Artworks

Provenance

Robert Miller Gallery
Private Collection, New York

Exhibitions

Alice Neel - Freedom, David Zwirner, New York, USA, February 26 - April 13, 2019
Alice Neel, Uptown, Victoria Miro Venice, Italy, July 15 - September 16 2017

Alice Neel: Painted Truths
March 21, 2010 - June, 13, 2010
Museum of Fine Arts, HoustonTouring to Whitechapel Gallery, London and Moderna Museet, Malmö.Catalogue edited by Jeremy Lewison and Barry Walker with essays by Tamar Garb, Jeremy Lewison, Robert Storr and Barry Walker and appreciations by Frank Auerbach, Marlene Dumas and Chris Ofili.

Alice Neel's Women
October 28, 2005 - January, 15, 2006
Washington D. C., National Museum of Women in the ArtsCatalogue by Carolyn Carr

Literature

This is a painting from her Federal Art Project. It is a painting of her hospital roommate, Goldie Goldwasser, after delivery and shows the toils of labor and delivery. Neel felt that childbirth deserved to be depicted as a life experience and not a secret. Neel was in the hospital for her delivery of her son Richard in September 1939.'

After leaving the hospital following Richard's birth, Neel painted a portrait of a fellow maternity patient, Goldie Goldwasser, ostensibly in the throes of giving birth. Unlikely as it is that she actually witnessed another patient giving birth, the assumption is that the portrait represents Neel's own felt experience. Childbirth is depicted as a disorienting and destabilizing ordeal in which the mother is dismembered. Parturition is equated with the severing of limbs. The torso itself is a monstrous, free-floating form, with swollen breasts and aureolas that double as bruises. The woman's face bears the scars of extreme effort: black bags beneath her eyes, a black void for a mouth, and dishevelled hair. Largely unpainted areas indicate the soiling of the bedclothes, while, over her high leg, the folds in the sheet, signalled by black lines, act as restraints.

Publications

Alice Neel 'Painted Truth'
Allara, Pamela. Pictures of People: Alice Neel’s American Portrait Gallery, Brandeis University Press, 1998. Fig. 47, pg. 92