, exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, March 22–August 1, 2021
Nearly four decades after her death, American painter Alice Neel (1900-1984) has received the major museum retrospective she has long deserved,
Alice Neel: People Come First, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Neel painted over the course of six decades, for the most part, until the last 20 years of her life, in relative obscurity. Her vibrant, idiosyncratic portraits are characterized above all by their candor and keen observation, which were at times unflattering but rarely without insight.
Neel’s “Human Comedy,” as she thought of her work, was conceived along the lines of French novelist Honoré de Balzac’s series of interconnected novels (1829–1848) by that title, which depicted every social class. Through choosing sitters among bohemians in Greenwich Village, the working class in Spanish Harlem, labor activists and Communist Party leaders of the 1940 and ‘50s and