Collecting Souls, Gathering Dust: The Struggles of Two American Artists, Alice Neel and Rhoda Medary

Traces the friendship and disparate lives of two American painters, Alice Neel and Rhoda Medary

When Alice Neel met Rhoda Medary in a Philadelphia art school in 1921, Neel was an outwardly conformist loner crushed by a dominant puritanical mother, while Medary, her friend and mentor, was an iconoclastic free spirit. But their lives went in diametrically different directions. Neel married a worldly Cuban painter, moved to Havana, abandoned him, then experienced life in Greenwich Village, several affairs, massive depressions, a suicide attempt, therapy. She raised two children in Spanish Harlem, turned to political leftism and enjoyed eventual fame. Medary, who married an autocratic architect, forsook art to raise children; her life a shambles after three decades of marriage, she rediscovered, in the years before her death in 1981, what Neel had learned much earlier--that painting was central to her identity. The Belchers, a husband-wife team--he's a history professor at Beaver College in Pennsylvania; she edited Medary's memoirs--have crafted a perceptive, compulsively readable dual biography that illuminates the struggles of women who try to break out of roles society expects them to fulfill. Photos.
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