Artworks

Depicts the artists's older son Richard (b.1939) age 15. Excerpt from the New York Magazine "Neel Life Stories" by Edith Newhall JUNE 19, 2000 about Richard Neel sitting for his mother: "The date of the one that I remember posing for -- and she painted me as a baby -- was in Spring Lake, New Jersey, in 1945 or '46, and I think I'd just been at summer camp. And what I remember from that was the awkwardness of the pose. I had my hand up, like this, although that's characteristic of me. I can still remember the sitting in that chair, the feeling of the chair. Alice always did make you sit a little bit longer than you wanted to. For that painting, I doubt whether there were more than three sittings. From then on, there are a lot of paintings of me, and my brother and me. Alice always, even before she was recognized, thought that she was a great artist, and she led all of us to believe that that was the case. She always taught us to respect the work and to respect her sense of its value. I was not known as a good artist in class, but I always thought that if I asked my mother to give me lessons, I could become a really good illustrator or whatever. I persisted in that idea until I was about 12 years old. I even told some of the girls in class that I had a mother who was an artist and she'd teach me how to be one, too. But I don't think anyone outside the family circle was impressed, at that time. Every painting was a different experience. Once, we were having coffee in the cafeteria of the Museum of Modern Art, and she said, "Gee, I love that pose -- when you get home, I'll paint you in that pose." So I posed at home pretending I was at the Museum of Modern Art." "In Richard with Dog (1954), every inch of the canvas is densely worked, from the background foliage to the oral patterned shirt to her son’s de ant, tight-lipped stare. the unidentified dog peeking shyly and deferentially from the corner of the canvas is likewise a tight knot of brown, black and white." 'Her Family and Other Animals' by Kirsty Bell, Alice Neel: My Animals and Other Family, Victoria Miro 2014 "Richard even goes so far as to say that despite the suffering he experienced as a child, having Alice as a mother was a worthwhile tradeoff. “She was a good mother. She was a good friend to me. And the fact that she might no have been able to give me the protection that I might have gotten somewhere else, that’s a fact. But I suppose I got the protection, but I didn’t get something else. It’s just one of those things that we have to deal with. Every single one of us has to deal with what we’re dealt, and the people we are exposed to. And it was a gift to have her as a mother, certainly. There is no question about it.” Hoban, Phoebe. Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty. St. Martin's Press, 2010, pg 167. "Alice often told Hartley how tormented she was by Richard’s condition [temporary blindness like caused by syphilis]. “She told me any number of times how she suffered every day with Richard’s eyes. And that’s exactly the way she said it. And in some of the paintings she did show Richard’s eyes as abnormal. She had to be living with it. She saw it in his face.” “Whatever happened, Alice was absolutely tortured by it. She used to say ‘I don’t go a day without thinking about all these things.’ She had to forgive herself. Maybe she didn’t accept the major responsibility, but maybe she did. I do think Alice felt terribly guilty about it I think she suffered about it. I think she tried to make it good.” However else Alice managed to live with such disturbing thoughts, she also relied on the survival strategy she knew best: She channeled her emotions into her art." Hoban, Phoebe. Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty. St. Martin's Press, 2010, p.154