NEW YORK — Days after seeing "People Come First," a career-spanning Alice Neel survey at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, an afterimage of her brisk vision of vibrant humanity still pulses behind my eyes. Even in memory, Neel's paintings never sit still. They squirm, shiver and jiggle. Particularly memorable is her astonishing sequence of tender yet frank, unidealized portraits of pregnant women, women in childbirth and women breastfeeding. Regarded cumulatively, they are one of the signal achievements of modern American art.
Neel died in 1984 at age 84. But “People Come First,” which was organized by Kelly Baum and Randall Griffey, is a perfect show for right now. Conspicuously, it answers a ringing, present-day call for institutional inclusiveness. Neel, as a portraitist, was ecumenical. She painted people of color, the poor, the elderly, children, immigrants, gay and transgender people, workers, artists and political activists. She painted them naked and clothed, ailing and healthy, in Greenwich Village in the 1930s and later in Spanish Harlem and, from 1962 on, in West Harlem. She paid attention to them in ways that felt — and still feel — connected to love. (“Love is a phenomenon of attention,” wrote Ortega Y Gasset, a formative influence on Neel in the 1920s.)
But this is only part of what makes “People Come First” timely. Through its driving focus on the singularity of all her subjects, Neel’s work pumps oxygen into a room choking on the exhaust fumes of identity politics. Her acid colors and wry, gorgeously wayward psychology cut through the ideological cholesterol spiking in our body politic to show life as it really is: frail, intense, hilarious, hard-won, ephemeral, contradictory, deeply odd and oh so beautiful.
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