Alice Neel: Hot Off the Griddle

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Here the viewers are free to travel back in time in the New York of the 1930s to the one of the 1980s, via Cuba and other Latin American countries where Neel lived. Even as her canvases moved away from the streets of Harlem, Neel remained a committed Communist Party member throughout her adult life. Based predominantly in New York, Neel painted figuratively during a period in which it was deeply unfashionable to do so.In every painting, there’s an anchor that pulls you in, though, whether in the pose, details of dress, or Neel’s endlessly fascinating treatment of hands.

The heads are always slightly too large for the bodies, the brushwork is never flattering but emphatic; here and there you are looking at garrulous caricature. At odds with the expected large-sized exhibition catalogue, this publication has been designed to be more considered. Her life wasn’t easy, and she was never well off, but she knew what she wanted, having discovered in herself the qualities needed to be a good artist: ‘hypersensitivity and the will of the devil. Neel painted and drew her neighbor, Georgie, starting from around ten years old, many times throughout the 1950s, inadvertently documenting his growth from a child to a teenager.Quotations and titles utilise an alternate set of narrow capital characters, creating a slight sense of unease and distorted proportions when blown up to larger sizes, especially within the exhibition space. It made more sense here, Neel was mixing with the flamboyant characters of the New York art scene, including a stripped down, vulnerable Andy Warhol. Unlike so many of her contemporaries and even followers, the community we see in her work is enormously diverse in race, class and sexuality.

As Neel explained, ‘I like to paint people who are in the rat race, suffering all the tension and damage that’s involved in that… The awful struggle that goes on in the city’.After being discharged almost a year later, Neel moved to New York, where she painted outcasts and oddballs like Joe Gould, a local eccentric also known as ‘Professor Seagull’, representing him with multiple penises to symbolise his inflated ego. Even the children are sitting quietly: the girls of Black Spanish-American Family (1950) with their hands folded in their laps, the daughter in The Family (1970) looking watchfully back at us.

It was important therefore to represent human beings in painting and create especially a space for those who otherwise went unseen. It finishes with a video montage that showcases Neel’s exuberance as she paints her amused subjects, flashes cheeky grins, and plants kisses on friends. These are the words of Alice Neel, printed in the exhibition catalogue for ‘Alice Neel: Hot Off the Griddle’ which is running at the Barbican in London from 16 Feb to 21 May 2023. Neel painted right up to her death and was known to phone friends to exclaim: ‘Guess what, I’m still alive!Neel invited her subjects into her studio, at this time the bay window of her living room in her apartment at 300 West 107th Street. Alice Neel (1900–1984) worked in New York at a time when figurative painting was deeply unfashionable. In fact, Neel’s depiction of women, and rejection of the male gaze, made her something of a feminist icon. I’ve been waiting to see a collection of Alice Neel’s work together since writing my dissertation about her in 2021.