The artists portrait show at the Met is packed with raw emotional power.
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Alice Neel was the painterpar excellence of New Yorks human comedy.
She often outlined people in an electric blue that made each individual vibrate like an archetype.
Neels eye penetrated her subjects: We see their lives, creative beauty, personal grace, wounded delusion.
We see how they have been butchered by life.
Her gaze is loving but predatory; she appears to feelwithher subjects but never fullyforthem.
Their visages hit us like depth charges.
I love her work.
At this point, Neel has become a beatified artist, almost a fridge-magnet artist like Frida Kahlo.
In 2017, the New YorkTimesdubbed Neel one of Americas most inventive and peculiar portraitists.
(Id delete peculiar and add epic.)
Neels story is one not only of great talent but of artistic courage, persistence, and will.
This even though she barely sold a thing and received little recognition until the late 1960s.
At the time of her death, she had about 300 unsold paintings in her apartment.
Neel had some of Whitmans dispassionately passionate gaze.
She seemed to emulsify things, then merge with them.
I have no self I have gone into this other person.
Neels early adulthoodwas harrowing.
In Havana, they painted together, mingled with other artists, and Neel gave birth to a daughter.
The little family moved back to the United States, settling in the Bronx.
Then disaster struck: In 1927, their baby died of diphtheria.
I was already in a trap.
Its something out of Dante.
During the day, Neel left the child with Enriquez and went to paint in the Village.
Then calamity struck again: Enriquez left her and took their baby to Cuba.
Neel was suddenly alone in New York.
That was just the end of everything, Neel said.
In 1930, Neel had a nervous breakdown.
She attempted suicide by gas, was placed in a mental institution, and tried to eat shattered glass.
Around that time she wrote, Now is the great renunciation …
But she survived, and after getting out of the sanatorium, Neel moved to the West Village.
There, she mingled with artists, painted, and took lovers.
I had to reach my sexual aim, she later said.
She raised both children as a single working mother, painting all the while.
On his left and right are attendant figures with bulbous male genitalia.
As curator Helen Molesworth has quipped, Alice liked dick.
She said abstraction pushed all the other pushcarts off the street.
It must have been galling.
(She had moved uptown in 1938, for good.)
Neels portraits of the 1960s and 1970s are peopled with incredible, crested human bouquets.
Some have sepulchral eyes.
She painted trans performers, famous writers and critics, soldiers, museum guards, and alpha curators.
His frail baby-seal body is sunken, blown to pieces, and stitched together.
(He had been shot by Valerie Solanas two years before.)
This is Warhol as wraith, as wounded, introverted angel.
(Are these revenge pictures?)
These sessions still didnt gain her the recognition she deserved.
It must have killed her when he coolly replied, Oh, so you want to be aprofessional?
Finally, in 1974,at the age of 74, Neel had a retrospective at the Whitney Museum.
The show was up for 38 days.
It had an eight-page catalog with one color illustration.
He scoffed at her ineptitudes and wondered why so many serious people lend themselves to this unflattering treatment.
AnotherTimescritic, James R. Mellow, cracked that her work was savage.
Neelsnude self-portraitstands with Picassos 19056portrait of Gertrude Stein.
In each we see a Gibraltar-like woman monumental, aware, in thought, and with power.
Neel said I hate the way I looked …
I dont like my throw in … my spirit looked nothing like my body.
Neel gives us women as real, feeling everyday Atlases: living, dying, sexual.
These are not the romantic, damaged, fragile, venomous, or hysterical objects of the male mind.
These works are tidal forces unto themselves.
This is a true meaning of flesh of my flesh.
Neels colossal images are a singular document of the eternal cosmic topology of motherhood.
This ambivalence was never rendered quite this way before.
The men are drones.
The women as the suns of new solar systems.
Finally, there are Neels many pictures of young mothers nursing or with their children.
Here we see the new dominion these women live in.
These paintings impart a wisdom gleaned elsewhere, onlyin Old Master pictures of the Virgin Mary with her child.
Mary had terrible foreknowledge of what was to come; the faces of Neels mothers have that same look.
That this child will one day die.
Its easy to recognize her greatness in retrospect, when her work is celebrated in a setting like this.
For most of Neels 84 years, though, she was artistically on her own.
I broke all the rules, she said.
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