Alice Neel featured in the Royal Academy's America after the Fall: Painting in the 1930s

The Sackler Wing

Burlington House

25 February - 4 June 2017

The art of 1930s America tells the story of a nation in flux. Artists responded to rapid social change and economic anxiety with some of the 20th century’s most powerful art - brought together now in this once-in-a-generation show.

In the devastating wake of the Wall Street Crash, artists sought to capture the changes in urbanisation, industrialisation and immigration that pulsed across the country, resulting in one of the most vital periods for American artists in the 20th century. This was a decade like no other that saw them search for an elusive ‘Americanness’ through realism, populism and abstraction, rural and urban themes, the farm, the new, the traditional.

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Image: Alice Neel, Pat Whalen, 1935. Oil, ink and newspaper on canvas. 68.6 x 58.4 cm. Collection of Whitney Museum of American Art © The Estate of Alice Neel.