Alice Neel: ‘Always in the Process of Becoming’

Alice Neel, A Spanish Boy 1955

‘I paint to try to reveal the struggle, tragedy and joy of life.’
Alice Neel

I recently watched a fascinating documentary about the American painter Alice Neel, written and directed by her grandson Andrew Neel (‘Alice Neel,’ 2007).

Neel believed passionately that people are worthy of our attention; that every individual merits scrutiny. She created raw, intimate images of diverse characters, revealing their suffering and frailty, their strength and dignity. In pursuing her craft, she made huge personal sacrifices. She persisted with portrait painting when the art establishment determined it was an obsolete artform. She persevered when the world went wild for Abstract Expressionism. And finally she received the credit she had always deserved.

In the documentary there’s a brief clip of Neel at work with a sitter in her apartment. She reflects on how a portrait is shaping up.

‘It’s going somewhere, but it hasn’t arrived there. It’s always in the process of becoming.’

Let us consider what we can learn from this compelling artist.

1. ‘Search for a Road. Search for Freedom’

Alice Neel was born in 1900 and grew up in rural Pennsylvania, in a middle-class family that was often short of money. After graduating from high school, she took a clerical job to help support her parents. She studied art at evening classes, and in 1921 she enrolled at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women.

‘My conscience bothered me, that I should be just fooling about with art when really everybody needed money.’

In 1925 Neel married Carlos Enríquez, an aristocratic Cuban painter, and they moved to Havana to live with his family. There she embraced the thriving avant-garde creative scene and developed a lifelong political consciousness. 

Neel had already travelled a long way from her conventional Pennsylvania upbringing.

'Art is two things: a search for a road and a search for freedom.’

Alice Neel with her paintings at her Spanish Harlem apartment in 1944. Courtesy of Sam Brody, via SeeThink Films

2. ‘All Experience Is Great, Providing You Live Through It’

In 1927 the couple moved to New York where Neel's first-born daughter died of diphtheria. A few years later Enríquez left her, taking their second daughter with him. Neel suffered a nervous breakdown, was hospitalized and attempted suicide. 

‘In a way it was my own fault. I pushed my brain back. And then after it got back there, I was much worse off. I forgot all the Spanish I knew. I couldn’t read. I couldn’t do anything.’

When Neel was released from the sanatorium, she took to painting themes of motherhood, loss and doubt. 

She continued to be unlucky in love. She had an affair with a heroin-addicted sailor, who, in a jealous rage, set fire to 350 of her paintings and drawings. She had a son by a nightclub singer and another by a documentary film-maker. The latter supported her work, but was abusive to her older boy.

‘I look happy. But that’s just a fake. I’m serving a sentence. Instead of jumping out the window, I’m putting in the time.’

Neel sold very few paintings and she participated in only one exhibition in this period. Between 1933 and 1943 she received funding from the Public Works of America Project, one of the Roosevelt's New Deal initiatives. But once that income dried up, she relied on welfare to make ends meet.

‘I had acquired the idea that for art’s sake you had to give up everything. If I had some money, I wouldn’t buy a dress or anything. I’d buy canvas and paint materials.’

Somehow Neel managed to survive.

'All experience is great providing you live through it. If it kills you, you've gone too far.’

Alice Neel, Pat Whalen, 1935

3. ‘People Come First’

In Greenwich Village Neel painted critics, artists, activists and intellectuals. In Spanish Harlem she painted her neighbours, women and children, family, friends and strangers. In West Harlem she painted pregnant nudes and nursing mothers. She painted people from diverse racial, cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. She painted what she called ‘the human comedy’: real people, real bodies, real lives.

'For me, people come first. I have tried to assert the dignity and eternal importance of the human being.’

Neel had developed a direct style of portraiture. Employing bold loose outlines and fresh vibrant colours, stripping away unnecessary detail, focusing with unflinching intensity on posture, personality and nuance; on idiosyncrasies that indicated the sitter’s true character -  a subtle gesture of the hand and a gentle tilt of the head; a clenched fist, folded arms and a furrowed brow; a bored stare, tired eyes and a nervous sideways glance. 

4. Be a ‘Collector of Souls’

'Like Chekhov, I am a collector of souls… If I hadn’t been an artist, I could have been a psychiatrist.'

Neel was aiming to go beyond surface detail to establish psychological truth. This required her to be empathetic; to develop a strong sense of the feelings of the sitter; to be sensitive to the life within.

‘I go so out of myself and into them that after they leave I sometimes feel horrible. I feel like an untenanted house.’

 5. Resist Prevailing Fashion and Dogma

Throughout her life Neel had to steel herself against prevailing cultural fashion and dogma.

There was a view that advances in photography had effectively removed the need for portrait painting. Neel demonstrated that, whereas a photo freezes a sitter in a particular moment and attitude, a painting can animate its subject through time; can penetrate beyond masks and facades; can express an authentic individual identity.

‘I would have to apologise for being psychological because that was considered a weakness.’

In the 1950s and 1960s Abstract Expressionism drowned out all other artforms. As the painter Chuck Close observed, it was as if Neel was ‘broadcasting and no one’s picking up the signal.’ But she remained stubbornly committed to representational work. 

‘I am against abstract and non-objective art because such art shows a hatred of human beings. It is an attempt to eliminate people from art, and as such it is bound to fail.’

Alice Neel, Marxist Girl (Irene Peslikis), 1972

6. ‘Express the Zeitgeist’

Neel was conscious that every individual is imprinted with the values and struggles of their era. And so her portraiture evolved with time. 

