Alice Neel: People Come First
Until 1 August at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan
The Met’s retrospective to the late US painter Alice Neel (1900-1984) chronicles six decades of the artist’s prolific career, from her ruminative portraits of New York’s global diaspora to her visceral depictions of motherhood. Some of the most striking pieces in the show are the nude portraits Neel painted of pregnant women a subject she said was missing in Western art that capture the psychological and physical weight of the moment, like the painting
Margaret Evans Pregnant (1978) depicting a friend of the artist who was pregnant with twins. The show also examines Neel’s lifelong engagement with New York, including piercing portraits of her neighbours in Spanish Harlem, and her work for the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression. Neel stuck to an Expressionist painting style in an era where Abstraction reigned, and was “ambitious at a time wh