Another female artist warrants her own page.
I discovered Alice Neel:
Alice Hartley Neel, 1900-1984.
“I don’t know what you expect to do in the world,” her mother once told her, “You’re only a girl.”
Alice Neel hailed from a clan of steamship owners and opera singers, also descending from of signers of the Declaration of Independence. Her 8-year old brother died of diphtheria shortly after she was born. Several months later, Neel’s family moved near Philadelphia. After graduating from high school in she was an army secretary while pursuing her passion for art, taking evening classes at the School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia. at 21 years of age, Neel enrolled as a student at the Fine Arts program at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, with the help of scholarships and savings. A brilliant student, Neel earned several awards for her portraits, which would remain her life-long focus.
At 24, she met and fell in love with a wealthy Cuban in the program, Carlos Enríquez. They moved to Havana and the following year she had her first exhibition and gave birth to her first child, Santillana, who died while still an infant from diphtheria, the same disease that had claimed her brother. The couple moved between Cuba and the US, eventually settling in NYC. They had another daughter, Isabetta, in November 1928, and planned to move to Paris two years later, but Enríquez left unexpectedly for Paris, taking Isabetta with him. Neel suffered a nervous breakdown, was briefly hospitalized, and later went to find Enríquez. The marriage was unsalvageable and Neel attempted suicide again and was hospitalized. Neel never divorced and would see her daughter only on rare occasions for the rest of her life. Neel never remarried, but had a number of romantic relationships and had two sons. However, Neel’s partners were unsupportive of her creative endeavors; one was actively destructive, destroying 300 of her drawings and 50 oil paintings in a jealous rage.
Neel remained in New York City, an activist for left-wing political causes. In 1933, she received funding from the Public Works of America Project, part of FDR’s New Deal. They supported her painting until 1943, after which she struggled to make ends meet for the rest of the decade, having difficulty finding a market for her work. Some thirty years into her career, Neel finally began to receive the recognition she had long deserved. According to the artist, her work “began to be understood in the late 1950s, before that it was too tough for people.” The momentum of the women’s rights movement led to increased interest in Neel’s work. By the 1970s, Neel was widely recognized as a major American artist, a feminist icon. Allen Ginsberg composed and read an original poem for her in a memorial service at the Whitney. Alice Neel is buried near her studio in Vermont.
