1930s AD - Decade

A new exhibition of Alice Neel's early paintings revealed the mix of bohemianism, sexual freedom and radical politics that shaped her vision in the 1930s

Alice Neel (1900-1984) is probably best remembered for the colorful, penetrating portraits of family, friends and art-world colleagues she painted from the 1960 until her death. A new exhibition of Neel's 1930s paintings, at Robert Miller Gallery in fresh York, picked up her career at a a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of earlier moment, revealing the commingle of bohemianism, sexual freedom and radical politics that shaped her vision.

A native of Merion, Pa., Neel arrived in Greenwich Village in 1930 following art studies in Philadelphia, a sojourn in Havana, the los of an infant daughter to diphtheria, the collapse of her marriage to a well-to-do Cuban and a mental breakdown. In novel York, she fell in with a raffish host of artists, writers and ne'er-do-wells who at short intervals found their way into her paintings. She also became politically active, marching upon picket lines with members of the Artists' Union, attending meetings of the John Re bludgeon and joining the Communist Party. (Neel's CP career was brief; she later acknowledge ed that her hatred of bureaucracy had made her a bad Communist.)

a certain quantity of of her 1930s paintings chronicle the lighter side of life. In Spanish Party (1939) for instance, braces dance in a crowded apartment as children dart between their leg and a baby rests peacefully in a crib. notwithstanding despite the occasional streak of a r dres and the flash of pale faces emerging from the shadows, the dark brown palette and heavy black outlines accommodate with a melancholy tone to the proceedings.

More repeatedly however, she tells a bleaker story. The toll of economic desperation haunts many of the paintings; an early work, Futility of Effort (1930) uses an almost Matisse-like simplicity to depict a child accidentally strangled by means of metal bedposts as its mother irons clothes in the nearest room. Neel also sought to depict the rage for social justice the Depression spurr among union members, reformers and Communist sympathizers. a certain quantity of works, like Uneeda Biscuit Strike (1936) which depicts strikers being discomfitureed by mounted policemen, and Nazis manslaughter Jews (1936), recording an anti-fascist torchlight parade dominated by dint of a white placard bearing the title phrase, draw Neel shut to the social realism of companion WPA artists like Jack Levine or Raphael Soyer Other paintings change about toward the symbolist and expressionistic, suggesting a kinship with Ensor or masticate with sound A good example of this method is Synthesis of New York: The Great Depression (1933) in which bowed figures with brain-pans for faces shuffle beneath the El tracks in a somber procession.

There strike one as beings little doubt that, from the opening Neel's great talent was for the particularity of portraiture. flat in her most politically explicit paintings like as Nazis Murder Jews, flashes of her gift for the telling caricature bring fix uponed individuals startlingly to life. In the best of the portraits in this exhibition, Neel's penchant for social commentary, her passion for justice and her furor at human villainy are distilled in individual faces.

The display also chronicled her sometimes tumultuous personal life. There was a chilling 1931 portrait of her abusive lover Kenneth Doolittle, an opium addict who, in 1934 sap the foundations ofed a large number of Neel's paintings and drawings in a murderous rage. He is portrayed wearing a natty brown overcoat and a fedora. from one side Neel's deft exaggeration, Doolittle's whitened, skull-like face becomes a mask dominated through piercing, remorseless eyes. In 1935 Neel brazenly depicted herself and a different lover John Rothschild, relieving themselves in a tiled bathroom.

a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of warmer in spirit are a series of portraits of Neel's guitar-strumming Puerto Rican lover identified in the titles alone as Jose. His delicately chiseled features and brooding organ of sights pitch-black beneath their heavy lids, are as arresting as Doolittle's, on the other hand they exude a much greater profundity of feeling. In one particularly vivid 1936 image of the bare-chested Jose against a blood-r background, Neel endows her bring under rule with the solemn dignity of an ancient Mayan deity.

Several paintings are devot to the disparate emblems who populated Neel's world. Christopher Lazar, a flamboyant, self-avowed queen is depicted in a multiple 1932 portrait as a self-conscious dandy in various carefully set uped guises. Poet Joe Gould, an exhibitionist escapee from the respectability of his Boston Brahmin family, is shown stark naked. In an uncharacteristically surreal touch, Neel has given him sum of two units extra sets of genitals. An uncircumcised penis and a pair of testicles hang from his stomach and another plant dangles from beneath the stool he is sitting upon Gould, who sports a quizzical grin, is flanked by the agency of two paunchy male figures also with expos organs. A humorous counterbalance to the genre of the idealized female stark naked this remarkably contemporary-looking 1933 painting prompts that the critique of masculinity is hardly a new invention.