Her paintings were a site of expression for populist politics and in her art she found something close to freedom from the doldrums of her personal life.
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If you’re looking for the opposite of social distancing – and who isn’t, these days? – then Alice Neel is there for you. There, that is, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has recently opened a full-scale survey of this greatest of 20th-century portraitists (‘Alice Neel: People Come First’; until 1 August). Go if you can, and revel in the sheer presence of so many unmasked faces, so many interesting humans – the encounter with each one unforgettable.
The timing of the show could not be better. Newly decamped from the Breuer building on Madison Avenue, and finally emerging from months of reduced visitation, the Met – again, like all of us – could use a shot in the arm. Neel most definitely provides it. Over the course of her long career, she was wildly out of step with prevailing tendencies. Only now are we finally catching up to her, at last able to see her paintings as the bracingly essential works that they always have
Itâs Time to Put Alice Neel in Her Rightful Place in the Pantheon
A large retrospective feels at home in the Metropolitan Museum of Artâs grandest galleries and should silence any doubt about the artistâs originality or her importance.
A visitor studies Alice Neel’s 1964 portrait of the civil rights leader James Farmer in the exhibition “People Come First” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.Credit.Sasha Arutyunova for The New York Times
NYT Critic s Pick
It is said that the future is female, and one can only hope. But it is important to remember that the past, through continuous excavation, is becoming more female all the time. The latest evidence is the gloriously relentless retrospective of Alice Neel (1900-1984), the radical realist painter of all things human, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.