Artworks

In Mother and Child, we find a theme that frequently occurred in her paintings of the 1920s through 1930s, almost to the extent that is haunted the artist after her first daughter Santillana died of diphtheria in 1927 when she was one year old, and fuelled the years of mental depression and ill health that were to follow for Neel. Whether the sitters in this case are specifically identifiable or not they are clearly Hispanic, and derive seemingly from the fact that Alice Neel moved to Spanish Harlem in New York in 1938, where she was to live for the next twenty-four years. The faces are strangely mask-like with strong linear Rouault-like contouring and a tone that is simultaneously sombre and ominous they appear as accusatory of the viewer and generate an oblique sense of moral dignity framed with an evident feeling of material poverty. Yet at the same time they are formally not dissimilar to faces found in Picasso portraits of the early and pre-Cubist years, or more directly the anonymous faces that Léger frequently painted during the period he spent in America in the 1930s. The mother and child are present flat up against the front picture plane during and this merely adds to their accusative presence. Gisbourne, Mark. 'Alice Neel: Portraits of Plentitude.' Alice Neel. Edited by Georg Frei. Zurich: Thomas Ammann Fine Art AG, 2015.