Alice Neel: Hot Off the Griddle

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In quintessentially Neel fashion, the pop artist looks fleshy and defenceless; his eyes are averted and his stomach sags over the surgical corset he wore after being shot. A 1926 portrait of Neel’s first (indeed only) husband, the Cuban artist Carlos Enríquez, who all but kidnapped their child, has overtones of El Greco.

The main gallery is a kind of all-together-now vision of a certain time and place: downtown Manhattan in the 1960s and 70s. Instead, her portraits bear witness to a network of interrelations shaped by the dynamics of a city where, like in Levitt’s film, people from every race and class rub up against each other. Then followed international recognition with an exhibition in Moscow in 1981, which was close to her heart. Regardless of the profile of her sitters, the portraits never lose their raw, often uncomfortable, intimacy: Neel’s refusal to look away.

Henri was committed to a relentless brutalism, and urged those who came after him to “paint what is real to you. I represent the 20th Century’, she says in one documentary about her, ‘I was born in 1900, and I’ve tried to capture the zeitgeist’. Neel painted and drew her neighbor, Georgie, starting from around ten years old, many times throughout the 1950s, inadvertently documenting his growth from a child to a teenager. In her last decades of life, she saw a new wave of recognition from critics, while celebrities sought her out for portraits, including Andy Warhol and poets like Frank O’Hara. Alice Neel (1900–1984) was born in a small town in Pennsylvania, studied art in Philadelphia, and lived most of her life in New York, with a stint in Havana following her 1925 marriage to the Cuban avantgarde artist Carlos Enríquez Gómez.

A communist Hot Off The Griddle takes its title from what Neel described as her desire to, like Levitt, ‘catch life as it goes by, hot off the griddle’.The phrase comes from Neel’s freewheeling manifesto of style: “One of the reasons I painted was to catch life as it goes by, right hot off the griddle. Additional highlights include a large-scale self-portrait from 1980, painted at the age of 80, four years before Neel’s death. It is hard to hear the gentle whispers of one artist against the thrumming visual noise of another, and too often the canvases look either unfortunately similar, because grouped by theme or material, or appear to compete for greater or lesser strength or subtlety. The vibrant blue of the cover and the laid texture of the paper nods to the infamous striped chair that Neel regularly used in her sittings, debossed with three true-to-size photographs of the artist showing her characteristic playfulness.