleasure  I opened FREEDOM, a David Zwirner Book (published by D.A.P.)  of Alice Neel’s nudes. I was very curious. In her portraits clothes are stand-ins, identifying what’s underneath. But I guessed the Warhol painting could be no outlier. Neel made thick outlines to separate her sitters from their backgrounds. Body and psyche are continuous, despite the clothes. Warhol’s head was somehow less animated than his exposed chest.

Figure drawing offers the chance to see the skin the person is dressed in. In the excellent intro to FREEDOM, daugher in law Ginny Neel talks of how Alice’s art defied female steriotypes. Her  honesty about pregnancy and childbirth is still as rare as her open sexuality, She painted male bodies as men painted women. She asked the art critic John Perrault, obviously an admirer, to pose for the Whitney Show. Below is the result, character and some beauty.

Helen Molesworth’s essay “Looking with and Looking at Alice Neel” gives an art historical context to the question, how does a woman paint a naked body when there’s no tradition of the female “gaze?”When I was an art student in Philadelphia the blue laws were still in place. We had to draw male nudes with a brief hiding their genitals. Women were uncovered but not men. When the law was changed, we women were disconcerted. How were we to draw this body part we had never studied?  It was embarassing.

Alice’s male nudes, like her females, are individuals instead of the usual approach, idealized figures reflecting male fantasies. Ahough her lovers may be rendered erotic, sexually attractive, her emotions are not the subject of the portrait. Similarly, when male nudes are paired with a woman in her paintings, the subjects are individuals but they are in relation to each other. Below they seem apart, yet together, physically together and emotional worlds apart. 

Rare is the man, who paints women without their clothes like this, observing their emotions and character-instead of being absorbed in how he feels about their looks. With Alice Neel’s nudes the closest she comes to projection of her feelings seems to be in the pregnant ones. Neel who had 4 children, may have identified with the strange plasticity of the pregnant body. In her work, there are no idealized round beaming earth mothers.

Neel’s pregnant nudes can appear uncomfortable, surprised, resigned. They are true to the odd truth of pregnancy–a strange being inside a woman’s body. Perhaps Neel identified with the unguarded moment, feelings she might have shared. The children she paints are also individuals, not  appendanges of their mothers. Here is a portrait of her own daughter at 9. Also a set of twins with their mother and a boy baby–contented, curious,  male.