We’d like you to look at one piece of art for 10 minutes, uninterrupted.
In her six-decade career, Ms. Neel was best known for her portraits across a wide spectrum of humanity — poets, Puerto Ricans, performers, pregnant women, politicians, prominent people and poor ones, queer, straight, Black, white, nude, clothed, famous and ordinary.
Her paintings depicted people who had been through what she called the “rat race” of life. “They’re damaged and they are mutilated, but they are still kicking,” she told Johnny Carson in 1984
Ms. Neel painted at an easel, her eyes darting from the subject to her oil paints to the canvas, in sessions that could last hours.
“No coffee was served,” her son, Hartley, said. “There was no social aspect to this. She almost never had somebody else watching her paint. And so it was a very intimate experience.”