The subject of Alice Neel’s painting Marxist Girl (Irene Peslikis) (1972)—a founder of the New York Feminist Art Institute—presides over a worn purple chair like a self-possessed sovereign of bohemia. Peslikis’s right leg hangs over the armrest while her curling right arm shows off an unshaven armpit. Those brownish-black eyes confront us with a glare that is vulnerable yet not uninviting, as though she is too afraid to ask: “who the hell are you?” To her left, affixed on a blue wall under the vaulting industrial pipes of the Centre Pompidou is the double portrait Wellesley Girls (Kiki Djos ‘68 and Nancy Selvage ’67) (1967). In their preppy skirts and tights, painted under a harsh fluorescent light on a weekend trip to the city, they display the essence of middle-class naivety while social revolution rages outside.
Among others, they rub shoulders with Life magazine editor David Bourdon (purring like “the cat that’s got the cream”, according to Neel) and Gregory Battcock, the legendary secret-keeper of Manhattan’s queer gossip (whose stern expression resembles, oddly, “an Asturian miner”). The exhibition features 70 such works of Neel’s friends, her sons, their ex-girlfriends, loners, drop-outs, draftees, revolutionaries, expectant mothers, poets, museum curators, and strangers off the street. It is a veritable who’s who of the human carnival. It is a whole life in art.
Born on 28 January 1900, “four weeks younger than the century”, as she liked to say, Neel is perhaps the most astute and penetrating people-watcher of that tumultuous century of American history. She was painting right up until the moment of a particularly spectral photograph taken by Robert Mapplethorpe in 1984—included in the show—that depicts the artist just a week or so before her death.
Another work on display, by Jenny Holzer, is a wonderful fragment of biography: in 1955, when federal agents came to interrogate her over her Communist Party membership, Neel unsuccessfully tried to get them to sit for a painting.
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