Alice Neel: Hot Off the Griddle

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In 1974, her work was celebrated with a major exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York; she was 74 years old. To me the wonder was at her bloody-mindedness in sticking to her guns and her increasing virtuosity at rendering these figures in paint.

She was wise-cracking and funny as always, the same sense of humour that pervaded her work throughout the exhibition, but it would be wrong to think we should laugh at Alice and it was probably a self-defence mechanism on her part that she invited it. It looks every inch like it was painted today, not nearly half a century ago, such is the extraordinary influence that Neel exerts on contemporary figuration right now, especially in New York. It wasn’t a very big income, but it gave me enough to live and paint on,” Neel told the American art historian Cindy Nemser for the book Art Talk: conversations with 12 women artists, published in 1975. But if there is something of the autopsy about Freud, Neel is gentler, taking real pleasure in her body in its ninth decade. This is a terrific selection, superbly curated by Eleanor Nairne and her team with utmost empathy (and the most eloquent captions you will find).Her personal life is covered comprehensively in the exhibition – full of partners, children, encounters and cultural phenomena. She paints the poor communities of her adopted home with tender sadness and absolutely heaps of empathy.

Philippe Dagen, writing in Le Monde, describes Neel as a “ghost” or “spirit” (perhaps a reference to Robert Mapplethorpe’s 1984 photograph), who was long overdue proper recognition in France: “Neel does not seek to seduce, but to warn about the reality of the time.The artist, who described herself as “the collector of souls”, moved to Harlem in the early 1940s with a nightclub owner. Although its absurdity marks it out from much of her work, it is nevertheless typical of her style, insofar as it is, in its painting , still deliberately unshowy and perhaps even flat. There’s a wonderful moment in the show where you head into the airier, larger downstairs galleries from the more compressed upstairs rooms, and you feel a surge of new confidence. This widely celebrated Beat film was directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie and features an improvised narrative by Jack Kerouac. To her left, affixed on a blue wall under the vaulting industrial pipes of the Centre Pompidou is the double portrait Wellesley Girls (Kiki Djos ‘68 and Nancy Selvage ’67) (1967).

Parched earth, cement, latex, objects protruding from scarlet enamel, paintings poured, dripped or scattered, loose structures that seem to have their own grammar or syntax: this is a prodigious vision of a kind of gestural, ungendered painting going on all over the world for a while. The Barbican’s exhibition treats Neel’s politics as something of a curio, a by-product of the humanistic value she places on life rather than the other way around. The heads are always slightly too large for the bodies, the brushwork is never flattering but emphatic; here and there you are looking at garrulous caricature.Even the children are sitting quietly: the girls of Black Spanish-American Family (1950) with their hands folded in their laps, the daughter in The Family (1970) looking watchfully back at us.

The main gallery is a kind of all-together-now vision of a certain time and place: downtown Manhattan in the 1960s and 70s.

An artist with such force of personality she could cajole Andy Warhol into sitting half-naked before her, even though he regarded nudity as “a threat to my existence”. Crowned the ‘court painter of the underground’, she favoured subjects who were unfamiliar in art, among them pregnant women, queer performers, and Black and Puerto Rican children. A 1926 portrait of Neel’s first (indeed only) husband, the Cuban artist Carlos Enríquez, who all but kidnapped their child, has overtones of El Greco.