Painted Truths

What does the soul of a city look like? Alice Neel got close to describing it in her portraits of the characters of New York. For over 50 years she painted the Puerto Rican and African-American inhabitants of Spanish Harlem, the activists of 1930s Greenwich Village, and creative icons such as Andy Warhol, Frank O’Hara and writer Linda Nochlin in the Upper West Side. Raised and trained in Philadelphia, Neel moved to NYC in the 1930s, drawn by its political subculture. Her work was never really in step with that of her contemporaries; there was no minimalism or abstraction. Instead she took a very personal approach to painting, making work that was psychological, intense and often strange—such as 1941's Two Girls in Spanish Harlem, in which the odd, flat perspective gives the frill-clad subjects a haunting appearance. There are touches of Lucian Freud here and there in her work, and you can see Neel's influence on future greats such as Elizabeth Peyton, whose stylized, choppy depictions of androgynous stars took Neel’s straight-up portraiture into the worlds of pop and fashion. Around 1960, Neel began to be embraced as an older, influential figure by the city’s creatives: she appeared in Robert Frank’s Pull My Daisy (1959), painted feminist writer Kate Millett for the cover of Time, and received a retrospective at the Whitney in 1974. A close friend of Michel Auder, she provided the subject matter for his from-the-hip biographical video piece Alice Neel (1976–1983). Neel has long been considered one of America's most important 20th-century painters, but it’s taken until now for Europe to be treated to a major exhibition of her work. Alice Neel: Painted Truths opens tomorrow at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.