Nude or Clothed, Alice Neel’s Unsentimental Portraits Command Attention

The show is too big, the catalogue and labels are too woke, but it’s great to see museumgoers viewing art in the flesh, again.

T here are three problems with Alice Neel: People Come First, which opened last month at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and runs there until August 1. First, it’s a retrospective, and Alice Neel (1900–1984) doesn’t need another career-long survey show. This is the third one I’ve seen since 2000, and there were three I missed, one in Houston, one in Stockholm, and another in London, each within the last 15 years. All of these shows have catalogues with essays.

At least a dozen smaller exhibitions over the last 20 years have considered aspects of her career, among them Hilton Als’s show, Alice Neel Uptown, which ran in New York and covered a big chunk of the same territory, literally and figuratively, that the Met show covers. It has a 150-page catalogue. I saw a very good show, again, with a scholarly catalogue, on Neel’s late portraits at Zwirner about ten years ago. Zwirner represents Neel’s estate.

Enough already. The Met show is a Neel rehash, the “new and improved” part mostly a veneer of tiresome, brainless bilge about injustice.

Second, and this and the first problem are related, the exhibition is too big. It’s got over 100 paintings, drawings, and watercolors, and it rambles, at times limply, even plaintively, in search of an edit. These problems are measures of the Met’s current states of miasma and drift.

Finally, People Come First presents the art of curatorial self-indulgence, a new kind of performance art, as art history. Neel would have rolled her eyes at the faddish piety with which the Met’s curators treat her work. Neel, of all, people, knew she was no saint.

Kelly Baum’s catalogue essay goes to tortured pains to establish Neel as a radical, and “radical” describes her in the introduction to the show in the Met galleries. Neel called herself a Communist in the 1930s but admitted she wasn’t a very good one. “I don’t like going to meetings” was one way the casual 1930s Communists said, “I’m too busy for these kooks.” Neel was a frequent protestor but limited herself to carrying signs. She’s a New York type.

These problems overlap but not with a toxicity so turbocharged to make the show unviewable and the catalogue unreadable. I’m glad I saw it and recommend it. She’s a brave, tough artist, though not a great one. There are one or two good, new nuggets. And it’s good to see so many people in a museum. Neel is a quintessential New York survivor. The locals need a boost after all the wreckage this past year.

Neel is one of the few serious, devoted, and distinctive portraitists in the Modernist era. That was not an easy niche to occupy from the time of Abstract Expressionism, which has no place for portraits, through Pop Art, where portraits are drenched with irony and aren’t really portraits but ads. Portraiture over the centuries has been seen by most critics and many portraitists themselves as hack work. Photography might kill it yet. Technology has made image-keeping the stuff of devices and ephemera.

Neel’s nudes are extraordinary, whether of hairy, untoned odalisque men or pregnant women presented in all their distorted, tired discomfort. In the 1930s, she found an aesthetic formula that worked for her, and she kept at it with smart modifications here and there over 50 years. Her subjects, bohemians mostly, demand attention via her style and their strong personalities operating in tandem.

Margaret Evans Pregnant is the show’s strong start. It’s from 1978. It’s Neel at her feistiest. Pregnancy is a complex drama, the origin drama for the unseen, unborn baby and a life’s drama for mothers. Neel’s view of it is frank and unsentimental. For a portraitist, the pregnant nude offers new challenges. Neel said that “plastically, pregnancy is very exciting.”

After centuries of portraiture, it’s hard to find a new angle, and she did. Her pregnant nudes are as far from Titian or Renoir as an artist could get. They’re hard to look at for long. There are four or five in the show, as well as Childbirth, from 1939, a study in tension and endurance. The pregnant nudes are nearly double portraits. There’s a little life in there, after all, wreaking havoc on his or her mother’s body. Neel painted nudes of children, too, and we’re not talking Raphael’s pudgy, sweet bambini. Neel’s children are in the “only a mother could love” category. Neel painted a portrait of Linda Nochlin, one of my graduate-school professors, and her young daughter. I barely recognize either.

The introductory text tells us the exhibition’s main points. Odd as this sounds, curators today sometimes struggle with main points, possibly because their main points are flimsy or preachy or jingoistic. Neel dedicated herself to “the ethical foundations of humanism,” I read. What, pray, does this mean? I think “humanism” means different things to different people, and what are its “ethical foundations”? Humanism is a philosophical movement, but it’s also a squishy, sentimental word.

Neel focuses on “injustice as a result of racism, sexism, and capitalism.” No, she doesn’t. Neel is a portraitist, not a genre painter, and if the exhibition is really a biography, then write a biography, which, by the way, has already been done. Neel’s not really a movement painter. “People come first,” she said. Curators, ever look at the title of your own show?

