Telling It As It Is
Alice Neel was 80 when she finished her first painted self-portrait. It had taken her five years and her cheeks were flushed because ‘it was so damned hard’. With characteristic irreverence, she chose to depict herself unapologetically naked. Perched on her favourite stripey blue chair, she assumes the role of both artist and sitter – neither of which would typically be a woman in her eighties. Biting back against the history of the female nude, in which young women are posed as erotic objects, Neel presents us with her aging body in all of its glory.
In the studio, Neel felt radically free from society’s expectations and constraints. She described painting as a space in which she could be ‘completely and utterly myself. For that reason, it was extremely important to me. It was more than a profession. It was even a therapy, for there I just told it as it was’. In this self-portrait, she stares defiantly out at both herself, behind the easel, and at us, her imagined viewers, one eyebrow raised in a playful challenge to match her courage for looking - for telling it as it is.
Havana
Neel had grown up in a small, conservative town – Colwyn, Pennsylvania – which had little by way of culture. She knew from a very young age that she wanted to be an artist but remembers her mother telling her: ‘I don’t know what you expect to do in the world, Alice? You’re only a girl’. In 1921, she enrolled at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, where she found ‘you could more or less paint as you wanted’, and in the summer of 1924 she went to the Chester Springs Summer School, where she met and fell in love with the Cuban artist Carlos Enríques (see photo below).
They married on 1 June 1925 and the following February went to live in Havana, which was Neel’s first time abroad. Struck by the brilliant light and lush colour of her new surroundings, she made paintings of passers-by on the street, as well as an intimate portrait of Enríques. These works show a strong affinity with Robert Henri, who had taught at the Philadelphia School many years earlier, and whose book The Art Spirit (1923) Neel had taken with her to Cuba: ‘Paint what you feel’, he insisted, ‘Paint what is real to you’. In December 1926, Neel gave birth to a daughter, Santillana del Mar. The couple kept active in the modernist scene in Cuba, and when they exhibited side by side at the Salón de Bellas Artes in March 1927, the critics considered declared their work ‘a revelation’.
Carlos Enríquez, 1926
In December 1926, Neel gave birth to a daughter, Santillana del Mar. The couple kept active in the modernist scene in Cuba, and when they exhibited side by side at the Salón de Bellas Artes in March 1927, the critics considered their work ‘a revelation’.
Carlos Enríquez was born in 1900 to one of the wealthiest families in Cuba (his father was doctor to President Gerardo Machado). He soon became disillusioned with his family’s conservative attitudes – as they were with his bohemian ways. Machado declared: ‘Well, doctor, your son is an insolent bastard, and if he doesn’t leave Cuba on his own, and quickly, I’m going to throw him out!’ In 1920, his family sent him to Philadelphia to study finance, but his heart was set on painting, so in 1924 he went to the Chester Springs Summer School. There he met Neel – only to be expelled, as she recalled, ‘for doing not much more than taking walks with me’. After the pair married and moved to Havana, they painted constantly. When they returned to the US, they struggled with poverty and the death of their first child; their relationship dissolved soon after the birth of their second daughter, although they remained legally married for the rest of their lives. Enríquez went on to become a central figure in Cuba’s Vanguardia movement.
Greenwich Village
Joe Gould, 1933
A Harvard graduate from a well-off family in Massachusetts, Joe Gould was a regular at the cafés, bars and parties of Greenwich Village. He claimed to be working on ‘An Oral History of Our Time’ that would capture ‘the sermons of street preachers, shouts in the night, wild rumours and cries from the heart’. Neel was kind to Gould – she recalled how he would ‘knock on the door and say, “Ship Ahoy!” And nobody let him in, but I felt sorry for him’. Here she paints him as a naked satyr with a comically inflated sense of virility. Neel knew how radical her portrait was, but even 30 years after its making, when she tried to include it in her 1962 solo exhibition at Reed College, Portland, it had to be hung in a janitor’s closet to avoid controversy. Gould’s writing was widely believed to be a myth, but in recent years the dime store notebooks filled with his ‘Oral History’ came to light and have now been acquired by Harvard.
