Alice Neel: Painter of Modern Life

Alice Neel: Painter of Modern Life was a major museum survey of 72 works by Alice Neel. The exhibition travelled throughout Europe through January 2018.

The exhibition began with early portraits created in Havana and paintings made in the 1930s when the artist was living in New York's Greenwich Village. The later works included paintings Neel made in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where she lived and worked from 1962 until 1984. The exhibition was curated by Jeremy Lewison, who has worked with the Estate of Alice Neel since 2003.

Neel persisted passionately with figurative painting throughout the post-war period, gaining recognition for her work from the 1960s onwards. The New York Review of Books observes how, in her later portraits, Neel was able to "unflinchingly depict the gamut of human vulnerabilities, emotions and attitudes." Her first retrospective was organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1974 when Neel was 74. As Peter Schjeldahl writes in The New Yorker, "Outlasting insult and condescension, a woman among competitive men, and a figurative artist in times agog for abstraction, she triumphed."

Painter of Modern Life was first shown at the Ateneum Art Museum (part of the Finnish National Gallery) in Helsinki before traveling to the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague in 2016, and the Fondation Vincent van Gogh in 2017. The exhibition opened at Deichtorhallen in Hamburg in October 2017. Painter of Modern Life was accompanied by a fully illustrated publication with texts by Jeremy Lewison and Susanna Pettersson.