The Barbican Centre to open major exhibition dedicated to Alice Neel

The Barbican Art Galley will showcase the largest exhibition to date in the UK of the work of American artist Alice Neel .

Image: Alice Neel at the age of twenty-nine, 1929, © The Estate of Alice Neel. Courtesy The Estate of Alice Neel.

Drawing on international public and private collections, Alice Neel: Hot Off The Griddle brings together works spanning her 60-year career. Based predominantly in New York, Neel painted figuratively during a period in which it was deeply unfashionable to do so. She persisted with her distinctive, expressionistic style, even though it meant that for most of her life she lacked material comfort, let alone critical recognition. Crowned the ‘court painter of the underground,' Neel chose to portray individuals who were not typically the subjects of painting – pregnant women, labour leaders, Black and Puerto Rican children, Greenwich Village eccentrics, civil rights activists, queer performers – retaliating against exclusionary histories. Each of her paintings radiates with her sense of the humanity and dignity of each subject.

Image: AliceNeel. Black Spanish-American Family, 1950. © The Estate of Alice Neel. Courtesy The Estate of Alice Neel.

The exhibition charts Neel’s painting during the Great Depression, when she became one of the first artists to enrol on the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Her experiences during this time consolidated her desire to bear witness to the hardship of life as experienced by most Americans.

Works include a portrait of her friend and writer Joe Gould, featuring multiple tiers of genitalia – a painting so scandalous it was not publicly exhibited until four decades after it was made – as well as a humorous scene of Neel with her lover John Rothschild in the bathroom, both stark naked, one peeing in the toilet, the other into the sink.

Image: AliceNeel. The Spanish Family, 1943. © The Estate of Alice Neel. Courtesy The Estate of Alice Neel.

The downstairs galleries at the Barbican are dedicated to highlights of Neel’s later portrait paintings from the 1960s and 1970s, when she made some of her most celebrated work. Neel invited her subjects into her studio, at this time the bay window of her living room in her apartment at 300 West 107th Street. Her sitters included poet Frank O’Hara (1960), then a curator at the Museum of Modern Art; artist Benny Andrews and his partner Mary Ellen Andrews (1972); Jackie Curtis (1972), the actor and star of Warhol’s Factory; and the performance artist and sex activist Annie Sprinkle (1982).  

Image: Alice Neel. Self Portrait, 1980. © The Estate of Alice Neel. Courtesy The Estate of Alice Neel.

The Barbican exhibition also includes her only full-sized self-portrait, completed when Neel turned 80. The painting took five years to finish because, in her own words, ‘it was so damned hard.’ Rallying against the history of the female nude, in which young women are typically posed as eroticized objects, Neel presents her aging body in all its glory.

Location: Barbican Art Gallery, Barbican Centre,Silk Street, London,EC2Y 8DS. Date:16 February – 21 May 2023. Price: from £18. Concessions available.