Throughout her long artistic career Alice Neel was primarily a figurative painter producing portraits and thus her career's arc gives rise to the author's title. Neel spent years not being recognized as critics focused on art movements such as abstract expressionism. Her own early expressionism found subjects in trauma and the family. Work produced before 1933 had innovative content.
Alice Neel married a fellow young artist, a Cuban, Carlos Enriquez. Cuba was a source of interest to a number of Americans including Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos and Walker Evans. Neel and her husband were influenced by the Cuban avant-garde.
The artist moved to Greenwich Village in 1931. At the time she could be characterized as a social realist and after 1933 through the early years of the forties she was a WPA artist. She moved to Spanish Harlem in 1939. One of the author's contentions is that Neel created a proletarian portrait gallery. When following the war America became child-centered, Neel painted an America of poverty. Neel's family, raising sons Richard and Harley, was matrifocal.
Alice Neel appeared in the movie, PULL MY DAISY. Later the proletarian gallery of Neel shifted to being a New York Art Network as her sitters began to include quasi-famous people. She gained recognition in 1962.
The book describes a long journey to acclaim. Some of the issues the author treats in an interesting fashion are political. Our family bought this book after viewing a movie about Alice Neel created by a grandchild. The book is everything we had hoped for in broadening our appreciation of Neel. It is now possible to understand how circumstances bearing on a woman's place deprived her of public appreciation earlier in her career. That said, leftist politics did provide a community of comrades tending to give the artist some psychological and spiritual support. She remains a role model to anyone seeking sustenance through her example of leading an extraordinarily productive life amidst serious material and emotional deprivations.
