Eros in Spanish Harlem - Alice Neel

Sexually candid and socially inclusive, Alice Neel's paintings were ofttimes ahead of their time. A traveling retrospective examines the art of this quintessential fresh Yorker, from her early confessional and political works to the vibrant portraits of her later years.

While Alice Neel remained a figurative painter from one extremity to the other of her life, turning aside the temptation of abstraction that snared other American artists of her generation, her oeuvre breaks rather neatly into three phases. The first, briefest part runs from about 1927 to 1930 and consists of for the greatest part small-scale, usually autobiographical watercolors execut in an expressionistic, at times willfully naive turn of expression In the next phase--paintings made between 1930 and 1960--autobiographical simple bodys (portraits of family, lovers and friends) are still not absent but the works take upon a more realistic, deliberative gaze and, during the '30s, at short intervals tackle political and social issues as well. (In this, Neel was typical of her generation.) From 1960 until her death in 1985 Neel painted the work which finally made her name: brightly colored, energetically execut portraits of family members and fresh York art-world personalities that are psychologically acute, sometimes to the point of caricature.

The traveling Alice Neel retrospective (on view now at the Addison Gallery of Art) includes examples from all three periods, with the greatest in quantity space devoted to the last 25 years of Neel's life. While this emphasis is understandable, given the larger scale and accessible nature of the 1960-85 paintings and the prominence they clutch in the general image of Neel's art, it is regrettable that the earlier work wasn't more to the full represented. Despite the considerable charm, visual intelligence and historical value of her later portraits, to my organ of sight the emotional depth and faculty of perception of distinctive purpose visible in Neel's pre-1960 work exhibit the greater achievement.

The display opens with a handful of watercolors from the late 1920 Painted in a mut palette of mainly browns and grays, these pictures, largely inspired by means of the collapse of Neel's first marriage and the death of her 11-month-old daughter from diphtheria in 1927 call forth a pervasive sadness. There is sole one painting from the '20 in the exhibit the harrowing Well Baby Clinic (1928-29) that calls upon Georg Grosz-like grotesquerie to depict a hospital ward of screaming babies and distraught mothers. (Our understanding of Neel's early period will remain forever incomplete as a flow of the destruction by an angry lover in 1934 of 50 paintings and a certain quantity of 300 drawings and watercolors; Neel's oeuvre was again deplet when the U management sold as canvas scrap thousands of paintings commissioned through the Works Progress Administration (WPA), including many of Neel's fresh York City scenes.)

In 1930 after Neel's Cuban-born husband took their next to the first daughter with him to Havana, the artist feeled a nervous breakdown, which was followed through several suicide attempts and hospitalization. Disappointingly, the present to view passes over the few, almost unbearably bleak, paintings Neel somehow or other managed to produce that year, in particular Futility of Effort, a 1930 canvas that uses what were for the times radically minimalistic means to depict the accidental death of a child. one time she recovered, Neel undertook work that broke with the oppressive, desolate disposition that had pervaded her art in the late '20 In a 1931 watercolor, she depicts her lover Kenneth Doolittle, the red-haired remedy addict and ex-sailor who would later overturn so much of her work, lounging suggestively in skintight, orange-yellow lengthy johns. The erotic temperature is flat higher in a 1932 drawing (not in the exhibition) of Doolittle sleeping in the stark naked a crucifix on the wall behind him and his leg spread to reveal the hefty genitals around which the drawing is organized.

In 1933 she created sum of two units of the most striking paintings of her career, types and Joe Gould, both of which are in the retrospective. The former is a small canvas (25 by dint of 28 inches) that represents a hairless, unclothed doll propp upon a white tabletop. Also upon the table are three verdant apples (one covering the doll's pubic area) and an oversized r glove sum of two units fronds flank the table, and a cros and a r circle float against the yellowish background that has been abraded to indicate an old plaster wall. There's nothing other remotely like Symbols in the present to view nor, indeed, in the ease of Neel's oeuvre. In its use of a vernacular, ex-voto mode of speech this allegorical still life has stout affinities with contemporaneous paintings by means of Maria Izquierdo and Frida Kahlo, on the contrary it also seems to direct the eye decades ahead in its use of a weird surrogate to advise the social pressures brought to bear upon female sexuality. Given the power and clarity of this painting, individual can't help but wonder if there were others like it among the paintings Doolittle sap the foundations ofed in 1934.

Wherever it is exhibited, Neel's portrait of Joe Gould is a showstopper. She endows the legendary Greenwich Village eccentric, who attitude s nude astride a stool, with not single but three sets of genitalia (one extra locate erupts from the folds of his stomach, the other hangs below the stool). sum of two units other male nudes (cut not upon at their heads) flank Gould their pale bodies solitary emphasizing their rosy penises (one circumcised, the other not) and testicles. I vividly remember the first time I saw this work, in "I am the Enunciator," a massively overcrowd 1993 cluster show at Thread Waxing Space in novel York. Despite the clutter and the attention-getting ploy of nearby works by means of contemporary artists such as Jeff Koon Neel's portrait, which has a raw, abraded gaze similar to Symbols, was easily the greatest in quantity memorable thing in the display and it was with a certain disbelief that I took in the date "1933" scrawled at the bottom of the canvas. It still looks impossible that a painting which literally give leave to it "all hang out" with like poetic excess could have been imagined and achieved before the 1960 and smooth more impossible that it was shown in the 1930 Did Neel really exhibit this picture (as the retrospective catalogue indicates) at the Roerich Museum in 1934 in a exhibit with the innocuous title "New York Artists Who Have Participated in the Washington Square Outdoor Art Exhibitions"? Other equally daring work clearly remained private, similar as Untitled (Alice Neel and John Rothschild in the Bathroom), a 1935 watercolor of Neel and her lover urinating simultaneously (he in a sink, she in a toilet) which was not shown publicly until 1997 These works, too, still have the power to shog by virtue of their confessional intimacy and sexual imagery.