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Artist Alice Neel
Listen to Susan Stamberg's report on Morning Edition.
February 16, 2001 -- Some people say that it takes years to make someone an overnight success. The life of portrait artist Alice Neel supports this idea.
Deemed "the quintessential Bohemian" by the New York Times, Neel spent most of her 84 years painting portraits. But nobody paid much attention to her until the last decades of her life. Now, 17 years after Neel's death, a full-scale retrospective of her work opens at the Philadelphia Museum of Art the weekend of February 16-18. NPR's Susan Stamberg, who interviewed Neel in 1979, revisited the work of the artist and found her to "be talented, and a bit outrageous."
Neel's subjects ranged from New York glitterati to door-to-door salesmen. She didn't start to grab the attention of the art world until the 1960s, when she herself was in her sixties. At that point, she started to paint other people in the art world -- artists, dealers, patrons. The burgeoning women's movement celebrated her. She painted feminist Kate Millett for the cover of Time magazine. She appeared on Johnny Carson. She was finally happy and living comfortably after years of bad relationships, a lost child, emotional breakdowns and suicide attempts.
It was time to do something she had never felt like doing before -- paint herself. At the age of 80, she did a nude self portrait. Neel commented that "the reason I did it was because my own face bores me. I can't bear that little Anglo-Saxon face. But with the whole body, there are strange things going on -- the flesh is falling off the bones...I always had bad feet -- I have a prehensile big toe and there's a leg that as a leg is frightful, but as a work of art, it's gorgeous."
Neel is naked in the painting, save for a pair of eyeglasses, which was her way of saying "look, I'm someonebody who looks. That's who I am. I'm somebody who inspects, I'm somebody who scrutinizes." She also holds a paintbrush in one hand and a rag in the other. Ann Temkin, the curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, says it's a perfect Neel gesture. "I don't think there's any other self portrait of artists in which they show their rag, which of course is admitting their mistakes, admitting they make messes."
Check out the Alice Neel retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art --
www.philamuseum.org
Learn more about Alice Neel at www.aliceneel.com
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