Alice Neel: Hot Off the Griddle

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She began in earnest as a painter in Cuba alongside her husband Carlos Enríquez, creating intense, fluid portraits of him and people she encountered in Havana. Accompanying the largest UK show of the artist’s work to date, at London’s Barbican (until May 21), the book includes over 70 of Neel’s most vibrant portraits, capturing the shifting social and political context of America in the 20th century. The artist, who described herself as “the collector of souls”, moved to Harlem in the early 1940s with a nightclub owner.

The Great Depression in the 1930s inspired public arts projects, which employed artists like Neel and recognised art as labour. Even as her canvases moved away from the streets of Harlem, Neel remained a committed Communist Party member throughout her adult life. Largely unrecognised for her work in the last century, Neel has since come to be championed for the candour with which she looked at the world. In fact, Neel’s depiction of women, and rejection of the male gaze, made her something of a feminist icon. Neel’s paintings are even more extraordinary given their strident commitment to figuration, all the while New Yorkers could not make up their mind over whether the future of Modern art belonged to gestural abstraction, Pop, Minimalism, the downtown happening or anything else.The Barbican’s exhibition treats Neel’s politics as something of a curio, a by-product of the humanistic value she places on life rather than the other way around.

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’. Describing herself as "a collector of souls”, Neel worked in New York during a period in which figurative painting was indeed deeply unfashionable.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’. Neel was a self-declared non-feminist but it was no surprise feminists embraced her for her tenacity at continuing to make her work despite being ignored by the male-dominated system she wanted to be part of. These later portraits particularly are full of empathy and are at their most powerful when Neel has connected with the vulnerability of the sitter, maybe through her own experience of that vulnerability.