‘“She lets her energy go full throttle”: Hilton Als on Alice Neel’s queer portraits’
2026
As happy as I am that Frieze Masters has put together its new section Queering Modernism: Visual Languages of the 20th Century, I wonder if the title is a little redundant. Isn’t modernism, the best of it, always queer? The great modernists, ranging from Duchamp to Paula Rego to David Hammons, say, are what I call manipulators of the status quo—artists who took great joy and inspiration by mirroring and shattering our common assumptions or expectations about race and sex and class. What they and a number of artists achieved by rearranging a world that had arranged for us to be one thing—a man, a woman, a Black man, a white woman, a femme, a butch, a citizen, and so on—was to make visible our rarely explored multiplicity as complex beings.
Read more at the Financial Times.
Learn more about Alice Neel.
