NEW YORK — Portraits tell stories. The unflinching portraits by Alice Neel (1900-1984) are realistic and honest, showing a wide swath of humanity in a variety of settings: a young girl on a beach, a well-dressed businessman sitting in an office, a gay couple embracing, an immigrant family relaxing at home. These portraits tell many stories; in some, the viewer can only guess at the story by mulling a sitter’s enigmatic expression. As Neel herself once said, “For me, people come first. I have tried to assert the dignity and eternal importance of the human being.”
Neel has been described as one of the most important portrait artists of the 20th century. At a time when male artists dominated the art world, and whose paintings were often made for male viewers, Neel’s work was a breath of fresh air. Her paintings subscribed to the ‘female gaze’ concept in art, especially in her powerful nudes of women that were decidedly not made for male viewers to drool over. A fine example is an untitled 1966 lithograph of a woman shown nude from the waist up. She is not lolling on a bed or posing seductively. Instead, she sits upright, assertively, and stares at the viewer as if to ask what they are looking at. This work made $6,000 plus the buyer’s premium in June 2022 at Rago Arts and Auction Center.
Neel also stands out for specializing in figurative painting at a time when Abstract Expressionism was in vogue. “Alice Neel was a rebel. She painted female nudes exuding their own self-created, personal power, not derived from sexuality,” said Wade Terwilliger, president of Palm Beach Modern Auctions in West Palm Beach, Florida. “She was associated with scandalous social circles, lived in poverty — even shoplifting to support her children, according to an article I read — and had a fascinating history of love affairs, one of which resulted in the burning of 350 of her works. She followed this up by painting herself nude at 80 years of age. As a multifaceted rebel in her own life, her artistic genre is just one aspect of her contrarianism.”
In her portraits, Neel strove to not make a subject beautiful or handsome, but to instead show the subject’s humanity. Any so-called ‘flaws,’ from a tired smile by an exhausted mother to an extra roll of flesh, only made her subjects more relatable. In lithographs such as Mother and Child (Nancy and Olivia), which realized $5,500 plus the buyer’s premium in March 2023 at Freeman’s Hindman, she departs from her male contemporaries’ typical idealized views of motherhood. In this portrait of her daughter-in-law, she shows that motherhood is life-changing. Neel’s own motherhood experiences were fraught with tremendous challenges. She lived a tumultuous life, and ended up having four children with three men. After losing her firstborn daughter to diphtheria at age one, her husband left her, taking their second child with him. Neel suffered a nervous breakdown and spent six months in a hospital after attempting suicide. Her subsequent relationships with men yielded two more children, but were not drama-free.
In certain portraits, she steers clear of typical portraiture conventions and depicts her sitters turned away from the viewer, perhaps locked in a moment of deep thought. Black Spanish Intellectual, an oil on Masonite that attained $80,000 plus the buyer’s premium in December 2022 at Palm Beach Modern Auctions, clearly demonstrates this approach.
“Black Spanish Intellectual offers Neel’s typical complexity of expression, and some mystery that makes this portrait special,” said Terwilliger. “Instead of a direct, intense gaze back at the viewer, there is quiet conflict, a reaction to an internal dialogue, or something happening off camera, and that is a strength.”
Born and raised in a Philadelphia suburb, Neel lived in Cuba for a while before settling in New York City in the 1930s. There, she lived in two very different neighborhoods: Spanish Harlem and the Upper West Side, and her experiences in both fueled her interest in painting people from different cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. She painted family and neighbors as well as those in the arts. She was also interested in social justice, and painted activists. In her 1974 portrait of Harriet Lyons, a founding editor of the feminist magazine Ms., Neel portrays Lyons with a direct and commanding gaze — an artistic choice that honors the important work the sitter was doing in writing about issues of women’s sexuality and rights. The crayon, watercolor, gouache, and pencil portrait made $70,000 plus the buyer’s premium in June 2021 at Swann Auction Galleries.
Neel also trained her unflinching gaze on a young girl on the beach in a 1982 lithograph, Bather (Olivia with Red Hat), which earned $13,000 plus the buyer’s premium at Heritage Auctions in October 2021. She captures the child, who is dressed in a bikini and a bucket hat and has her hands on her hips, staring at the viewer with an expression of mild annoyance, at an age when she is still confident in her body.
The auction market is strong for Neel, particularly among United States-based collectors, but European audiences have begun taking notice. According to the Alice Neel website, she received little attention in Europe until “exhibitions that toured Europe in 2010 and 2016 resulted finally in her recognition as a world renowned artist.” New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted a major Neel retrospective in 2021 that renewed attention and drove a price spike immediately after. “Her highest auction results for paintings are recent, within the last three years,” Terwilliger said. “Of those over $1 million, only one was prior to 2021. Editions are in a similar trend as well.”
For beginning collectors who admire Neel’s work, her editioned prints are often a good entry point. Prices can vary from a few thousand dollars to more than $10,000. A signed screenprint of Geoffrey Hendricks & Brian took a strong price of $11,000 plus the buyer’s premium in May 2023 at Palm Beach Modern Auctions. This particular work likely performed so well as it was prominently featured in the Met’s retrospective. “It was very recognizable to collectors, even among the many evocative depictions she made of queer life and relationships,” Terwilliger said.
While her drawings obviously don’t bring prices that match her original oil paintings, they are highly sought after. An untitled ink and gouache on paper known as Young Girl Sitting at a Table brought $22,000 plus the buyer’s premium in May 2021 at Rago Arts and Auction Center.
Neel’s artworks are as relevant today as when she painted them. Calling herself a collector of souls, she depicted people from all corners of society. In each work, she imbued a sense of the sitter’s dignity, whether they were a vaunted art critic or a washerwoman. Psychologically intense, they nearly vibrate with emotion.
“You can look at Alice Neel’s portraits and immediately relate to them,” Terwilliger said. “She painted her subjects with candor and honesty, and often depicted states of mind that aren’t ‘pretty’, but are universally felt. Boredom, stress, curiosity, stoicism, exhaustion, and a smirk here and there keep her work relevant over 70-plus years.”
