Eleanor Nairne
Alice Neel: Hot Off The Griddle
Summary
This talk covers the largest exhibition to date in the UK of American artist Alice Neel (1900–1984), whose vivid portraits capture the shifting social and political context of the American twentieth century.
Describing herself as ‘a collector of souls’, Neel worked in New York during a period in which figurative painting was deeply unfashionable. Crowned the ‘court painter of the underground,‘ her canvases celebrate those who were too often marginalised in society: labour leaders, Black and Puerto Rican children, pregnant women, Greenwich Village eccentrics, civil rights activists and queer performers. A member of the US Communist Party, Neel and her radical portraits caught the attention of the FBI. In recent years, the politics of her work has given her cult status among a younger generation of artists.
Eleanor Nairne
Eleanor Nairne is the senior curator at Barbican Art Gallery, London. Internationally, she has curated shows such as Erotic Abstraction: Eva Hesse / Hannah Wilke (2021) at the Acquavella Galleries in New York. She was previously curator of the Artangel Collection at Tate, organizing more than 30 exhibitions and displays across the UK. A regular catalogue contributor for institutions such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Louisiana Museum in Denmark, she has written essays and reviews for the Art Newspaper, Frieze, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times, among others. She is also a trustee for Hart Club, an organization devoted to neurodivergent artists.
Also a fantastic question. This is why it’s so good to ask for questions ‘cause you tell me all the things that I haven’t been clear enough on, which is great. So thank you for that. So, and it relates to the last question, which is the, it was the one condition of the WPA programme was that you weren’t allowed to submit any nudes. So it’s this kind of complete miracle, suddenly she can earn a wage, she gets paid every six weeks, set dimensions of a canvas. But the one rule is no nudes. So she goes, as you’ve seen, she goes back to painting people naked, including painting some amazing portraits of pregnant women. But there’s a period during the kind of '30s, '40s, '50s, where that becomes less part of her practise.
Very good questions. So with some artists, you know exactly how prolific they are because there’s a catalogue resume that gives you a kind of total overview of their practise, and with some you don’t. So Alice Neel was pretty prolific, but we don’t have any single kind of overview of everything she made. So I couldn’t tell you a precise number of works. And in terms of making the selection, you really, it sort of depends on what the most recent exhibition has been. So whether you are trying to, you’re trying to think about what people have had access to see. So you want to present slightly different works, but you also want to make sure that the kind of cornerstones to present the artist in all their kind of glory are there. And yes, you generally do have a particular theme in mind because you’re only ever going to show a fraction of the total works they made. So in this instance I really wanted to kind of have that political undercurrent running the whole way through. So if you’d never come across Alice Neel in your life, you could learn everything you needed to about her full career. But if you’d seen every Alice Neel show to date, you could also still take something specifically for you about the nature of her political commitments.
It’s a really complicated question, ‘cause in some ways I’m always kind of cautious about gender during that period, because I think, I don’t know that Alice Neel, you know, she’s kind of pre-second wave feminism, right? So I’m not sure that she really sees herself as a woman artist per se. I think she just sees herself as an artist. You know, I think she kind of thinks that sex makes no difference to who she is as an artist, and she’s just been kind of blessed with talent. But in reality, obviously second wave feminism has an enormous impact. So one of the great paintings she makes is of the feminist, Linda Nochlin, with her daughter Daisy. That’s now in the MFA’s collection, and we were very lucky to borrow that. So someone like Linda Nochlin is very active in supporting and promoting Alice Neel’s career, and has a, yeah, huge impact on her being considered as a kind of important figure from that period.