Nadya and Nona, 1933
Nadya Olyanova was a handwriting analyst and close friend of Neel’s who moved to New York from a small town near Kyiv. In 1931, after Neel left a psychiatric hospital, Olyanova had her come to stay in New Jersey; later, when Neel suffered a stillbirth in 1937, Olyanova wrote a tender reminder to Neel of her mother’s wisdom: ‘Alice don’t get wreckless’. Olyanova had a weekly radio show where she examined listeners’ handwriting. Looking at the way Neel wrote her ‘t’s, she identified the ‘compulsive drive of the creative artist’. Nona’s identity is not entirely clear: one possibility is that the name is an alias, an anagram of ‘Anon’. In her notebook, Neel wrote how, when a visitor mistakenly identified Nadya and Nona as a lesbian couple, Nona retorted: ‘What nonsense, we each had at least 3 husbands.’
Kenneth Doolittle, 1932
When Neel was staying with Nadya Olyanova in New Jersey, she met a charming, red-haired sailor called Kenneth Doolittle. Together they discussed society and politics and he would serenade her with workers’ songs on the banjo. The two became lovers and in 1932 they moved together to Greenwich Village, where Doolittle introduced Neel to members of the Communist Party USA. Doolittle liked to smoke opium and would become fiercely jealous whenever Neel received attention from other men. In 1934, in a fit of rage, he burned over 300 of Neel’s works on paper and slashed almost 60 of her paintings – her portrait of Joe Gould is visibly singed from the fire. Neel knew how lucky she was to have escaped alive. Later in life she encountered Doolittle again and was touched to find that he had changed his ways, becoming a devoted parent and committed labour organiser.
Alienation, 1935
Neel met the wealthy travel agent John Rothschild when she was exhibiting at the first Washington Square Outdoor Art Exhibition in 1932. By contrast to her lover Kenneth Doolittle, who had been raised in an orphanage and was largely self-taught, Rothschild was Harvard-educated and had the means to take her out for occasional dinners at a time when most New York artists were literally on the breadline. He became a keen admirer of Neel and her work, and his romantic pursuit of her sent Doolittle into a jealous rage. Neel fled the scene and lived briefly with Rothschild in what she called ‘that swank hotel’, where she would paint watercolours of their intimate life together, such as this one. Rothschild would later leave his wife and child in pursuit of Neel, but she never fully committed to him. They did, however, remain close and Rothschild lived with her for the last five years of his life.
The Great Depression
Nazis Murder Jews, 1936
After Doolittle introduced Neel to members of the Communist Party USA in 1932, she began regularly attending their demonstrations. In 1935 she became a card-carrying member herself, though she was often frustrated by the bureaucracy of their meetings. A major focus for the party at the time was public demonstrations against the rise of right-wing movements around the world. The same year that Neel joined the party, the American Artists’ Congress was formed to bring artists together in the fight against fascism. In September 1936, six months after Adolf Hitler marched German troops into the Rhineland and imposed anti-Jewish laws, Neel joined artists from the WPA programme in a torchlit protest against fascism – a powerful moment, which she captures here.
Uneeda Biscuit Strike, 1936
From January to May 1935, thousands of employees at the National Biscuit Company (NBC) went on strike against poor labour conditions. With the country still reeling from the Great Depression, the 1930s were a time of job insecurity and increasing unionisation. But even as early as 1928, NBC employees were calling for ‘better wages and more protection for those of us who get sick’ in the pages of the Daily Worker, and seeking security from ‘the oppression of our palm beach suit bosses’. Neel’s painting refers to the many arrests and violent clashes that occurred during this four-month period, with policemen using clubs against striking employees. One witness quoted in the New York Times described police action as ‘one of the most vicious and inexcusable attacks upon men and women in a picket line’ he had ever seen.
