Passage III

HUMANITIES: Passage A is adapted from the article “Heroes and Wretches” by Suzie Mackenzie (©2004 by Guardian News and Media Limited). Passage B is adapted from the article “Alice Neel: The Art Modernism Neglected” by Jeremy Lewison (©2010 by Telegraph Media Group Limited)

Passage A by Suzie Mackenzie

Francis Bacon used to say that no artist in their lifetime can possibly know whether or not he/she is any good. Only time, he said, could sort out the twin perils that beset every artist: theory, by which "most people enter a painting", and fashion—what an audience feels it should or should not be moved by. Bacon reckoned this "sort out" period to be somewhere between 75 and 100 years, by which time the artist would most likely be dead. For this reason, he also said, success in an artist`s lifetime is no indicator of greatness—on the contrary. Every artist works within a void “and will never know".

In this sense, if no other, the American portrait artist Alice Neel can be said to have been lucky. She can never have had any expectations, because to be a woman and an artist on the cusp of the 20th century was to cast yourself into avoid. Neel was born in 1900, into a middle-class Philadelphia family, at a time when, as Henry James had observed only 19 years earlier, to be a lady was to be a portrait. She worked all her long life: against the prevailing theory of what it was to be a woman, that it was not becoming for a woman to be an artist, to have a public life, that women were framed for the interior. And against fashion: she remained a figurative artist when the rest of the New York art establishment was in the grip of abstract expressionism. Neel doesn’t seem ever to have had any notion of "becoming" an artist, or even "being" an artist. She simply was an artist. Even after the mid-1970s, when she finally did become "fashionable"—helped by a major retrospective at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974—Neel rarely took commissions. She painted for herself.

At the Vietoria Miro Gallery in London is the first ever solo exhibition of Neel's work in Europe—a collection spanning three decades, curated by Jeremy Lewison. Looking back now, 20 years after Neel's death, it is possible to see how she took a quintessentially bourgeois form—the portrait—and radically transformed it, while making the innate constraints of portraiture work for her. Hers are not portraits as advertising, they don't flatter the sitter or inspire envy in the viewer. You don't look at a Neel painting and recognise power, affluence, beauty—though these ingredients may be there. Her greatest gift as a portraitist, Lewison says, is her psychological acuity.

Passage B by Jeremy Lewison

Neel had a natural flair for paint. She painted thick and thin, dry and wet, and in the later stages of her career ignored any conventions of finish, rather deciding for herself when a work was complete enough. At times she felt that a painting had reached a point where to go further would spoil it. In some instances she painted a second version. Ultimately what mattered to Neel was to keep the painting fresh and alive.

In our present era portraiture has been relegated to a minor art. The portrait survives largely in the wooden paintings commissioned by academic colleges or national portrait galleries from artists who have facility but little flair or psychological understanding or vision.

Photography has replaced painting as the means of choice for portraiture but photography is concerned with capturing the moment. Painting is about the synthesis of time. Moreover a photograph, with its smooth reflective surface, printed by a chemical reaction or digitally manipulated with no material depth or presence, is entirely different from a painted portrait.

Neel’s work is an assimilation of many different moments and moods, a distillation of many hours of scrutiny of the subject that concludes in a single summarising image where the impressions captured over time are related not simply through an image but through the material quality of paint, the flicks of the wrist and the movements of an arm, paint laid on hastily and contours outlined slowly.

Neel’s art displays a range of marks made in the service of communicating an image rather than at the behest of any conceptual programme, for Neel is a natural painter and apparently unselfconscious.

Looking at Neel’s work now is to see a review of the twentieth century in New York. She represents changes in fashion and social mores, racial and gender issues, class differential, political agendas, feminist advances; in short her work effortlessly reflects a century of change as much as that of any photographer from the same era. With the abandonment of the modernist project, museums and galleries now make room for multiple voices to be heard, to uncover the art of those whom modernism neglected.