 Alice Neel (American, 1900 - 1984) Victoria and the Cat, 1980 Oil on canvas Bequest of Frederic Mueller, 1990 (6003.1) At a time when realism, especially portraiture, was eclipsed by the prevailing
move toward abstraction in American art, Alice Neel remained committed to
social realism and portraiture throughout her career. Few artists have mined
their personal worlds so directly and intimately. During the Depression, Neel
was one of the artists for the Works Progress Administration. In 1930s she
moved to Spanish Harlem, where she portrayed the gritty realities of life in the
ghetto. Portraiture became Neel’s forte, and although she did much to maintain and
revive the tradition in the mid to later 20th century when others thought it had
become an obsolete genre, she did not receive recognition until late in life.
Neel styled herself a “collector of souls,” and she painted family, friends and
acquaintances, including many figures in the art world of the time. Not one to
flatter or sentimentalize her subjects, Neel abandoned the traditional elements
of rigorous naturalism, distorting and manipulating the relationship of form,
perspective, line, color, and anatomy to create portraits of uncompromising
directness. She responded intuitively to the sitter and depicted what she saw
and perceived, often producing psychologically intense images such as the
portrait of the Brazilian sculptor Marisol which in hangs in gallery 4 of the
museum. Neel’s portraits could also have a softer aspect, as in this painting of her
granddaughter Victoria holding her calico cat. The work shows Neel’s process
of first quickly sketching in outlines in blue paint and then adding color, usually
leaving the background blank. This charming portrait is as much one of the cat
as of Victoria. Neel obviously had fun painting the cat’s fur, especially the
bushy tail, which is perhaps as close as the artist came to abstract
expressionism. |