Alice Neel’s best portraits, as chosen by painter Chantal Joffe

‘SELF-PORTRAIT’ (1980)

Alice is 80 when she makes this self-portrait. Compare it to Lucian Freud’s late self-portrait in which he’s standing naked, brandishing a brush, looking almost like a boxer, all ego. And then there’s little Alice sitting on her chair, her feet twisted a bit, her flesh hanging off her arms. Yet she also has her brush and her rag, so she is like a fighter too, in a different way. There is no vanity here, no flattery, but as a painter she finds a real beauty in her thick white hair and bright pink cheeks. She’s sitting down, but she’s totally active in the act of painting. She has almost left her body behind, and she’s observing it with detachment. She’s enjoying the line of her navel and her puffy ankles. She conveys the age-spotted softness of her skin in just a few lines. The economy of her painting is extraordinary.

‘ANDY WARHOL’ (1970)

Is it Alice’s cosy motherliness — she is 70 when she paints this portrait — that allows Warhol to be so vulnerable with her? He lets her paint him without his shirt, his chest exposed, his eyes closed as if unable to bear her scrutiny. She doesn’t flinch from painting what’s right there: the tenderness of those scars and the line of his breasts, his long brown shoes and strange old man’s trousers. It’s so far from how Warhol presented himself, all hidden with wigs and make-up and polo necks.

I know how it feels, as a painter, to sit with someone and see their vulnerabilities. Alice never tries to make things pretty. Her gaze is full of love and compassion and honesty. That’s a hard thing to do. The moment when you turn the painting around and your sitter sees it — people flinch. That can be hard, because as a painter you fall in love with everybody you paint.

Nobody has painted Warhol like that or seen Warhol like that. It’s not a cruel painting, but for Warhol it must have been a hard painting.

‘LINDA NOCHLIN AND DAISY’ (1973)

I love that even when Alice paints influential art-world people she cannot betray her own honesty as a painter. Linda Nochlin is an amazing feminist art historian, but here she also looks a bit like a school mum. You know this woman. She’s trying to look glamorous, but she’s got this wriggly little kid with her. Her hand is gripping the child, trying to keep her on the sofa. It’s touching — we are so exposed by our relationships to our children.

By this point Alice has lived the truth of that, trying to be a person and a painter and a mum, and Linda is sitting there trying to hold it all together somehow. I think Alice is the first painter who shows us that from the inside. In a mother and child scene by Renoir, say, it’s a very different view we’re looking from.

There’s a fierce intelligence about Linda. It’s like she’s challenging Alice. She’s saying, “I’m a critic, I’m a writer. Make this a great painting.” I’m really in awe of Alice Neel’s ability to hold all of that in play.

‘JOHN PERREAULT’ (1972)

I’m a shy painter. Alice was never shy. She looks hard and paints the art critic with great precision from his eyebrows to his toes. His body, all the hair, the warmth. The marks of his tan. His maleness and his vulnerability. She sees all of him, and we experience both his vanity and her appraisal of him. He’s full of confidence, and that makes him more vulnerable than the vulnerable people she paints. She’s loving his beauty, but she’s gently laughing at him as well. She’s taking the piss a bit. People who feel themselves to be beautiful, you can paint them with a kind of impunity with which you can’t paint people who are more insecure.

It’s strange to think of this encounter. Alice is 72 when she paints him, and he is young, lying on that bed like a big ginger cat. His penis is so utterly real in this painting, the weight of his balls. The sweet old lady never flinches. People underestimated Alice, and that allowed her to make some extraordinary paintings.

‘WELLESLEY GIRLS’ (1967)

Alice very much defines the contrasting characters of these two girls, the forward-leaning one and the shyer, more prim one sitting upright, her hands clasped in her lap. Also it’s a very specific age of girl; she shows you the gusset of her tights without quite meaning to.

I like that Alice shows us the individuals within the larger picture of privileged college girls in the 1960s. She conjures the time brilliantly. It’s like a scene from The Graduate. I grew up in the 1970s and these are people I would have looked at. The clothes are so telling, they’re as important as in a Goya or a Rembrandt.

‘MARGARET EVANS PREGNANT’ (1978)

I suspect this is Margaret Evans’s first child. She has that look of fear and excitement, of shimmering innocence. She has no idea what’s to come, because experience is the only way you can understand some things in life. Alice paints her with both compassion and detachment: she knows exactly what lies ahead for Margaret Evans. The reflection in the mirror behind her has a darkness to it, as if she is slightly older there and Alice is foreseeing the future when she’s actually had the baby — the exhaustion.

It’s exciting to see a pregnant woman painted by someone who’s been pregnant, who knows how it feels to be in that body. The last time I painted someone pregnant, at the end of last year, I saw the baby’s elbow go by across her tummy. Suddenly, I remembered that feeling of being inhabited. But there is something secretive about Margaret too. Pregnant women are so self-contained in their relationship to the infant; they have a secret none of the rest of us have. Painting somebody is very much the meeting of two people, a confrontation in some ways. And I get that with this portrait. Margaret is poised, she is holding her own.

‘CARMEN AND JUDY’ (1972)

The baby looks at her mother’s face while Carmen looks out at us, one hand holding the baby’s hand, guarding her body. Hands are always really telling in Alice’s paintings. The bright pattern dress is emblematic of the 1970s, contrasting with the pathos of the scene: the unwell baby, the mother’s sorrow and bravery and weariness. It’s a funny expression on her face, she is allowing us to look but at the same time she’s saying, “Don’t feel sorry for me, I’m OK.”

This child is so vulnerable, and Alice’s own story is everywhere. To my mind, the child is also her own baby daughter, Santillana, when she was losing her to diphtheria. Making this painting is forcing Alice to go back in time: it’s the 1970s and Santillana died in 1927. Alice is inhabiting Carmen as much as she is looking at her. Painting is like a truth serum for the artist as well; your own feelings always come out.

‘Alice Neel: Hot Off the Griddle’ is at the Barbican, London, from February 16 to May 21. The accompanying book ‘Alice Neel: Hot Off The Griddle’ is published by Prestel

Follow @FTMag on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first