In The Street
Spanish Harlem
T.B. Harlem, 1940
In 1939, after José Negrón left Neel and their three-month-old son Richard, she remained in touch with his family, including Margarita, who was married to José’s brother Carlos. The following year, Neel painted Carlos while he was recovering in a tuberculosis hospital in order to comment on the epidemic of TB that had broken out in overcrowded areas of New York. The bandage on the left of Negrón’s chest is from a thoracoplasty, a surgical procedure common at the time which involved removing several ribs and collapsing the lung. In this period before effective antibiotics were widely available, TB treatment was brutal, and Neel spoke of the ‘crucifixion’ that the 24 year-old Negrón went through in his recovery, not least as he developed a drug addiction after codeine was administered to ease his pain. In titling this work after the disease rather than the specific patient, Neel highlights the situation as a social rather than an individual issue. As she explained: ‘East Harlem is like a battlefield of humanism, and I am on the side of the people there.’
Georgie Arce No. 2, 1955
Georgie Arce (born Jorge Alberto Arce) was a Puerto Rican boy who met Neel in the street in 1954, and with whom she shared a unique and long-lasting friendship. Arce often came up to the apartment to be drawn and painted by Neel; she recalled how he would ‘beg me to adopt him’, lying down outside her apartment door if she was away. Although most of his extended family remained in Puerto Rico, Arce seems to have been close to his grandmother, Marcelina: when he was 18, Arce listed her as the ‘person who will always know your address’ on his draft card. Arce is only 11 in this painting, but the rubber knife he holds now feels like a strange omen given that he went on to be convicted of murder and conspiracy to commit murder in 1974. Arce remained in touch with Neel even after being incarcerated, exchanging letters and greetings cards and sending ‘love and regards to the whole family’.
Anarchic Humanism
Mercedes Arroyo, 1952
Mercedes Arroyo (born Maria Mercedes Romero) was a social activist who lived on West 109th Street in West Harlem. In December 1950, not long before this portrait was painted, the writer Mike Gold described her in the Daily Worker as ‘well known for her heroism’. She was a powerful public speaker who taught at the Frederick Douglass Education Center and the Jefferson School of Social Science, where Neel took classes and once gave a lecture. As a member of the Puerto Rican Commission of the Communist Party, Arroyo denounced ‘the tragedy of discrimination, rent-gouging, overcrowding and terrible slum conditions under which 400,000 of us Puerto Ricans, together with our [Black] brothers and sisters, live in this great city of New York’. The FBI kept files on Arroyo, whose activities would have aroused deep suspicion at the time, especially given her support for Puerto Rican independence. Arroyo was killed in a fire on 8 July 1964, which her family believe to have been a targeted act of arson.
Harold Cruse, c. 1950
Neel met Harold Cruse (see photo below) around 1950, when he was an active member of the Communist Party and was working a series of short-term jobs, including being an orderly at Harlem Hospital and a copy boy for the Daily Worker. When the FBI interviewed Cruse in 1955, he had become disillusioned with Communist Party politics: he ‘realize[d] the CP was not helping and could not help the [Black] race’. In the 1960s, Cruse taught at LeRoi Jones’s Black Arts Repertory Theater School and published The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967), which was scathing in its attack on other Black thinkers for their assimilationist approach. He went on to become a prominent intellectual and a professor at the University of Michigan, where he founded one of the first centres for African American Studies. Neel and Cruse fell out of touch until reconnecting in 1974, when Neel wrote to say ‘it was so good to see you after all these years … Write + tell me all you’re thinking and feeling’.
Horace Cayton, 1949
Horace R. Cayton was a sociologist, best known for co-writing Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945). The grandson of Hiram R. Revels, the first Black Senator in the US, Cayton refused to serve in the army during the Second World War because it was segregated, enlisting instead in the Merchant Marines. In 1949, just before Neel painted him, Cayton quit his job as the Director of the Parkway Community House, a centre supporting the local community on the South Side of Chicago. In his autobiography, Cayton described the centre as a ‘sop thrown to the [Black] community by wealthy and middle-class whites’ and explained his fear of becoming ‘part of the machinery by which [their] subjugation … was perpetuated’. Soon after, Cayton moved to New York, where he experienced increasing bouts of depression and alcoholism, which led to brief stays in hospital. He died in 1970 while working on a biography of his friend and fellow writer Richard Wright.
