Itâs Time to Put Alice Neel in Her Rightful Place in the Pantheon A large retrospective feels at home in the Metropolitan Museum of Artâs grandest galleries and should silence any doubt about the artistâs originality or her importance. A visitor studies Alice Neel’s 1964 portrait of the civil rights leader James Farmer in the exhibition “People Come First” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.Credit...Sasha Arutyunova for The New York Times NYT Critic's Pick It is said that the future is female, and one can only hope. But it is important to remember that the past, through continuous excavation, is becoming more female all the time. The latest evidence is the gloriously relentless retrospective of Alice Neel (1900-1984), the radical realist painter of all things human, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.