Hartley
Alice Neel
ALICE NEEL, 1966. OIL ON CANVAS.
“For me, people come first.”, said Alice Neel, “I have tried to assert the dignity and eternal importance of the human being”. She stayed true to this maxim for her entire career, embodying principles of socialism in her work as she painted portraits of the everyman from her neighbours in Spanish Harlem to anti-fascist activists, queer artists and members of New York’s global community. Neel was ignored by the artistic mainstream for most of her career, partly due to her political leanings, and lived in destitution for large swathes of her life. Yet still she painted, consistently and vigorously, and returned to subjects close to her, such as her son Hartley. Here, she portrayed him after his first year of medical school, exhausted and depleted and filled with thoughts of an alternative life conscripted to fight in the Vietnam War. Neel was able to capture a genuine and powerful intimacy with all of her subjects, but her piercing gaze is amplified when depicting her son. It is one of hundreds of portraits she painted of him, each one filled with the complex feelings of motherhood, hope and love tinged with trepidation and worry. She collected souls throughout her life, but it is Hartley who owned hers.