Death of Mother Bloor, c. 1951
In 1951, Neel was placed under observation by the FBI – her home was described in one of their reports as ‘the main storage place for Communist literature in the Harlem, NY, area’. Flying in the face of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, who were zealously denouncing communist sympathisers, Neel painted an increasing number of party members. In this work, she marks the death of Ella Reeve Bloor, known affectionately as Mother Bloor. A labour organiser and founding member of the Communist Labor Party, Bloor stressed the important relationship between socialism and suffrage, and worked tirelessly to achieve an equal vote for women within the Communist Party. Her public funeral in Harlem was photographed for Life magazine by Bernard Hoffman, which may have been Neel’s source for this painting.
Mike Gold, 1952
Mike Gold (born Itzok Isaac Granich) was a writer, editor and friend of Neel’s who was known as the ‘Dean of US Proletarian Literature’. An ardent socialist, in 1927 Gold protested against the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti – Italian anarchists who had controversially been convicted of murder. He wrote a regular column called ‘Change the World’ for the Daily Worker and founded the Marxist review New Masses (a copy of which sits alongside his right hand here), in which he claimed: ‘the one political problem of our time … is how the working class can be organized and led to the conquest of the state’. Gold was a mentor to Neel: in 1951, the year before Neel painted him, he organised an exhibition of her work at the New Playwrights Theatre, describing her in the catalogue essay as a ‘pioneer of socialist realism in American painting’. After Gold’s death in 1967, Neel made a second portrait as a memorial, based on this original but adorned with a skull and lilacs.
Human Creatures
Pull My Daisy, 1959
In 1959, the writer Jack Kerouac adapted the third act of his play Beat Generation into a film. Directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, it features the poets Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Gregory Corso, alongside cameo appearances by artists including Neel. The bizarre scenes are laced with an improvised narrative by Kerouac, which the New Yorker described as giving ‘comic ripples to seemingly spontaneous shenanigans’. Neel’s inclusion in what would become a defining work of the Beat period represents a critical juncture in her career, as she began to mix with a wider circle of artists and became a beloved figure in New York’s cultural community. When Leslie invited her to contribute a statement to the Hasty Papers she wrote how she wished she could ‘make the world happy, the wretched faces in the subway, sad and full of troubles, worry me’.
Black Draftee (James Hunter), 1965
Neel met James Hunter in 1965 when he had just been drafted to fight in the Vietnam War. Hunter had only a week left in New York, so he did not get to come back for another sitting. Neel decided ‘it would be interesting to leave a work in progress’, with the painting becoming a powerful metaphor for the unknown status of so many men sent to fight against their will – especially in 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson was radically increasing ground forces in South Vietnam. Hunter’s exact identity has remained a mystery. Our research suggests that he may be an individual called James Leroy Hunter, who served in the US army from 15 October 1965 to 26 September 1967, after which he returned safely to New York. James Leroy Hunter died in 2009 and is buried in the National Calverton Cemetery on Long Island.
Ruth Nude, 1964
Ruth Alscher (born Ruth Halberthal) was a teacher who lived on 99th Street in East Harlem. In the early 1950s, Alscher was investigated by the FBI after they accused her of attending a dinner party with Julius Rosenberg – the American engineer who was later executed with his wife, Ethel, for allegedly being Soviet spies. Now believed to be a communist, Alscher struggled to find teaching jobs, and instead worked as a taxi driver to support her three children. Around this time, Neel spotted Alscher and her daughter in Central Park and approached them saying ‘I must paint that child!’ Neel painted Alscher’s daughter, Jan, in 1953 and Alscher in 1964. The two remained friends, with Alscher later describing how she respected Neel as ‘a woman on her own who was fierce about her painting’.
Gerard Malanga, 1969
Gerard Joseph Malanga was born in the Bronx in 1943 to an Italian family. A poet and photographer, he began working with Andy Warhol in 1962 and moved with him to the abandoned workshop space at East 47th Street that became famed as The Factory. That same year, Neel was introduced to him at a party by the underground filmmakers Willard Maas and Marie Menken. Malanga went on to become a key collaborator of Warhol’s: he assisted with screen-printing; appeared in films; worked on the three-minute silent Screen Tests (1964–66); and, the year of this painting, co-founded Interview magazine. Malanga remembered coming to sit for Neel in her living room over three sessions, each of about two hours, and how ‘the conversation really, in a way, became part of the portrait. It helped her along. She made me laugh.’
