Heidi Howard on Alice Neel
Alice Neel, Faith Ringgold, 1977, Oil on canvas, 48 x 36 inches
I first encountered Alice Neel’s work in 2007. I was in my last year at Sarah Lawrence College and learning how to paint. As I spent hours looking at paintings from our past, trying to figure out how they were made, I became fascinated by how paintings showed us an extended record of a human’s choices in a particular place and time. I loved books like Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Min Jin Lee’s Free Food for Millionaires that caught something of my world growing up as a curious, visionary, femme-identified person who loved their diverse city, thrived in between its diasporas and felt a brighter future resonating from the complexity of these new intersectional spaces. I was searching for contemporary paintings that told visceral complex feminist human stories when the artist Robert Berlind said I must see the film “Alice Neel” at Film Forum.
The film spoke to me on many levels. It spoke to my belief that my way of seeing could change the way we live. Neel is the philosopher I was always looking for, saying things like, “the world we live in today is almost purely psychological.” I had big dreams about how alternative perspectives on our surroundings could change civilization. Like Neel, I love conversation. I could see that Neel’s portraits were not just a venue for her ideas or her sitter’s ideas but a shared space where they came together. You feel this dialogue through the paint! Through Neel’s color choices and lively gestures, sometimes precise, sometimes building form, sometimes slappy and drippy, she revolutionized the concept of figurative painting. It was no longer a means to objectify the sitter to suit a painterly style, but evidence of a live interaction. I love that her paintings cannot be summarized into a single statement. They are not only snapshots of the sitters, or even just the story of her life, but hold, in themselves, many interrelated lives in New York City from the 1930s to the 1980s.
Though we are in a Renaissance of figurative painting, we often discuss it in terms of abstraction, or as if it was made through an automated process like photography, limiting the work to what is being pictured and missing that it is more. Neel’s paintings are a guide to reading through paint. She employs color like a true tetrachromat, showing all the colors she sees in many moments. When we look at her paintings our eyes move the way hers did, with wry humorous calculation and joy. Defying conventions of glazing to create an illusion of light, and Impressionists’ “petite sensations,” Neel paints like an Abstract Expressionist, moving swathes of colors with large brushes, thinking about an entire large rectangular space. Her lines are more like lettering than her color swaths. Through these lines, descriptive actions of her pointed brushes, we see Neel’s eyes focusing as someone else’s body parts move, discerning new signs of eyes, nostrils and hands. Clothing is an intermediate painted space between lines and ambient color shapes. It hangs with a different panache on each sitter. Sometimes, like in “Faith Ringgold,” small gestures form lively patterns and accoutrements as spirited as Ringgold’s face. At other times, like in “Hartley,” (1966) clothes are color drapes leading to his facial expression.
Alice Neel, Hartney, 1966, Oil on canvas, 50 x 36 inches
Now that we spend most of our waking hours interfacing with screens, the act of sitting for a portrait, the dialogue, the studio smells, and the intervals of silence are vital. Paint on canvas is some of the clearest documentation we have of our cognizance of our bodies and their actions. We see the shifts in interaction from the time of the radio, to black and white television, to color TV painted by Neel. In the film of Neel, we see her and her painting process recorded many times over the years, which must have taken considerable effort for an artist on a tight budget. Her words about her paintings are smart, precise and political, revealing her awareness of technological developments and these recordings’ future value. We see Neel’s sitters in dialogue with her spirit, her truth. She paints her own body with more of an eye towards the celebratory at eighty than she does at 20. In her early paintings, she is with her lovers, a blob in expression and presence. Her breasts, belly button, pubic hair, rosy cheeks and red hair are her main features. In her Self-Portrait at 80, she is a painter whose face, carrying more years of knowledge than most other living humans, draws the viewer in. Her entire body is present from the weight of her sagging tits and belly to her firm hands and lively toes. Her slumped, set, confident posture reveals her lived knowledge of bodies.
Alice Neel, Self-Portrait, 1980, Oil on canvas, 135.3 x 101 cm
The weight of Neel’s body in her self-portrait makes me think about all the pregnant woman she painted. In the paintings, I feel the complex anticipation of pregnancy, of having your body torn both physically and psychologically, then, hopefully, sewn back together. I feel the weight of mothers’ stories of disappointment in not feeling sewn back together by society. These days, as often as celebrating successful pregnancies with people I paint, my portraits hold stories of miscarriages. I think about Neel at eighty with her two sons and grandchildren and two lost daughters. Her paintings hold a richness in discomfort and pain. They document a series of determined decisions, of faith in the power of painting, and of Alice Neel’s perceptions. They reveal her persistent pursuit of dialogue with a diverse range of people. She got them to decide it was worthwhile to sit and spend time with her.
In Neel’s paintings I see the questions: What does it mean to build a painting? A career? A life? A family? A civilization? I am inspired to continue this dialogue with similar tenacity, confidence, and joy.
Heidi Howard, Clarity Haynes, 2021, Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 38 inches
Heidi Howard is an artist born and currently living in Queens, New York. Their first monograph “Colors make us do vibrant deeds!” was released by Phoebe Press in 2024.
