Alice Neel: Painter of Modern Life

Text by Jeremy Lewison

This groundbreaking book re-evaluates the work of Alice Neel, one of the most renowned American portrait painters of the 20th century

This insightful catalogue examines anew the full range of Alice Neel’s (1900-1984) celebrated paintings of people, still life, and cityscapes. Featuring around seventy paintings spanning the entire length of her career, this handsome book accompanies a major retrospective of her work, and reveals her underlying interest in the history of photography, German painting of the 1920s, and other artists, such as Van Gogh and Cézanne, all of which provided an important precedent for the veracity and raw emotional intensity of her figurative works. Neel is renowned for her visual acuity and psychological depth, and her portraits and nude paintings of friends, family, strangers, and prominent cultural figures alike convey an incredibly consistent intimacy regardless of the relationship to her subject.

The accompanying essays trace the trajectory of Neel’s artistic language as it evolved alongside contemporaneous trends in the New York City art world and examine the manner in which her own work figured into the social and cultural contexts of her time. Created over a sixty-year period, Neel’s oeuvre offers a remarkably expressive document of the specific milieus she navigated through and ultimately transcends the marker of time altogether.