Andy Warhol, 1970
Neel remembered first meeting Warhol in 1963 when ‘we were both hanging out in the penthouse at the Museum of Modern Art, and he said “Oh, you’re that woman that paints those wonderful portraits. I want a portrait!”’ She met him again in 1970 and he suggested, ‘why don’t you paint me with my scars?’ which she did, over four or five sittings, revealing the damage from the June 1968 assassination attempt by Valerie Solanas (a former member of The Factory entourage) and the surgical corset he was now forced to wear. Given that Warhol was famously squeamish about his appearance, calling nudity ‘a threat to my existence’, the painting is a remarkable image of vulnerability, demonstrating Neel’s special talent for putting her sitter at ease. As the feminist artist Judy Chicago commented, ‘instead of being presented as an iconic art hero’, Warhol allows himself to be seen as ‘wounded, bandaged’. The background of the canvas is left quite bare, a device Neel increasingly used in order to accentuate the sense of emotional exposure, or what Neel called the picture’s ‘hypersensitive economy’.
Jackie Curtis as a Boy, 1972
Jackie Curtis was an influential figure in Manhattan’s underground scene who became one of Warhol’s ‘superstars’, featuring in his films Flesh (1968) and Women in Revolt (1971). An acclaimed actor and playwright, as well as a singer and sometime poet, Curtis was characterised by Warhol as ‘a pioneer without a frontier’. In 1970, Neel painted Curtis in glamorous drag, with a full face of make-up and glowing red hair, alongside friend and collaborator Ritta Redd. In this work, Curtis appears off duty, in all American jeans and a baseball jersey. The phrase ‘as a boy’ in the title emphasises gender as a space of play, in which a person might move fluidly between roles, as Curtis did over the years and across various sittings for Neel. At the time of this painting, Curtis regularly carried around a book on the actor James Dean, believing that his spirit had ‘jumped’ into their body when he died. As Lou Reed sings in his 1972 song ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, ‘Jackie is just speeding away / Thought she was James Dean for a day’.
Ron Kajiwara, 1971
Ron Kajiwara was a graphic designer who worked for Vogue. Born in 1944, Kajiwara and his family were held in an internment camp in California as part of the mass incarceration of Americans of Japanese descent after the US joined the Second World War. By 1971, when Neel painted him, Kajiwara was winning industry awards for his designs, with his graphics accompanying articles on environmental damage and global food shortages. Alongside his work for Vogue, where he went on to become Art Editor, he also designed stage sets, collaborating with the radical Theater for the New City in the East Village. One critic in the New York Times said of his set design for the 1982 play The Dispossessed: ‘Remember his name if you have a loft or a play you want decorated.’ Kajiwara died in 1990 from an AIDS-related illness.
John Perreault, 1972
The young art critic and curator John Perreault approached Neel in 1972 to borrow one of her paintings for an exhibition on the male nude at the School of Visual Arts, New York. He was particularly keen to borrow her 1933 portrait of Joe Gould. Perreault recalls: ‘She seemed very reluctant. She pulled it out of her storage, and then she started looking at me with her brilliant, mischievous eyes.’ Upon learning that other artists in the show would be displaying new work, she insisted that ‘I have to do a new painting, too. And I’ve always wanted to paint you; you remind me of a faun. So lie down there on the sofa.’ The painting eventually took 17 sittings to complete and Perreault remembers how she laboured over it with ‘the devil in her eyes’.
Carmen and Judy, 1972
Carmen Gordon (born Marie H. Polynice) lived a few blocks from Neel and helped manage her household. She was born in 1928 in Haiti, where she became an acclaimed clothing designer. In the 1960s her husband fled to the US after campaigning against the Haitian president Jean-Claude Duvalier, a dictator who had many of his political opponents killed. A few years before this work was painted, Gordon joined her husband in New York, where she would occasionally accompany him in peaceful protests against the Haitian government. Gordon’s daughter, Judy, developed health complications shortly after her birth and died not long after this painting was finished. It was a powerful reflection of their intimacy that Gordon allowed Neel to paint her while she was feeding her child. She died in 2021 at the age of 93, and her youngest son remains close to the Neel family to this day.
