by Anne Gabriel
For some reason, David Zwirner Gallery is having an Alice Neel show. A friend of mine was slated to write a review of it for a major Los Angeles cultural publication and, at the last minute, after a lot of frightening feedback from her colleagues, she chickened out.
The issue was apparently that the review was going to be negative. And writing a negative review of Alice Neel is something that apparently is just not done. Alice Neel was a pioneering female artist who took an interest both passionate and compassionate in those that were not like her—the marginalized the dispossessed. But so did lots of good artists.
Picture this: An Alice Neel painting. Not a famous one. Posted by an unknown on Tumblr or Instagram, uncredited and without her bio or the year. Picture someone commenting on it: “breathtaking”. It goes viral. Because everyone can just see how beautiful it is.
You can’t picture it. That would never happen, because everyone knows Alice Neel paintings are not that good. They look like the work of Sunday painters who’ve seen a Monet or two but haven’t learned to paint yet have produced the world over for at least a hundred years. Alice Neel was good. It is good that she made art, that she was eventually recognized by fellow women after years of laboring in obscurity, it is good that a woman got to be an important artist for painting unglamorous people in an unglamorous way. That is a wonderful story on paper, not so much on canvas.
She showed a certain kind of person could paint a certain kind of other person—but unlike, say, Diane Arbus, she didn’t show that they could be dramatic, interesting, mysterious or insightful. She just showed that you could do it—but so had a great many artists since the 1930s, when she began working with the Works Progress Administration.
I suspect, in 2024, Alice Neel paintings represent a certain kind of “realness” injected into upper-class homes otherwise curated in pastels and WASPy textures. What if—next to this cutting-board whose each horizontal laminated layer was carefully smoothed by inscrutably Japanese processes—we had just a hideous pile of crap? But the colors match. They are tasteful: whites, grays, a few bursts of color like the bowtie of a quirky Nantucket curator looking for vintage furniture in a few nauseated greens to remind the viewer of a life stifled by the thin paper of ornamental lamps. Not a life worth living, but a life.
But she unstintingly puts her body on display? So does everyone in a naked picture. Older women had been photographed naked by the time she made her famous autonude. But why did she paint it? Because the photograph might’ve contained information or surprise but not do the more important thing: the painting reminds us that Alice Neel is willing to paint.
Like so much of what we inherited from last century, it would appear Alice Neel is too load-bearing to the last century’s sense of itself to forget. No mainstream publication will ever raise a hand against her. But I will not believe she is good by any standard until I see at least one person willingly hanging a poster-sized Alice Neel print in their living room, and looking at that bullshit every day of their life.
Photo: Allen Ginsberg by Alice Neel, David Zwirner