Richard in the Era of the Corporation

In her East Harlem apartment, Alice Neel painted. Toiling away in relative obscurity for most of her career, she depicted ‘the human comedy’ as she saw it. A lifelong communist, she was the court painter of the common man. Her portraits are not of aristocrats and society figures so much as the friends, neighbors, delivery men and characters that populated her world. It is this belief in the everyman and disdain for corporate, capitalist America that makes this portrait of her son so intriguing. One of many she painted of Richard, her unflinching brush does not hide what she sees. Twisted around himself, the silver streak in his air left unpainted, his dark eyes staring emptily through the canvas – this is in many ways a portrait of a mother’s disappointment. Neel painted against the grain, not fazed with the vogues of the day or the art market; her work reflects her truth with total clarity.