{"id":29003,"date":"2021-07-08T17:12:23","date_gmt":"2021-07-08T17:12:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/?post_type=articles&#038;p=29003"},"modified":"2021-07-09T02:43:53","modified_gmt":"2021-07-09T02:43:53","slug":"a-freudian-take-on-alice-neel","status":"publish","type":"articles","link":"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/articles\/a-freudian-take-on-alice-neel\/","title":{"rendered":"A Freudian Take on Alice Neel"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_29011\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-29011\" style=\"width: 1280px\" class=\"wp-caption alignfull -width\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-29011 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2021\/07\/Alice-Neal-Body-3.jpg\" alt=\"A Freudian Take on Alice Neel\" width=\"1280\" height=\"1024\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-29011\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Courtesy of Alice Neel<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>\u201cPeople Come First,\u201d the Alice Neel show being mounted in the Tisch Galleries at <a href=\"https:\/\/www.metmuseum.org\/exhibitions\/listings\/2021\/alice-neel\" target=\"_blank\">The Metropolitan Museum of Art<\/a>, closes on August 1.\u00a0 It is her first retrospective in 20 years.\u00a0 She is the only female artist to have had an exhibition in the Tisch Galleries, a place of prominence at the Met that has until now been reserved for such historical figures as Michelangelo and Delacroix so, in that, Neel, a determined feminist who disguised it when needed with her chatty charm, has become historically significant herself.\u00a0 I was about to write that she is the female Lucian Freud\u00a0 &#8211; a feminist faux pas and one she would have chattily yet churlishly spurned in her Auntie Anti-Abstract Expressionism way, a moniker that I think she might have laughed at because for all her seriousness as a political being she also loved a good giggle at her own expense.\u00a0 Watch this clip of her on <i>The Tonight Show<\/i> to understand how disarming she could be as she delights Johnny Carson.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Alice Neel on tv - wonderful\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/nAvVA9-P00E?start=134&#038;feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>After seeing this show at the Met, I have, in fact, come to believe that Lucian Freud is the male Alice Neel.\u00a0 Her radical humanity as an artist was a forerunner to his.\u00a0 Neel is Freud\u2019s artistic id &#8211; to borrow a term from his grandfather Sigmund &#8211; each, Alice and Lucian, fraught with the need to acknowledge the stark reality of flesh as they complemented it with feints toward early forays into surrealism in Freud\u2019s case and threads of abstraction in Neel\u2019s as she needled her canvases with it, canvasses filled with the brilliance of her figurative art,\u00a0 just as the male-dominated Abstract Expressionist movement needled her about her gender and her demands to be taken seriously.\u00a0 The influence of Neel lies pentimento there beneath the layer upon layer of paint in Freud\u2019s impasto technique.\u00a0 Indeed, I haven\u2019t been as moved and even thrillingly troubled by an exhibition since November of 2019, when I strolled through \u201cLucian Freud: The Self-Portraits\u201d at the Royal Academy of Art in London then strolled through it again.\u00a0 And again.\u00a0 I did the same thing at the Met in June, when I repeatedly walked through the Neel show trying to process her alchemic genius of capturing &#8211; even cauterizing &#8211; the damned human condition with only the strokes that were deemed needed and sometimes even leaving a canvas \u201cunfinished,\u201d as so many of us forsakenly are.\u00a0 This was the opposite of Freud\u2019s technique and yet the alarming, alluring results are so alike.\u00a0 Why were they, this American woman who struggled in so many ways during her lifetime and this privileged British man who was born in Berlin, aligning in my thoughts -, especially since Neel, even though she focused famously on her nude self when she was 80, was politically ecumenical in her choice of portraits, while the Freud show that had equally moved me was centered solely on himself?<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_29013\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-29013\" style=\"width: 1280px\" class=\"wp-caption alignfull -width\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-29013 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2021\/07\/Alice-Neal-Body.jpg\" alt=\"A Freudian Take on Alice Neel\" width=\"1280\" height=\"1024\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-29013\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Courtesy of Alice Neel<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>In this Neel retrospective, the curators, Kelly Baum and Randall Griffey, have on some walls paired her work with Cassatt, Van Gogh, and Soutine, among others.\u00a0 But it made me long for a show that would pair instead Neel with Freud and the \u201cconversation\u201d that would ensue between them.\u00a0\u00a0 Her canvasses are canny in their incongruous immediacy and mindfulness; they, imbued in some way with her characteristic to be chatty to cover up a rightful churlishness, won\u2019t shut up as we engage with them.