Marxist Girl (Irene Peslikis), 1972
Irene Peslikis (see photo below) was an artist born in 1943 to a Greek American family in Queens. A founder of the radical feminist group Redstockings, Peslikis hosted members in her loft on East Broadway, where they made posters with slogans such as ‘Tell It Like It Is’ and ‘Bitch Sister Bitch!’ Peslikis remembered the late 1960s as ‘electric … I knew I was part of making history’; in 1969, before abortion was legalised in New York, she organised a speak-out for women to talk candidly about their experiences. In 1971, Neel wrote for a journal that Peslikis had co-founded called Women and Art: ‘I have always wanted to paint as a woman,’ Neel explained, ‘but not as the oppressive and power mad world thought a woman should paint.’ After two issues, the journal was abandoned, with half the editors rejecting the left-wing approach taken by Peslikis and others. When Neel heard about this rift, she asked to paint Peslikis and the other editors deemed Marxist because, she felt, ‘we need radicals’; but only Irene made it to the sitting.
Margaret Evans Pregnant, 1978
Margaret Evans (born Margaret McConnell) was a friend of Neel’s who was born in Alabama and grew up in Nigeria and Italy. During a hitchhiking trip through Europe and Asia, known then as ‘the hippy trail’, a friend wrote to encourage her to meet the artist John Evans, whom she went on to marry in 1976. At the time of this portrait, John was 47 years old and Margaret was eight months pregnant with twins: in Neel’s words, ‘God has forgiven John Evans for not having a baby all these years by sending him 2 at once.’ She travelled by bus for an hour and a half to each of the sittings, where Neel would gossip away while marvelling at Evans’s body. In her diary, Evans wrote that Neel called herself a ‘vicious old woman’, although ‘I haven’t seen her vicious side – only the grandmotherly side and the artist side’. Evans still lives in New York, close to her twin daughters India and Honor.
Lifelong Commitment
Alice on Alice
Living Room
Image credits
Unless otherwise stated, all images are © The Estate of Alice Neel. Courtesy the Estate of Alice Neel.
Telling It As It Is
Alice Neel, c. 1970.
Havana
Neel and Enriquez in Havana, c. 1926.
Greenwich Village
Alice Neel in Greenwich Village, 1932. Photograph by Kenneth Doolittle.
Joe Gould, c. 1945. Photograph by Berenice Abbott/Getty Images.
Alice Neel and Nadya Olyanova, year unknown.
Alice Neel and Kenneth Doolittle, c. 1933-34.
John Rothschild, c. 1940.
In The Street
N.Y., c. 1940. Photograph by Helen Levitt. © Film Documents LLC, courtesy of Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne.
Spanish Harlem
Georgie Arce, year unknown.
Anarchic Humanism
Mercedes Arroyo (centre) with the Mutualista Obrera Puertoriquena, 1940. Jesus Colon Papers, Centre for Puerto Rican studies, Hunter College, City University of New York.
Harold Cruse, c. 1946. Courtesy the Auburn Avenue Research Library, Atlanta, Georgia.
Mrs. Ella Reeve Bloor Omholt's funeral, c. 1951. Photograph by Bernard Hoffman/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock.
Human Creatures
Gerard Malanga, 1971. Photograph by Jack Mitchell/Getty Images.
Andy Warhol, 1976. Photograph by Michael Tighe/Donaldson Collection/Getty Images.
Carmen Gordon, year unknown. Courtesy the family of Carmen Gordon.
Irene Peslikis, year unknown. Courtesy the family of Irene Peslikis.
Lifelong Commitment
Alice Neel protesting the Metropolitan Museum's exhibition Harlem On My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900-1968, New York, January 1969. Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah/MUUS Collection/Getty Images.
Living Room
Alice Neel in her New York studio with her granddaughter Olivia, surrounded by paintings, 5 January 1979. Photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt. © Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock.
