ROOMS AREN’T SO important in an Alice Neel painting; her focus was on people. Her work, which attests to the cleareyed compassion Neel felt toward humans of all walks of life, reveals the deep interiority of her subjects through vivid, almost caricature-like renderings — wide-set eyes, dimpled chins, skin mottled in shades of green or blemished with blue-purple veins and exaggerated, spidery fingers. The settings in her artworks are often mere suggestions: the shade of a blue wall, the outline of a sofa — the room receding while the figure remains.
It can be disorienting, then, to recognize some of those settings in the artist’s final New York City residence — a 1,000-square-foot Upper West Side apartment, into which she moved in 1962 and which has remained largely unchanged since her death in 1984 at the age of 84. In the absence of a person, material details come into sharp relief: The artist’s blue paint-flecked smock hangs from her easel in the front room. Her palette, the globs of pigment now dried into nearly colorless husks, sits nearby on an aging page torn from The New York Times. Familiar furniture — such as the olive green sofa from “Linda Nochlin and Daisy” (1973) and the mustard yellow velvet chair from “Margaret Evans Pregnant” (1978) — is arranged in a circle. A photograph of her by Robert Mapplethorpe, thought to have been taken just days before she died, hangs beside the front door. The apartment is part museum, part time capsule, part home, part communion.
In each of Neel’s New York residences — from Greenwich Village to Spanish Harlem to the Upper West Side — the artist painted her subjects in her home, whether they were celebrities, such as Andy Warhol, or kids from the neighborhood, as in “Two Girls, Spanish Harlem” (1959). As such, her home was always her work space — a necessary collaborator.
The Upper West Side apartment is now occasionally inhabited by Neel’s youngest son, Hartley, 80, and his wife, Ginny, 77. (Neel had four children: Isabetta and Santillana, with the Cuban painter Carlos Enríquez Gómez, Neel’s only husband; Richard, with the Puerto Rican musician José Santiago Negrón; and Hartley, with the photographer and filmmaker Sam Brody.) Hartley and Ginny stay there when they’re in Manhattan (they reside in Vermont) and open the apartment for invited guests, although there are no plans to formally show it to the public. The front room, the sitting room, the kitchen and Hartley’s old bedroom are all much as Neel left them. “I remember coming in the door and she said, ‘Don’t take your coat off. I want to paint you like that,’” says Ginny. “This apartment was alive with Alice.”
Read more