Neel is a distinguished portraitist for her curiosity. She’s compellingly good at taking the physical dimensions of a person and making from them a state of emotional being. A portrait such as Geoffrey Hendricks and Brian, from 1978, has nothing to do with injustice, racism, sexism, or capitalism. It’s a portrait of two unique people who love each other and seem very much at ease with it. Portraits of Robert Smithson from 1962, Andy Warhol from 1970, and Randall in Extremis from 1960 are about anguish generally and each man’s specific anguish. She’s very good at making pain a unique, over-the-top experience.

“Injustice as a result of racism, sexism, and capitalism” is sudsy pablum and introduces a void in the show, and that’s intellectual rigor. Before too long, in the labels and especially the book, there’s “white supremacy,” “the patriarchy,” “white nationalism,” “class privilege,” “male hegemony,” “xenophobia,” and then there’s the “torrent of police violence against people of color.” This isn’t art history. Dropping these terms isn’t scholarship. It’s sloganeering.

In the catalogue, there are some meaty Neel quotes that would have made for substance. “Human beings are being steadily marked down in value, despised, rejected, and degraded.” She did see herself as a history painter. “I paint to try to reveal the struggle, joy, and tragedy of life,” she said, calling herself a “zeitgeist painter.” Struggle, joy, and tragedy are human staples, but each person, conditioned by his or her era, experiences them specially. All of these themes, straight from Neel, seem to be a better basis for a show, though they been developed in one way or another in the five or six previous Neel retrospectives. I think the curators serve Neel poorly by ladling today’s fads on her work.

Neel grew up in a middle-class family near Philadelphia and went to art school there in the 1920s. Though this has been done, it would have been a good idea to situate Neel in the art fulcrum of her time. She’s not sui generis, though the curators mislead viewers to believe that she is. We’re told that she read Robert Henri’s The Art Spirit, a good place to start, but what did she get from it?

Neel’s part of the Ashcan and Social Realist circle of Walt Kuhn, Bellows, Henri, George Luks, the Soyers, Reginald Marsh, and the Farm Security Administration photographers of the New Deal era. There is much of Max Beckmann in her work, here and there, as in the fantastic Portrait of Kenneth Fearing, from 1935, and some of her Depression-era genre and protest pictures. All of these artists depicted the inner-city poor and the offbeat, sometimes as portraits but mostly as totems during a period when down-and-out was in. Neel didn’t invent the genre.

A section on Neel’s art-history ancestors comes in the middle of the show and is so marooned that it seems to belong in the catalogue, except it’s been done so many times. There’s a Van Gogh and a Cassatt, both not really on point, the hideous Soutine, and Jacob Lawrence and Helen Levitt, also not on point since neither is a portraitist, as well as Henri. The one artist we don’t see is Eakins.

Neel’s from Philadelphia. Eakins died when she was 16. He was Philadelphia’s most famous artist in his lifetime. Where are the parallels?

Not to be a skunk in the injustice party — oh, why not, it’s a guaranteed boring party anyway? — but there are seminal points about Neel that are missing in the Met show. One is her battle with mental illness in the late 1920s through much of the 1930s. She was hospitalized for a year. Another, related point is her singularly inept turn at motherhood during this period, leading to the death of one daughter through, in part, Neel’s negligence, and then the lifelong estrangement with another daughter. A third is her multiple, chaotic relationships with men, which is covered indirectly in Neel’s early, explicit, and private drawings. Meredith Brown obliquely covers Neel’s early botched play at motherhood in her catalogue essay. It would have been an original bit of scholarship in the show.

These must have informed her choice of pregnant-women and mothers-and-children portrait subjects. A good beginning for these subjects might have been the moving portrait of Neel’s mother, Last Sickness, from 1953. Also named Alice Neel (1868–1954), this Victorian WASP seems to have been Neel’s launchpad. The portrait’s in the show but tucked by the entrance to the irrelevant gallery on Neel’s art influences.

I liked Neel’s portraits of New York crypto-Trots like Patrick Whalen, Max White, Phillip Bonosky, and others. A couple would have established Neel’s left-wing bona fides. Nazis Murder Jews, from 1936, is a crappy painting, as are Synthesis of New York and Longshoremen Returning from Work, both also Depression-era and entirely unoriginal. Investigation of Poverty by the Russell Sage Foundation, from 1933, is far from crappy. Big foundations, Neel felt, didn’t really care about poverty but, rather, headlines. Some things never change. In this painting, a corps of WASP foundation executives look blankly as an indigent woman sobs. Their indifference and intrusiveness rightly rankled Neel. They’re putting her through the humiliating “Queen for a Day” routine.

