WASHINGTON, DC.-“Alice Neel’s remarkable portraits reveal her ability to capture the essence of her subjects as well as her growth as an artist,” said NMWA Director Judy L. Larson. “The women’s museum is honored to host this glimpse into Neel’s life and her long, successful career.”

A self-proclaimed “collector of souls,” Neel is known for her bold, truthful portraits. Despite the art world’s infatuation with abstraction in the 1940s and 50s, Neel refused to adjust her painting style, persisting instead in painting raw images of real people. Neel sustained an interest in women throughout her career, selecting her subjects based on outward attributes that revealed inner selves. Based upon Neel’s interpretation not flattery, these images remain unfailingly, and often disconcertingly, honest.

Alice Neel’s Women examines these portraits as a central facet of Neel’s body of work that chronicles the evolution of American social mores as well as Neel’s personal and artistic growth. These paintings and drawings do not simply record the wide circle of intriguing women that Neel befriended such as Florence Lasser, a public relations specialist for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and ground-breaking feminist art historians Ann Sutherland Harris and Mary D. Garrard, but represent the varied types of roles that women, including Neel herself, embodied and performed.

About the Artist - Born January 28, 1900 and raised in suburban Philadelphia, Alice Neel was a free spirit who chose to turn her back on middle-class society by becoming a professional artist, an ardent political activist, and a resident of poor, urban neighborhoods for much of her life. Although her oeuvre included landscapes, urban vistas, and still lifes, portraiture anchored her art.

Neel studied art at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art) from 1921 to 1925. She moved to New York in 1931 after suffering a nervous breakdown when her first husband, a Cuban artist, left with their only surviving child. Neel’s existence thereafter was difficult, but she remained undeterred by the chaos in her personal life, assuming the responsibilities of single motherhood when her two sons, Richard and Hartley, were born in 1939 and 1942. Most important, she never stopped painting, even when her support from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) ceased in 1943.

Because she did not adjust her painting style to prevailing art world fashions, Neel’s work received little attention from 1940 to the 1960s. During the last two decades of her life, she finally achieved recognition through a 1970 exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, followed by a 1974 retrospective at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art (no catalogue), and the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Neel centenary exhibition in 2000.

Neel's unconventional life parallels the approach she took toward portraiture. It is hard to imagine any other painter creating such confrontational nudes or such a startling self-portrait (1980), wearing nothing but her eyeglasses, at the age of 81. Neel does not excuse herself from the same honest light in which she portrayed others. Her sagging breasts, ample thighs, and plump stomach present the viewer with a tired body lacking the eroticism that charges most nude portraits. Without apology, she presents herself as a woman who takes pride in her role as an artist and in her inherently lively character. Alice Neel died on October 13, 1984.

Alice Neel’s Women is sponsored by Altria Group, Inc., Institute of Museum and Library Services and the members of NMWA. A color catalogue, Alice Neel: Women by curator Carolyn Carr, accompanies the exhibition. Published by Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., this 164-page hard cover edition retails for $35.