“I’ll Show Them All.”
Why Alice Neel’s Radical Humanism Resonates Today.
Alice Neel’s (1900–1984) sweeping show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art comes at a precarious time for women, both in and outside of the art world. The Coronavirus has exposed a lot of our societal weaknesses and women, particularly women of color continue to be the most vulnerable. Last September, four times as many women as men dropped out of the labor force ( 865,000 vs. 216,000). In December, economists reported a drop in job growth, with women accounting for 100% of losses. These statistics are so mind-numbing and devastating that it’s easy to lose sight of the individual story and their humanity. I thought of all of this — of myself, who has been unemployed, unmoored, and homeschooling since last March — as I took in Alice Neel’s radical artistic documentation of regular people surviving life the best they could, often under extraordinary circumstances.
As for where this show fits within the larger narrative surrounding female artistic inclusion, Roberta Smith of the New York Times wrote that this Neel retrospective “reigns over prime Met real estate — the Tisch Galleries, typically host to historic figures like Michelangelo, Delacroix, and Courbet, and only now to a female artist.” That is to mean, this exhibit is noted, historic yet woefully inadequate on the whole. I suppose the exciting part, since I’m making the effort to ride this wave of optimism, is that there is much historic ground to excavate, much more to come. We will begin by celebrating Neel’s posthumous recognition, which rightfully places her talent and contribution on par with the great artists of the 20th Century.
Neel painted what she saw: the people she interacted with in her daily life in New York City. There is a decent portion of the show dedicated to the work created while she battled the conflicting demands of single motherhood and career, which she termed the “awful dichotomy”. That she was expressing this in the 1930s and 1940s, long before second-wave feminism deemed the “personal as political,” is extraordinary. Her paintings do not shy from expressing the idea that becoming a mother hurts, whether it be physically, mentally, emotionally, or economically. In her portraits of pregnant women, there is a sense of foreboding in the faces of her subjects. In some — like Pregnant Maria, the subject emits a stubborn bravado, but even that seems to support the idea of motherhood as a necessary burden that falls squarely on the shoulders of women.
Neel’s inclusion or focus — via wide, evident brushstrokes and heavy pigment, on the physical signs of pregnancy: the engorged breasts, large areolas, darkened veins, and linea Negra, enable her portrayals to cross over from a purely visual experience into a haptic one. As a woman who has been pregnant, I could feel each aspect of their physical discomfort. Unlike historical portrayals of motherhood, Neel sought and delivered the truth of that experience, stripping away any romanticism or propaganda often tied to motherhood. The foreboding and fear she portrays elicit an awareness that the pain of birthing was just the beginning. That the act of bringing a child into the world was the commencement of a life of struggle in a society that did not adequately meet the needs or recognize the sacrifices asked of women.
“My mother used to say to me, “I don’t know what you expect to do; you’re only a girl.” But this, instead of destroying me, made me more ambitious because I’d think, you know, I’ll show them, I’ll show her, I’ll show everybody.” — Alice Neel
The “awful dichotomy” framed the stages of Neel’s work. In her earlier work, her primary setting is the home, where she paints through and against the demands of single motherhood. She placed the signs of her struggle on the frame: art supplies are strewn among symbols of domesticity, depictions of her young children looking less than thrilled, perhaps a reflection of her own guilt and conflict. These works, in the late 1930s and 1940s, portray the young mother and artist as trapped, yet plowing through the creative process by painting what was on hand and within sight: a city street as seen from her apartment window, her children, her lovers, her despair, and still life objects. I thought of this series of either/or struggles recently as I did my taxes. To deduct a home office, the IRS states that a portion of my home must be used exclusively for my business and that I would not meet the requirements if I “use(d) the area in question both for business and for personal purposes.” I wondered, probably like Neel, what it was like to have a workspace, as so many men did (and do), that is exclusively for work and rarely co-opted by familial obligation.
Neel’s expanded artistic footprint coincided with her children’s growing independence. As they got older, she engaged with subject matter outside the home. Even so, her dedication to radical humanism and depicting regular people with empathy remained consistent. She championed leftist causes — communism, feminism, civil rights–because they placed those left behind or dehumanized by modern society at the forefront of their causes. With few exceptions, she rejected abstraction in favor of realism, in order to personify the revolutionary zeitgeist of New York City in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. She forged close relationships and painted social justice leaders and looked to her neighborhood, be it Spanish Harlem or Greenwich Village, to paint regular people, surviving industrialization, poverty, racism, and war.
Neel did not shy away from including her subject’s flaws but was consistent in depicting the dignity of their lived experiences. Even her own nude self-portrait depicts her, at the age of 80, as being both vulnerable and defiant, clutching a rather strategically placed paintbrush, a jab perhaps at the patriarchal world in which she toiled.
Tip: Allow at least an hour to take in the exhibit. Lines are worse midday (and obviously on weekends), aim to queue up first thing in the morning or around 2 pm.