The exhibition gets rolling with portraits like Marxist Girl, from 1972, Jacki Curtis and Rita Redd, two drag queens, painted in 1970, and Jackie Curtis as a Boy, from 1972. This portrait shows Curtis in his day job as a proto-preppy man, though the title suggests that, for Curtis, adulthood meant gender-bending. Robbie Tillotson is from 1973. Part of Warhol’s Factory crowd, he wears bell-bottoms and sports a white man’s Afro. Disco era in look and in their neon palette, they tip Neel’s hand. She’s very much a 1970s artist. Her subjects express the visions of late 1960s and 1970s women’s lib.

A Neel portrait is easy to recognize, so she’s a brand. Her figures are compressed, often hunched, and bulbous. Fashion models, athletes, and movie stars aside, people come in many shapes and sizes and tend to puff, sag, ripple in fat, and project embarrassed awareness that they’re no Apollo or Aphrodite.

I love her subjects’ big, soulful eyes. They twist or seem to squirm, or at least the sitting subjects do. Arms and legs are conveyed at weird angles. Fingers are long. Let’s put aside crock like “she’s beautiful on the inside” or “he’s a man of character.” Her subjects start as wounded creatures. The beauty of her work is what she does with them.

I liked Randall Griffey’s essay on Neel’s gay subjects. It has plenty of good biographical material and gets the 1970s New York gay ambiance right. Julia Bryan-Wilson’s essay looks at Neel the portraitist and representational painter and abstractionist. This is close to original material, though drawing from an essay by Mira Schor, and I don’t remember the other Neel retrospectives considering it.

Neel said Abstract Expressionism was a style that “hated human beings,” erasing them from art. True enough but Bryan-Wilson quickly goes off the rails, trying to establish a link between Mondrian and Neel based on “energetic, multiple, and intersecting white/dominant and non-white minoritarian cultures in New York.” This is silly.

The show itself has a section called “Good Abstract Qualities,” borrowing a quote from Neel, but it’s superficial. A watercolor from 1931 “establishes the importance she places on form, color, and space as elements communicating meaning in and of themselves.” No shit, Sherlock. Artists do this all the time. Neel’s gestural painting in Hartley, from 1966, “seem to have a life of their own.” Did an intern write these?

Light, from 1980, and Night, from 1959, two sunset pictures, some good portraits of Neel’s family, and Black Draftee, from 1965, end the show and the section on Neel and abstraction. I loved looking at them, though they made no sense there. Black Draftee isn’t finished. Neel painted the head first and then did the outlines of the body in thick paint. James Hunter, the subject, didn’t come back for a second sitting. Neel added it to her 1974 Whitney retrospective, saying it was finished and signing not the front but the back. It’s a good picture in showing her process and, as an object, looks good.

Neel wanted more African-American subjects in the show, her first New York retrospective, and thus declared it done, which it was, as far as she was concerned. People Come First is a hagiographic show and uncritical. How Neel fashioned her image in the 1970s is a work of art itself. This image-making became a family business run by her sons and daughters-in-law. Her grandson’s 2007 documentary is very good.

I like Alice Neel and enjoy looking at her work, but I have to wonder where quality control is at the Met. The show needs a diet both thematically and object-wise. The book is beautifully produced, but isn’t there someone at the Met ruling that essays actually need to cover art history rather than hijack the museum for a social-justice-warrior toot?

There’s not much I’d call original research. There’s room for a new take on Neel here and there, like Neel and motherhood, or Neel and abstraction, but the blow the curators take is a glancing, half-hearted one. It wouldn’t occur to young Met curators to look at Neel and the marketplace, another niche where scholarship hasn’t been done. Who bought her work? How did she cultivate clients? What was her niche? Starting in the 1960s, she had a dealer. That’s capitalism. Gasp. Do they sell smelling salts in the Met’s shop?

Quality control is the job of the director, even at a big place like the Met. I had two very good curators and didn’t need to worry about intellectual coherence, freshness of ideas, or the quality of essays. I did need to intervene sometimes on budgets, gallery interpretation, and overlarge shows stimulated by an excess of curatorial enthusiasm.

Some exhibitions, given their themes and the quality of the artist, are 40-painting shows. A disciplined edit of the Neel exhibition would have reduced People Come First to 40 or so objects and the two or three themes where new scholarship can be done. That this wasn’t or, worse, couldn’t be done is the director’s fault, or the fault of the modern and contemporary department’s head.