Alice Neel, all skew-whiff

“I am an old-fashioned painter”, Alice Neel once said. “I do country scenes, city scenes, figures, portraits, and still life… Still life is just composing and thinking about lines and colours and often flowers.” To a casual onlooker, what could be more traditional? Surely these old subjects are not those of a modern painter? The truth is, in Neel’s hands, her portraits, still lifes, and street scenes are some of the most progressive paintings of the last century, a century that Neel lived through: born in January 1900, she documented the Great Depression and the rise of international fascism, the feminist and sexual revolutions before, at the end of her long life in 1984, being celebrated as one of the most penetrating observers of that century. A new exhibition of her still lifes and street scenes recently opened at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels. I went to the Belgian capital to find an unnerving radicalism in these seemingly quiet and traditional paintings.

Some biographical exposition proves instructive here. In her mid-twenties, Neel married a Cuban art student, Carlos Enríquez, who came from an aristocratic family. They had two children; Santillana died from diphtheria shortly before her first birthday and a second daughter, Isabetta, was forcibly taken (today we would say ‘kidnapped’) from Neel after a mental breakdown and raised by Neel’s in-laws in Havana. The exhibition is hung chronologically and begins deep in this period of anguish. Having moved from Havana to New York in 1926, Harlem River (1928) depicts a section of the nine-mile tidal strait of water that separates northern Manhattan from southern Bronx. However, the picture looks as though it has been discovered in the arse end of nowhere, not The City That Never Sleeps: the grey sky is cold, remote, and heavy like a metal sheet, while flagging shacks of industry contain no people in them at all. A steamboat on the water is positioned sideways, as though paralysed on the upward arc of the river, just as likely to fall back on itself as climb the gunmetal grey water. Hung close by, Belmar, New Jersey (1935) is similarly consumed by a melancholy atmosphere: the central house is painted black, as though it has been condemned, while a gaseous yellow cloud lurks overhead. It is as though this cookie-cutter middle-class street has been poisoned by carbon monoxide in broad daylight.

For most of her life, Neel struggled as an artist and a single mother, a white woman who, in 1938 at the age of 38, chose to leave what she scathingly called the ‘honky-tonk’ world of the West Village and moved uptown to 8 East 107th Street in Spanish Harlem. She lived there until 1962, during which time she gave birth to Richard (whose father José Santiago Negrón left Neel and the baby just three months later) and then to Hartley, and made many portraits of her friends. John With Bowl of Fruit (1949) depicts her friend (and brief lover) John Rothschild, a financier whom she sometimes called ‘the money man’ and one of the few people outside of her extended family whom she returned to paint over many years. Rothschild is seated at a desk with a thin pipe placed between his pursed lips; his barely open eyes face Cézanne-esque apples and oranges in a huge bowl that resembles a huge cocktail glass.

Neel once told her friend Mike Gold, a writer for the Daily Worker, “I have tried to assert the dignity and eternal importance of the human being in my portraits.” In the only other work in the show that could by any measure be called a portrait, Joe Stefanelli (1963), we encounter the overlooked abstract painter on a snowy New York street, all bunched up and awkwardly framed. Stefanelli, a generation younger than Neel, has yet to receive his fair due: while primarily categorised as a non-objective painter he was, like Neel, interested in ‘traditional’ subjects like flowers, houses, and the overlooked ephemera of everyday life, and so should really be mentioned in the same breath as Jane Freilicher, Robert de Niro Sr., and Nell Blaine, all of whom are now celebrated as pioneers of ‘Figurative Expressionism’ (think Abstract Expressionism but rooted in life, and especially in the historical subjects of still life and portraiture). Stefanelli’s portrait finds him on one of those calm winter days which feels a bit like summer as the white sun hits the city hard, throwing definite streaks of shadow on the sidewalk. Stefanelli has taken off his overcoat and stares over our left shoulder, his eyes matching the colour of the icy-blue sky. As is typical in many of Neel’s portraits, the intense realism gives way to skew-whiff abstraction: the steep sidewalk appears to extend vertically behind Stefanelli, apparently blurring into the sky itself, while much of the left side of the picture is made up of up-down brushstrokes in yellow and black squiggles.

Most of the paintings on display in Brussels date from the 1950s and 1960s. Fish Still Life (1950) depicts coarse salt flakes and a severed fish head on a cutting board, its wide childlike eyes staring out into the middle distance as light falls flat on the top of its head. The poor thing looks as though it has been illuminated by a stage light for closer inspection on a pathologist’s post-mortem table. Two green bell peppers, a kitchen knife, and a French-style cooking pot surround the fish; the table is tidy, everything ready for cooking. The mess of putting it all together is to come. I cannot help but think about this work in relation to The Living and the Dead (1981), a memento mori and perhaps the most striking work in the show, which depicts a skull on a table in front of a high-up window looking down to the street below. In both paintings, we encounter objects of life’s transience; one is for dinner, the other a reminder that our ‘mortal coils’ (as Prince Hamlet described our bodies, himself clutching a human skull just like the one in the painting) are temporary vessels. A year before she died, Neel was asked by the novelist Ted Castle if she found herself thinking about her own mortality. “Death and I live here together”, Neel responded. She was always drawn to the “morbid and excessive”, and “everything connected with death had a dark power over me.” These might seem like objects arranged upon a table, but they are more like life and death arranged on a table; each has equal weight.

Looking at The Living and the Dead, I found myself slanting my neck at the strange perspective. This genuine desire, even need, to better make sense of the work by shifting my perspective skew-whiff, as well as the subject matter of driving rain (suggested by stick-figures who struggle to hold their wayward umbrellas; the outline of an umbrella turned upside down by the wind, discarded on the street, and now resembling a cobweb; the greyish vertical wash of precipitation on the cold sidewalk) reminded me of another work on display in Brussels: Broadway in Rain (1965). The curation of the show constantly throws up these surprising comparisons of form and content, as though Neel’s works are quietly whispering to one another. Both paintings are seen from elevated vantage points. “I really live out my front room windows”, Neel reflected: “It’s like having a street in your living room… Since I’ve always been claustrophobic, it is a great escape for me not to feel shut up in a room.” Despite, or perhaps because of, the claustrophobia she felt in the city, Neel is nevertheless recognised as one of the great street painters of New York. The exhibition offers a far less established view: Mitchell the diarist of provincial America.

Many of the paintings here represent the simpler pleasures of the country, such as the one-story red shingle cottage in Spring Lake, New Jersey, where the family would relax far from the hubbub of Manhattan. “New York is a constant input of the crush of people and machines and noise and distraction”, Hartley Neel noted in a recent interview, and so “in the country, she was able to relax, take more of her thoughts on spirit and on nature… It was a place to escape to, peaceful and quiet, a refuge from the ‘sturm and drang’ of daily life.” Neel’s subject was always the ‘sturm and drang’ (storm and stress) of everyday life, even when she tried to escape it. The pictures in this show remind me to keep looking at the mundane things – my dinner, my window looking out onto the street, the dead flowers I’ve forgotten to throw away – because they are often far more profound than we give them credit for. Sometimes you just have to arc your neck to see it.