Let’s celebrate Alice Neel as a painter of clothes — as well as people

In Alice Neel’s 1972 painting of Irene Peslikis, the feminist artist and activist is draped over a purple chair, her left arm raised to grip the backrest, exposing a tuft of armpit hair. Peslikis is wearing a violet-blue tank top and velvety high-waisted trousers in a similar shade. On her feet is a pair of dainty laced-up brown brogues.

The activist’s open, direct gaze is arresting. So is her simple outfit, which amplifies Peslikis’s self-assurance.

“[Clothing] is an aspect of her painting that doesn’t often get spoken about, but it’s very relevant,” says Eleanor Nairne, curator of Alice Neel: Hot Off the Griddle, the largest UK exhibition to date of the artist’s work, which opens February 16 at London’s Barbican. “[With clothing] she is trying to capture something of a person’s unique character and something of the spirit of the age.”

A self-described “humanist” and “collector of souls”, the late American painter showed endless curiosity for her fellow human beings. In her six-decade-long career, stretching from the 1920s to her death in 1984, she painted her lovers, her family and neighbours and also politicians, intellectuals, artists and activists. She sometimes undressed them, but just as often she didn’t, turning clothing into an inseparable element of her subjects’ individuality. In being a painter of people, Neel became a painter of clothes.

In “Wellesley Girls”, Neel’s 1967 painting of Kiki Djos and her friend Nancy Selvage, clothing, colour and composition come together to represent the sitters’ different personalities. Djos, on the left of the picture, spreads her legs wide and stares back at the painter. Her confidence is mirrored by her flamboyant outfit — a green and light-blue polka-dot blouse, worn open at the neck, over a black miniskirt and bright violet tights. Selvage, wearing a yellow crew-neck jumper over a black skirt, sits with her back straight and her hands quietly folded in her lap. She appears more demure than Djos, but no less fierce, her round hazel eyes similarly fixed on the viewer.

Neel said, “Oh, how wonderful, you’re all wearing patent-leather shoes.” And that was so intriguing to her’

Neel wasn’t an eccentric dresser herself, but clearly enjoyed clothing on other people, dwelling with pleasure on details such as a fur trim, the print of a dress or a colourful scarf. Sometimes these were the only items adorning the bodies of her subjects — such as the blue wide-brimmed hat and pearl necklace worn by an otherwise nude Rhoda Myers, a friend of Neel’s, in her portrait from 1930. Forty-three years later, young graduate Kitty Pearson was also depicted nude with a blue top hat. Neel’s 1970 portrait of Jackie Curtis and Ritta Redd hides in plain sight a delicious little detail: Curtis’s right toe peaks out of a hole in her tights, revealing the same bright red nail polish that she is wearing on her finger nails.

Shoes are a recurring object of fascination. Neel’s portrait of art critic John Gruen and his family from 1970 is also known as “Six Patent Leather Shoes” in a nod to the shiny footwear worn by the three sitters. In The Art of Not Sitting Pretty, Phoebe Hoban writes that Gruen, who in the painting also wears a violet scarf and bright blue socks, recalled Neel immediately fixating on their shoes. “She said, ‘Oh, how wonderful, you’re all wearing patent-leather shoes.’ And that was so intriguing to her, and I believe that when she started putting colour, she started with the shoes.” 

Porn star and performance artist Annie Sprinkle told New York Magazine that Neel “would almost have an orgasm over my high heels” after Neel painted her in 1982 wearing a revealing corset, garters, stockings and vertiginous heels. The look was chosen by Neel among many costumes that Sprinkle had brought with her for her sitting.

Neel painted her housekeeper breastfeeding her daughter while wearing a pink-and-magenta patterned dress

In her 1970 portrait of Andy Warhol, where the pop artist is nude from the waist up, showing the surgical corset that he had to wear after being shot by Valerie Solanas in 1968, his laced-up brogues immediately catch the viewer’s eyes. (According to Hoban, the shoes might have been a reference to Warhol’s commercial illustrator work for shoe manufacturer I Miller.)

At other times, Neel was so captivated by what her subjects were wearing that she would ask them to pose right away. This was the case of art historian Mary Garrard who, in the winter of 1977, entered Neel’s apartment wrapped up in a navy-blue pea coat, red scarf and cap. “Stop, I want to paint you just like that,” Neel said to Garrard, and so she was painted. The same year, Neel encountered Virginia Miller, who was wearing cowboy boots, and asked her to sit for a portrait. “She said, ‘You have to wear the same outfit,’” Miller recounts to Hoban.

Clothing and its absence play a part even in Neel’s nudes. In the 1970s, the artist invited art historian Cindy Nemser and her husband Chuck to sit for her and then slowly cajoled them into removing every layer of their clothing, which they had carefully picked for the occasion. “Alice took one look at us, and frowned,” writes Nemser. “‘All those clothes,’ she wailed, as she looked me over. ‘You look so fussy with all those layers of clothes and all that Mickey Mouse jewellery. You look so bourgeois in that pinstriped suit,’ she admonished my husband. ‘I just painted a dentist and he had all those clothes on too.’” In the end, they were both painted almost fully naked (Chuck kept his briefs on).

Neel aspired to capture the zeitgeist through the people she painted. Her portraits are rarely flattering for the sitters, but show empathy and an understanding of their personal histories. Clothing played a role in telling them.

In “Richard in the Era of the Corporation” (1978-79), Neel captures her eldest son, who at that time was working for Pan Am, wearing a crumpled suit, sitting uncomfortably in a chair. Neel said he looked “used up”. “The truth is I didn’t know what the 1970s was about until I painted him,” Neel told Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air programme. “And then I realised that it was the time when the corporation enslaved all the bright young men. Because he looks just about ready to die of being enslaved by Pan Am.”

Nairne, who in her curatorial work for the Barbican exhibition has been trying to find out more about the people who sat for Neel, takes as an example the story of Carmen and Judy. In the portrait, Neel paints her housekeeper breastfeeding her daughter while wearing a pink-and-magenta patterned dress. Through interviews with Carmen’s family, Nairne has discovered that before immigrating to the US, Carmen was a fashion designer in Haiti.

“It made me think that that pink-and-magenta dress has real flair to it,” she says. “Maybe Neel wanted to portray her in that particular dress because this is a woman who worked with her as a housekeeper, but who also had other lives. Being stylishly dressed was part of her character.”

‘Alice Neel: Hot Off The Griddle’ opens at the Barbican Centre, London, on February 16

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