Alice Neel: Painted Truths

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Through June 13

“Alice Neel was anything but an overnight success,” said Douglas Britt in the Houston Chronicle. Her artistic career began among the bohemians of 1930s New York, but for decades this painter of expressionistic portraits labored in obscurity, while the boys’ club of abstract expressionist painters dominated the field. Neel achieved renown only in the 1960s and 1970s, “when figuration made a comeback” and feminists discovered in her a sort of patron saint. This “career-spanning selection” of paintings at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts includes many of her masterworks. Neel “avoided photographic verisimilitude, deliberately distorting features and using unnatural colors in pursuit of her subjects’ inner lives.” In Hartley, a 1966 image of her own son, Neel’s “use of grayish green to capture shady areas” makes the still-young man seem somewhat corpse-like. The artist’s many nudes, meanwhile, are “frank and often disturbing, even grotesque.”

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It’s true, “Neel is known for her incisive psychological portraits, which often border on ruthless,” said Phoebe Hoban in ArtNews. But this exhibition also includes some of her “kinder efforts.” The Family (1970), for instance, captures art critic John Gruen, wife Jane Wilson, and their daughter, Julia, all seated on a sofa. “John, a bright purple scarf draped around his neck, anchors the center of the painting,” flanked by a bold Jane and a blasé Julia. “The three are depicted as dark, smoldering, and intense.” Yet each wears a pair of patent-leather shoes—“a whimsical quirk one notices before anything else.” Neel created The Family near the pinnacle of her career, but even then she didn’t make much of a living from her art. When she offered to sell The Family to the Gruens for just $1,200, “they said they couldn’t afford it.”