This retrospective sent a collective shivering depth charge through viewers’ psyches and showed that Neel was the painter par excellence of modern life. So original, raw, harrowing, and loving is Neel’s work that, in her lifetime, critics couldn’t grasp what she was up to. She lived at the edges into her 70s. By the time she finally started to be recognized, this painter, who worked in her living room, had lost one child to disease and another to her estranged ex-husband, suffered a mental breakdown, and saw the art world pass her by for her male peers. In “People Come First,” she emerged as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century and the ne plus ultra painter of pregnant women and motherhood — the colossal, savage tidal force that gives true meaning to “flesh of my flesh.” People lined up in spite of the pandemic to see work by this Balzac of the American human comedy.