Alice Neel Again Pt 2

I wonder if Neel’s bold borders aren’t a bit aspirant. The attention she paid to the people she painted gave them definition, established their borders. But then what of the painter. “I leave myself and go into that person.” Can we assume Neel wanted to be seen, understood, known, from the prevalence of these qualities in her work, how she extends so entirely this courtesy to others? Neel was so certain of her dedication to painting; I should not fill in the details of her biography with projections of my own insecurities, my competing desires; the work should, as they say, speak for itself.

Still. There is some evidence of desperation here. In the searing, steady gazes of her canvases and also her biography—her unstable health, her tumultuous relationships. Her art reveals the act of making it—the process, the room, the people, her hand, her body upright, her life. I want to know how to live.

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In 1925, Neel married Carlos Enríquez, a Cuban artist with whom she conceived two daughters. Neel’s first daughter died of diphtheria, and shortly thereafter, Enríquez left for Havana with their second child, abandoning Neel alone in New York. The loss of both of her children left Neel devastated; she suffered a nervous breakdown, attempted suicide twice. Most of her 30^th year was spent in hospitals where she received psychiatric care and, eventually, was encouraged to paint again.

“I always had this awful dichotomy,” Neel said. “I loved Isabetta, of course I did. But I wanted to paint.” Neel’s daughter remained in Cuba with her father’s family, and Neel stayed in New York. The two had minimal contact with each other for the remainder of their lives. The subject of a somewhat controversial painting of Neel’s which depicts the child fully nude staring boldly out of the canvas, Isabetta committed suicide in 1982, at the age of 54.

Eventually Neel gave birth to two sons, with two different fathers, born one year apart. She refused to stop painting while she acclimated to motherhood, opting to work at night after the children had gone to bed. Though Neel was able to continue painting throughout her sons’ lives, her dedication to her work, and the erratic lifestyle it inspired—or, as public funding for artists dwindled, required—at times meant deprioritizing a certain amount of stability for her children.

In Andrew Neel’s documentary about his grandmother, Alice Neel, he interviews his father and uncle about growing up with the famous artist. The men describe their mother’s rejection of societal norms, her early dismissal from the art world and subsequent poverty, and her volatile relationships. Richard, Neel’s oldest son, asserts his disdain for “bohemian culture.” “I think a lot of innocent people are hurt by it. I consider I was hurt by it.” (One must wonder, here, what a more robust government program for the arts and artists would have done to improve Neel’s quality of life, her ability to care for herself and her children. Is “bohemian culture” the enemy here, or is it the drastic decrease in funding for the arts that forces artists to choose between their work and economic security?)

Arguments between Neel and Sam Brody, the father of her youngest son, became physically violent, the abuse at times targeted at Richard. The financial instability Neel endured in pursuit of artistic freedom affected her family—after the termination of the Works Progress Administration in 1943, Neel relied on public assistance to support herself and her sons, raising them impoverished to such a degree that Richard was malnourished for a period of his childhood.

Despite the difficulties of being a single mother and an artist, Neel maintained both of these roles for the rest of her life. Her daughter-in-law, Ginny, posits that Neel’s ability to paint while mother has something to do with Neel’s home. An apartment on 108^th Street and Madison Avenue in Manhattan, Neel painted in the same rooms in which she raised her family. Homemaking as inseparable from artmaking.

Richard Neel on Alice: “It was a gift to have her as a mother. Certainly. No question about it.”

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As many working artists must do when forced into dire circumstances, Neel the made the sacrifices she deemed necessary for her portraits, for her people. It seems unfair to malign Neel for failing to provide her children with the stability of convention and money when the fathers of Neel’s sons played only vaguely supporting roles in their lives. And yet, Neel’s steadfast dedication to her painting—even the sittings and conversations and attempts at really seeing other people—made of herself a blankness, an absence for her children. While Neel’s interest in people is so undeniable in her work and the intimate settings that created it, beyond this abstract realm of ideas and images lie actual bodies—breakfast and bedtimes, the minutiae of the figures depicted on canvas. Neel seems far less interested in this world, though who can blame her. In my mind there is no doubt that Neel’s devotion to people was sincere, as is apparent in her art as well as her leftist politics, but it’s less clear what this means, or meant to her. 

