Alice Neel, Barbican review — sharp portraits get under the skin

From the neck up, she’s a sweet old biddy. From the neck down, she’s an affront to a canon that objectified women’s bodies and failed to notice their minds — or art — at all.

Waiting until she was 80 years old before painting herself nude, Alice Neel sticks two fingers up at all those — lovers, critics, her own daughter — who failed to understand she contained worlds. Simultaneously brutal, tender and inspiring, the painting contrasts the schoolmarmish propriety of her upswept silver bun and bespectacled eyes with the extravagant immodesty of her pendulous breasts and muffin-top belly. Meanwhile, the paintbrush in Neel’s hand declares her sovereign in her world.

It was always about power for the American painter. Who had it? Who deserved it? Who was fighting for it? As this new exhibition at the Barbican demonstrates, Neel paid attention to those whose lives, as poet Adrienne Rich put it, were “cheap poor quick unmonumented”.

After the sly ferocity of that self-portrait, we relocate to Cuba, Neel’s home in the mid-1920s. Captured in the fluid expressionism that characterised her early work, a portrait of a black mother and child — the woman’s broken-toothed smile testifying to poverty, the child’s stare wide-eyed with awareness beyond her years — speaks of Neel’s drive to “assert the dignity and eternal importance of the human being”.

To make the anonymous poor your subject is not unproblematic. Did Neel pay these sitters? Were they satisfied with their portrayal? Mostly Neel’s respect is evident, but in a painting of Cuban beggars, for example, their wan pallor and frail bodies shrinking from life’s vicissitudes, her models risk becoming objects rather than subjects.

Neel had no desire to exploit. Born in 1900 in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, she never felt at home in the conservative community, railing against “Anglo-Saxons . . . their soda-cracker lives and their inhibitions”. Her empathy for the less fortunate was innate. So distressed was she by tales of suffering Jesus at Sunday school she had to be sent home.

Her passport out of small-town America came in the shape of Carlos Enríquez, a well-connected Cuban painter whom she met at summer school in 1924 and married in 1925. But a portrait of her husband a year later, peering down his nose at a single glass of wine, alludes to a sardonic, self-contained languor that does not bode well.

Enríquez shattered Neel’s world. After he, Neel and their baby daughter Santillana returned to Colwyn, the Pennsylvania town where Neel grew up, in 1927, Santillana died of diphtheria. In 1930, Enríquez returned to Havana, taking the couple’s second child, Isabetta, with him. (Later Isabetta was allegedly ashamed of her mother because of her louche lifestyle in Spanish Harlem.)

Devastated by these losses, Neel was admitted to hospital with depression. Here, she says, “drawing helped me decide to get well”. Works from this period include the nude “Ethel Ashton” (1930), a heavy-thighed woman whose wary, lugubrious expression exudes scepticism about the whole portraiture business.

That ability to excavate her subjects’ interior selves was her great gift. Her turbulent personal life spoke of a woman with fragile psychic boundaries. Yet borderlessness blessed her with empathy. So deeply did she identify with her sitters, after finishing a portrait she felt as if she had “gone back to a untenanted house”.

As the Great Depression hit, Neel — who joined the Communist party in 1935 — inevitably identified with the laid-off workers. Employed by Roosevelt’s public art programmes, she painted strikes, anti-Nazi protests and the magistrates’ court where she was arraigned after picketing with the Artists’ Union. Deft and immediate, these images operate as painterly reportage by an artist who said: “I paint my time using the people as evidence.”

But Neel was deepening her craft. In 1938, with her lover José Santiago Negrón, Neel relocated to Spanish Harlem, a district she loved “for the rich deep vein/Of human feeling buried/Under your fire engines”, as she wrote in a poem. This invigorating world fuelled her efforts to scavenge from her sitters a vital, intimate essence so that the viewer feels as if they are encountering a sentient being rather than an image.

By now, Neel’s lush strokes had been replaced by a smoother modelling of tone and colour. In a painting from around 1950 of the black communist intellectual Harold Cruse, she evokes his melancholy acuity through subtle mélanges of brown, red, black and grey, heightened by the cobalt flash of his scarf and the splash of white where the sun catches his forehead. Neel was a supreme observer of faces: the way blotch meets wrinkle, the tilt of a gaze, slant of a jaw, tightening of lip.

As well as Cruse, she slips under the skin of her friend, novelist and labour activist Phillip Bonosky. Painted in 1948, he stares straight at her, paper under his arm, hand clamped between his legs, poised for intellectual combat. Strikingly, “Sam, Snow (how like the winter)” (1945), a portrait of Neel’s lover, the Marxist film-maker Sam Brody, known for his red-hot temper, bleaches Brody’s face to chime with the icy landscape outside the window.

Neel understood coupledom in all its fertile frictions. Painted in 1954, “Rita and Hubert” conveys the mysterious complicity between a duo on a sofa, Hubert gazing out stalwartly and pensive Rita staring at him, eyes rapt with precious knowledge of her man’s soul.

In 1970, Neel created one of her most famous portraits: an image of Andy Warhol, his scars and surgical corset on show to the world, his wasted body testifying to the havoc wrought by Valerie Solanas’s bullet. With closed eyes, face aslant, a blue aura behind him, Warhol remains frosty, omniscient, determinedly unhumiliated. Yet by allowing him his signature detachment, Neel exposes his vulnerability. She’s thawed out Mr Cool.

Although by then she should have been a household name, Neel was included in the Whitney’s Annual Exhibition only after a petition by feminist art historian Cindy Nemser. She had shown in galleries throughout her career, but her journey was compromised by her gender, her politics and her commitment to the figure at a time when abstraction, and later the superficial imagery of Pop, were fashionable. Finally, in 1974 a retrospective at the Whitney bestowed on her the recognition she deserved.

Neel died in 1984. Two years earlier, she had produced a quixotic portrait of Annie Sprinkle, a performance artist and sex activist. Down on one knee, in kinky boots and peephole corset, her flame-red hair bright as her mischievous eyes, Sprinkle’s image is too cartoonish to be a great painting. Yet it demands we remember Neel’s own recipe for portraiture. She would, she revealed, talk to her model until they “unconsciously assume their most characteristic pose, which in a way involves all their character and social standing — what the world has done to them and their retaliation”.

To May 21, barbican.org.uk

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