‘I like it not only to look like the person, but to have their inner character as well. And then I like it to express the zeitgeist. You see, I don’t want something in the’60s to look like something in the ‘70s.’

As Neel painted sitters of every ethnicity, sexuality, age, gender and economic group, so she recorded the progress of American history: from the Depression, through the Civil Rights era and on to a modern world of material wealth and spiritual poverty.

‘I like to paint people who are in the rat race, suffering all the tension and damage that’s involved in that – under pressure really of city life and of the awful struggle that goes on in the city.’

7. Be Tenacious. Be Interested

Toward the end of the 1960s, the Women's Rights movement celebrated Neel as an unfairly ignored talent, and she became something of a feminist icon. And yet she refused to be categorised simply as ‘a woman painter.’

'When I was in my studio I didn’t give a damn what sex I was… I thought art is art.'

Neel toured the States delivering lectures and participating in panel discussions at museums, art schools and universities. In the documentary an academic relates how, at one such event, Neel grabbed the microphone, set up a slide carousel of her work, and took over the discussion. She was hungry for attention.

At last, in 1974, Neel was given a major retrospective at the Whitney in New York. 

‘I always felt in a sense that I didn’t have the right to paint, because I had two sons and I had so many things I should be doing. And here I was painting. But that show convinced me that I had a perfect right to paint. I shouldn’t ever have felt that, but I did feel it. And after that show I never felt it any more.’

It had been a long, hard struggle for recognition. But Neel was equal to the challenge.

‘If you’re sufficiently tenacious and interested, you can accomplish what you want to accomplish in this world.’

In 1984 Neel died from cancer in her New York apartment.

Detail of Alice Neel, Richard in the Era of the Corporation (1978-79). Photo by Ben Davis.

Alice Neel was a woman of conviction. She adhered to her artistic and political beliefs, despite desperate poverty, untrustworthy lovers, a fickle art establishment and systemic sexism. She left us with a portrait of America in the 20th century, a tapestry of individual lives; of struggle, passion and endurance. 

There’s a telling scene in the film where this seemingly sweet little old lady upbraids an interviewer.

‘You must take what I give you. Don’t be so demanding. Just sit there.’
 She smiles gently.
‘Now. What was I talking about?...’

(You can see a retrospective of Neel's work at the Met Fifth Avenue, New York until 1 August 2021: ‘Alice Neel: People Come First.’)

‘Me.
Can you focus on me?
Baby, can you focus on me?
Babe.
Hands in the soap,
Have the faucets running,
And I keep looking at you.
Stuck on your phone,
And you're stuck in your zone,
You don't have a clue.
But I don't want to give up.
Baby, I just want you to get up.
Lately I've been a little fed up.
Wish you would just focus on
Me.’
HER, ‘Focus’ (D Camper / G Wilson / J Love)

No. 323

Do You Pitch in Poetry and Manage in Prose?

Norman Rockwell 'Freedom of Speech'

Mario Cuomo, the Governor of New York between 1983 and 1994, famously observed of the political process: ‘You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose.’ For politicians election campaigns are all grand themes, lofty ideals and elegant words. The day-to-day task of government is, by contrast, much more about hard bargaining, cold calculation and compromised action.

Of course, there’s been precious little poetry in the election currently concluding in the UK. Nonetheless, Cuomo’s dictum rings true, and it has a resonance for us in the world of commercial creativity. We would perhaps reluctantly agree that, in most circumstances:  ‘You pitch in poetry; you manage the business in prose.’

Classically, pitching is all theatre and personality; enterprise and enthusiasm; big ideas and limitless possibilities. If we’re fortunate enough to win a pitch, we soon come down to earth with a bump. Most of our proposed executions lie bleeding on the floor before us, victims of budget practicalities and Year 1 caution. (‘I think that will be brilliant in Year 2.’) We rapidly embrace a world of timeframes and team allocation; Gantt charts and organograms; status reports and conference calls. It’s all too easy to lose sight of our original hopes and plans. Before too long we do indeed find ourselves running the business in prose.

This begs certain questions of Agency leadership: Do we too readily set aside the optimism and open mindedness of the pitch for the harsh realities of everyday account management? How can we maintain some level of inspiration in the business once the aspiration and ambition of the pitch are a distant memory? How do we sustain some poetry in amongst the prose?

Moreover, in recent years the distinction between the pitch dynamic and day-to-day account practice has been blurred somewhat. As the world of communication has become more complex, as media have fragmented and technology has proliferated, pitching Clients have sought more than stirring words and lateral leaps. They want to know up-front about global networks and operating systems; capabilities and costs; partnerships, platforms and processes. They want to get their lawyers, accountants and procurement people involved. There’s a good deal of prose in the contemporary creative pitch.

This poses fresh questions for the pitching Agency: How do we convey to Clients the potential of our core creative proposal, whilst at the same time reassuring them that we have the people and processes to get the job done? How much of the pitch should we give to ideas and inspiration, and how much to systems and methodologies? What is the right balance of poetry and prose?

Of course, the natural inclination of both Client and Agency is to isolate the inspirational from the procedural. It’s quite common to have separate conversations, in separate meetings, with separate people.  But some of the most impressive pitches I have attended have integrated the two. They have endeavoured to make the business of platform management and collateral creation exciting; to make the process as stimulating as the product.

Inevitably the modern Agency should learn to pitch and manage in both poetry and prose.

No. 134