The eclectic lives behind Alice Neel's portraits
A visitor studies Alice Neels 1964 portrait of the civil rights leader James Farmer in the exhibition People Come First at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, March 29, 2021. Sasha Arutyunova/The New York Times.
by Erica Ackerberg
(NYT NEWS SERVICE)
.- My introduction to painter Alice Neel was a screen print that hung on the living room wall of my grandparents home in Woodstock, New York a provocative portrait of Neels pouting granddaughter lounging on a striped chair. That portrait then moved within my family, to Minneapolis, San Francisco and, finally, to my apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan down the street from where Neel painted and lived where it now hangs on my wall.