Alice Neel’s portraits celebrate queer world in London show

Twentieth-century American painter Alice Neel (1900- 1984) had a sharply uncanny eye for a portrait, her emotive, psychologically astute works an antidote to the abstract aesthetic fashionable throughout her lifetime.

Born in Philadelphia, she shaped a liberal philosophy during her time in Greenwich Village, New York in the 1930s, encompassed in the left-wing subjects that began to populate her work. A later move to Harlem, in a bid to escape the art world’s insular atmosphere, followed by the Upper West Side, saw her move in new circles, which included Andy Warhol, Frank O’Hara and Robert Smithson, all of whom appeared in her portraits.

Throughout her long career, Neel championed those left vulnerable from social discrimination, celebrating freedom and pride in the body in groups including women and the Black and immigrant communities. With her ninth solo exhibition at Victoria Miro, her support of the queer community is put under the lens in an honest and emotional snapshot of broader American society.

Portraits exhibited here – from Allen Ginsberg to Andy Warhol and performance artist Annie Sprinkle – encompass both the accuracy and the uncanny psychological insights Neel brought to her work. In this exhibition, a narrow definition of subject is eschewed for a wider celebration of queer communities, extended to include activists and thinkers and ‘those who would qualify as queer by virtue of their different take in their given field and thus the world’, says curator Hilton Als. ‘So doing, they reflect Alice’s own interest in and commitment to difference.’

Als builds on his extensive experience engaging with Neel’s work, including for the 2017 show, ‘Alice Neel: Uptown’. ‘[There], I noticed a number of themes in her work that hadn’t been mined previously – namely pictures that showed an array of her queer friends. Friends from her life in New York, New Jersey, and elsewhere. A lot of them were artists and a lot of them had working-class roots. I don’t think Alice ever set out to “represent” anything. She painted her myriad, layered worlds. But what I loved – what I saw in the queer pictures – was a kind of family of difference, men and women and others who may have had relatively little understanding in America at that time but complete understanding in Alice’s universe. Ultimately what I loved about these “queer” pictures is what I love throughout her art: empathy devoid of sentimentality. And what’s fluid in these pictures is fluid throughout the work: the exchange between artist and sitter. If sex and gender are part of that, so much the better.’

In gathering these portraits together, Neel’s sensitivity and celebration of nous is emphasised, the community she creates embodying an ultimately optimistic humanism. ‘There is loads and loads of joy here,’ adds Als. ‘Joy about her incredible artistry and her welcome table approach to things: Sit down! Tell me about yourself! Joy over her boundless curiosity. And humour. And it’s my great hope always that she will contribute to the viewer being a more open person, that understanding is possible, no matter what.’