Alice Neel - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0876331398 ISBN 13: 9780876331392

Publisher: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2000

Synopsis

Alice Neel (January 28, 1900 - October 13, 1984) was an American artist known for her oil on canvas portraits of friends, family, lovers, poets, artists and strangers. Her paintings are notable for their expressionistic use of line and color, psychological acumen, and emotional intensity.

For an artist to be born in 1900 in the U.S. was almost a guarantee that the great Depression would strike even the most promising career amidships, and that the support of the Work Project Administration (WPA), however imperfect, would constitute a lifeline.

What makes Alice Neel's career so remarkable is her early recognition of her aptitude for catching character and setting in down on canvas and her persistence with portraiture far beyond the WPA years into her maturity, when the Abstract Expressionists appeared to have derailed figuration as a serious mode in which to make art.

During the 1960s and 1970s Alice Neel remained very much herself as various forms of 'a return to the figure,' including superrealism, photorealism, and a rebirth of interest in academic drawing and painting from nature, came into being.

CONTENTS: Foreword by Anne d'Harnoncourt * Alice Neel: Self and Others by Ann Temkin * People as Evidence by Susan Rosenberg * Gentlemen Callers: Alice Neel and the Art World by Richard Flood * Undergoing Scrutiny: Sitting for Alice Neel * Plates * Chronology by Sarah Powers * Checklist of the Exhibition * Exhibition History * Selected Bibliography

About this title

From Booklist

The centennial of painter Neel's birth has inspired the first retrospective of her unsettling, psychologically acute portraits in 25 years, a reaffirmation of the sly power of her work, her unusual personality, and her courageously artistic life at a time when women artists were much maligned. As the enlightening essays gathered here attest, her bourgeois background and pleasant, blond good looks belied Neel's determination, penetrating vision, and tribulations. Her marriage to Cuban artist Carlos Enriquez ended in divorce and the loss of her two daughters, one to diphtheria, the other to her husband's relatives. Several years later, a jealous lover destroyed hundreds of her drawings, watercolors, and oil paintings. But Neel persevered, raising two sons on her own in Spanish Harlem, where she labored in near obscurity for two decades, painting portraits of neighbors, family, and acquaintances until finally achieving the serious attention she deserved. In her later years, Neel, always attuned to the outrageous and significant, painted the likes of Andy Warhol, Kate Millett, and Annie Sprinkle. Neel herself is fascinating, and her paintings startle, challenge, and engage. --Donna Seaman Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

From Library Journal

About half of her career, the superior figurative painter Neel (1900-84) found herself working against the tide of abstractionism, producing searing portraitsDimages of souls, largely acquaintances and friends. She specialized in the nude portraitDincluding one that revealed her at the age of 80Dbroadcasting the stark personal traits of each sitter: vulnerability, frank sexuality, open aggression, and the demonic. This exhibit catalog of the proud feminist's work accompanies a centennial show traveling from New York to Andover, MA, Philadelphia, and Minneapolis in the coming year. With 224 illustrations, 86 in color, and essays by curators from various museum venues, this is the most comprehensive and up-to-date view of her work, complementing Pamela Allara's biography, Pictures of People (Univ. Pr. of New England, 1998), and several filmed interviews, including Alice Neel, Painter (1989). Highly recommended for most collections.DMary Hamel-Schwulst, Towson Univ., MD
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Philadelphia Museum of Art
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0876331398
• ISBN 13: 9780876331392
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 198
• Editor: Ann Temkin