Read Hilton Als – Alice Neel’s Portraits of Difference in The New Yorker

A retrospective at the Met shows the artist’s deep feeling for all that she is not.

She had no business moving uptown. Generally, nice white lady artists like Alice Neel lived among their own kind, down in the Village, or they went wherever the male painters went and helped make those guys’ stories happen first. But Neel always wanted a different kind of life, so in 1938, at the age of thirty-eight, she chose to leave what she disparagingly called the “honky-tonk” atmosphere of the Village and move to Spanish Harlem—where European immigrants were giving way to Dominican and Puerto Rican immigrants. She learned the place by observing and then painting what she saw and wanted to understand: a “new,” diverse America, populated by men of color, single mothers sitting on stoops, and children in repose…

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Image: Alice Neel, Carmen and Judy, 1972

© The Estate of Alice Neel