Though Neel—unlike her son’s fathers—raised her two youngest children, did her erratic lifestyle and devotion to her work render her a “devouring ego”? Can her behavior be attributed to the mental illness she struggled with throughout her life? Is any claim of her failed maternity a misogynist accusation? How do Neel’s searching, trenchant depictions of people and bodies correlate to the physical world of people and bodies which require nourishment, maintenance, attention?

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I reject this binary thinking—art and care work can coexist, can even inform and inspire one another. We can invent a new ideal of ingenuity, an artistry inclusive of the community and chores and activism and paid labor which are necessary elements of being a human being in this hellish landscape of late-stage capitalism.

It’s just I’m not entirely sure what that means. The man I love wants me to lie in bed with him a little longer this morning. I’m so tired. The book needs so much work.

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Neel finally found success late in life. She began painting prominent New York City artists and writers in the 60s, which garnered her attention from elite circles. In 1974, the Whitney Museum hosted a retrospective of Neel’s work. It wasn’t until then, at the age of 74, that Neel claims she finally felt she “had a perfect right to paint.” Though her expansive oeuvre of work suggests otherwise, Neel said in an interview that she often felt, before this show, that perhaps she shouldn’t be spending all this time painting. “I had two sons and I had so many things that I should be doing, and here I was painting.”

She also became more robustly herself in her later years. A blue line certainly tracing her shape. In a 1978 interview, Neel says she “only flowered” after she turned 60. As a young woman, she was shy and uncertain; “everybody could knock me off base,” she said (Hoban). Many of the interviews, videos, and photographs of her show an old woman—white hair, wrinkles, a cane. She is brash and funny, always cracking herself up. Her laugh is an ebullient guffaw, from the chest, and she looks around, partly, it seems, seeking encouragement or admiration; partly in knowing, feigned shock of her outrageous sentiments.

The border tracing Neel’s body, in her 1980 self-portrait an ecstatic blue, thick. How it holds her aged, drooping flesh, her inquisitive, concentrated gaze, paintbrush hovering, in-motion. Holds in. Here she was—unrelenting and enclosed by the shape of herself, tenanted by the pastel shapes, the shadows of her skin—painting.

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Do people come first, or does art come first? Should art come first, or people? What kind of person am I? I wanted to reject the idea of the artist as recluse, the starving artist, the artistic genius. But it seems impossible to dedicate oneself to both art and people, in equal measure. There is so little money, and even less time.

Giving to others does not inherently mean losing the self. But it is hard to make art in the presence of someone else; it is hard to make art while making dinner, while rubbing wide circles into his back. Perhaps this is why I thought Neel was a model for the woman artist—her art included people, invited them into her home, made knowing and listening and giving a necessary element in painting.

Neel’s biography is so interesting to me in part because of its relationship with her work. How her paintings depict an ethos of humanity, maternity, and care, while Neel herself performed the flawed mechanics of relationality in squeaky, jerking movements. Perhaps the care work her paintings required of her was easier to access knowing it was for the sake of her work. Mostly I think raising children is a constant laboring, an ongoingness of care which stretches beyond the canvas, beyond the moment of creation, beyond bedtime—a constancy that does not exist as a single uninterrupted line but rather as hiccups, widenings, restarting and restarting and restarting.

Moralizing about how precisely Neel obliged to her role as a mother is also not my intention. What I want to know is how to live. How to be an artist and a woman, both ambitious and considerate, certain and permeable. What it means to be a person who contains both “I leave myself and go into that person” and the certain, clear “I wanted to paint.”