\u00a0 They are, yes, conversational in tone, but the conversation can become a bit cacophonous as they bear down on us with the overly constructed bohemian bonhomie of, oh, say that which was once found at the Cedar Tavern expressively filled with abstract testosterone in need of the reality of some female testiness.\u00a0 The short first paragraph of Neel\u2019s <i>New York Times<\/i> obituary, in 1984, referred to her, in fact, as \u201cthe quintessential Bohemian.\u201d\u00a0 She surrendered to accepting her truest self over and over, at times to her own disadvantage and detriment.\u00a0\u00a0 Freud, too, was a Bohemian but was more willful about it since it was a rejection of all the advantages that befell him.\u00a0\u00a0 His canvasses engage us with that same kind of willfulness in their having survived being painted by him and the long visual interrogation it took for them to arrive before our own eyes.\u00a0 His canvasses seem too exhausted to talk back to us &#8211; a kind of taciturnity overtakes them &#8211; and are just loquacious enough to beg us to share in the silence that, like a Freudian advantage, then befalls them. Neither Neel nor Freud had much use for smiles on the faces they chose to capture as they reconfigured figurative painting to combine a photographer\u2019s keenness for likeness with an empath\u2019s deeper delineation of depiction.\u00a0 The <i>New York Times<\/i> art critic Roberta Smith in her own <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2021\/04\/01\/arts\/design\/alice-neel-metropolitan-museum-review.html\" target=\"_blank\">keenly observed paean to Neel<\/a> and the Met\u2019s retrospective of her work, which was titled \u201cIt\u2019s Time to Put Alice Neel in Her Rightful Place in the Pantheon,\u201d referenced an \u201coverkill of likeness\u201d and sometimes when looking at a Neel or a Freud canvas, I do think of Arbus being let loose in Avedon\u2019s studio.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_29010\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-29010\" style=\"width: 1280px\" class=\"wp-caption alignfull -width\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-29010 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2021\/07\/Alice-Neal-Body-2.jpg\" alt=\"A Freudian Take on Alice Neel\" width=\"1280\" height=\"1024\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-29010\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Courtesy of Alice Neel<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Alice Neel called her work \u201cpictures of people.\u201d\u00a0 She didn\u2019t like the term \u2018portrait\u2019 and, when using it, her voice seemed to furnish it with its own frame in the form of quotation marks. \u201cOne of the reasons I did paint people was that I thought \u2018the portrait\u2019 had fallen into a bad spot,\u201d she once told interviewer Susan Stamberg on NPR after remarking on Stamberg\u2019s dress and the pleasing imperfection of her \u201csquashy\u201d nose. \u201cYes, I\u2019m visual,\u201d Neel continued after Stamberg mentioned the \u201csquashy\u201d comment.\u00a0 \u201cThe eyes are a\u00a0 ganglion of the brain.\u00a0 None of the other senses are. We are first of all-seeing animals.\u00a0 As for your nose, Whistler said that \u2018the portrait\u2019 is always something where something is wrong with the nose. I thought that was very cute.\u00a0\u00a0 A nose is just something that is part of the face.\u00a0 Like I painted male nudes but everybody &#8211; all they think about &#8211; is the penis.\u00a0 But really to me the penis is just part of the whole. I never think of it separately.\u201d\u00a0 Stamberg then began to remark that the eyes are the mirror to the soul.\u00a0 \u201cWell, that\u2019s old-fashioned,\u201d Neel said, cutting her off.<\/p>\n<p>In his rave of the Neel show at the Met, the <i>Washington Post<\/i>\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/entertainment\/museums\/alice-neel-retrospective-the-met\/2021\/03\/25\/aa4a860a-8c1a-11eb-a6bd-0eb91c03305a_story.html\" target=\"_blank\">Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Sebastian Smee<\/a> pointedly quoted Freud: \u201c\u2018In a culture of photography,\u2019\u201d the painter Lucian Freud once said, \u201c \u2018we have lost the tension that the sitter\u2019s power of censorship sets up in the painted portrait.\u2019 A crucial difference between portrait photography and painting, Freud added, is \u2018the degree to which feelings can enter the transaction from both sides. Photography can do this to a tiny extent, painting to an unlimited degree.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Neel:\u00a0 \u201cLike Chekhov, I am a collector of souls \u2026.\u00a0 If I hadn\u2019t been an artist, I could have been a psychiatrist.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29575,"featured_media":29014,"template":"","format":"standard","categories":[38,16],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v18.5 (Yoast SEO v20.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>A Freudian Take on Alice Neel, now showing at The Met<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A Freudian Take on Alice Neel, now showing at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/articles\/a-freudian-take-on-alice-neel\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" 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