Alice Neel Prints | David Zwirner

Alice Neel (1900–1984) is widely regarded as one of the foremost American artists of the twentieth century. While the avant-garde of the 1940s and 1950s renounced figuration, Neel developed her signature approach, creating daringly honest paintings of the people around her.

While Neel’s primary medium was painting, the artist worked with master printers to make a number of prints in the 1970s and 1980s, creating works that feature many of her recurring subjects.

These prints have come directly from The Estate of Alice Neel.

Alice Neel, 1980

The Family, 1982

Alice Neel

The Family, 1982

Lithograph on paper

31 1/2 x 27 inches (80 x 68.6 cm)

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Based on an acclaimed oil painting of the same title made two years earlier, The Family depicts Neel’s granddaughters Victoria and twins Alexandra and Antonia with their mother, Nancy, the first wife of Neel’s oldest son, Richard. Posed as a family snapshot, the painting that this print relates to was done at Spring Lake, New Jersey, where Neel spent many summers.

Installation view showing Neel's painting The Family, 1980, in the exhibition Alice Neel / The Subject and Me, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, 2016

Nancy and Olivia, 1982

Alice Neel

Nancy and Olivia, 1982

Lithograph on paper

31 x 28 inches (78.7 x 71.1 cm)

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Nancy and Olivia returns to a painting Neel made in 1967 titled Mother and Child (Nancy and Olivia)—her first portrait of the pair—currently on view in Alice Neel: People Come First at the Guggenheim Bilbao. Motherhood was a recurring theme for Neel and the subject of a number of key works. Here, as Ara Osterweil writes in Artforum, “Alice sees her daughter-in-law Nancy … in a way that recognizes the renewed drama and crisis that motherhood brings. It is not only the infant who is surprised to encounter their uncannily bounded self.”

Installation view showing Neel's painting Mother and Child (Nancy and Olivia), 1967, in the exhibition Alice Neel: People Come First, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2021

“This array [at The Metropolitan Museum of Art] confirms Neel as equal if not superior to artists like Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon and destined for icon status on the order of Vincent van Gogh and David Hockney.”

—Roberta Smith, “It’s Time to Put Alice Neel in Her Rightful Place in the Pantheon”, The New York Times, 2021

Jar from Samarkand, 1982

Alice Neel

Jar from Samarkand, 1982

Lithograph on paper

38 x 28 inches (96.5 x 71.1 cm)

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Jar from Samarkand is a tribute to Neel’s dear friend David Gordon, a theater critic and Communist Party activist. Neel painted Gordon in both figurative and still-life form the year of his death in 1973.

The print’s title refers to the elegant black vessel toward the edge of the table that Gordon had purchased for the artist in Soviet Asia, which was delivered to Neel after his death. The contrast between the grapes spilling over the sides of a tall glass bowl and the dark jar, reminiscent of a funeral urn, creates a moving picture of loss, heightened by the otherwise empty table and chairs.

Alice Neel, Jar from Samarkand, 1982 (detail)

“Solemn, motionless, the jar is like a funeral urn. Despite its small size, its emotional weight tips the table top up like a seesaw, life freighted toward death. In 1936, [the Russian-American artist Louis] Lozowick had argued that one could paint a ‘revolutionary’ still life; in 1973 Neel painted a still life that memorialized the death of revolutionary hopes through her personal feelings of loss. One plus one was becoming one minus one.”

—Pamela Allara, Pictures of People: Alice Neel’s American Portrait Gallery, 1998

Hartley, 1981

Alice Neel

Hartley, 1981

Screenprint on paper

33 1/2 x 26 inches (85.1 x 66 cm)

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Here, Neel depicts her youngest son, Hartley, sitting cross-legged in a white chair. About thirty-eight years old at the time of his painted portrait, Hartley had opened a private medical practice near Stowe, Vermont, in 1973, where he lived with his wife, Ginny. Resting his chin against his left hand, Hartley is shown as if lost in thought.

Alice Neel in her New York studio, 1979

Alice Neel, Hartley, oil on canvas, 1978

Light, 1983

Alice Neel

Light, 1983

Lithograph on paper

38 x 27 inches (96.5 x 68.6 cm)

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Light relates to one of Neel’s last large still lifes, made at her summer cottage in Spring Lake, New Jersey. The work demonstrates a continuing exploration of the relationship between realism and abstraction. Large areas of the composition move between two and three dimensions, and the shadow cast onto the floor and wall appears to reach out of the picture plane toward the viewer.

Alice Neel with her paintings at her Spanish Harlem apartment in 1944. Photo by Sam Brody

“Every person is a new universe unique with its own laws emphasizing some belief or phase of life immersed in time and rapidly passing by.”

—Alice Neel, 1970s

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