Freedom’s just another name for nothing left to lose: when Janis Joplin made this assertion famous, it was novel, perhaps, to the general population, but not to artists. The need to live an unencumbered life—to embrace a genuinely bohemian and precarious existence—was, for artists of the twentieth century, a priori: the starting point without which great work was considered impossible.
This Weltanschauung was formed in reaction to the fierce conventionality and constraint of the Victorian era; to the rise of the stolid middle classes and their opposite, the promulgation of Marxist ideals. It was enriched and emboldened by an insistence on artistic rigor—whether from the mid–nineteenth-century devotees of art for art’s sake or from their modernist descendants—that saw an artist’s vocation as pure and absolute, not unlike a religious calling. (As recently as 1990 when I was enrolled in an MFA program for fiction, we were inculcated with the familiar saw that an aspiring artist should allow in his or her life nothing that needed to be fed, watered, or walked. We joked about whether a plant was allowable.)
To choose the path of art may not have required a necessary vow of poverty; but it was widely understood that freedom frequently entailed financial want, and that it was a deliberate rejection of bourgeois tenets. As the French writer André Siegfried suggested, “Un bourgeois c’est quelqu’un qui a des reserves”—a bourgeois is someone who has reserves. A bohemian, in logical contrast, is someone who does not.
If, a hundred years ago as today, it was tough to be an artist, it was considerably more so for those without family resources, and harder still for women in that category. In literature, the twentieth century is marked by impoverished women who, free though they may have been in an artistic sense, were hampered in their work by the constant struggle to survive. From the British writer Jean Rhys or the Australian Christina Stead (both roughly contemporary with Alice Neel; and the latter, like Neel, affiliated with communism) to, more recently, Penelope Fitzgerald, there is no shortage of women who “did without” in order to pursue their art: did without fame, to be sure, but sometimes without heat, or food, or a bed to sleep in. Isolation and discomfiture were part of the job. As Jean Rhys recalled in her autobiography, “I would never be part of anything. I would never really belong anywhere . . . I am a stranger and I always will be, and after all I didn’t really care.” These women had difficult lives and suffered greatly; like Neel, they found refuge and, belatedly, triumph in their work.
WHEN ALICE NEEL was born, with the century, in January 1900, in a small Pennsylvania town, ideas about bohemianism were already widespread. From early on, she chafed at the parameters of her parents’ modest and conventional existence. In wanting to become an artist, she sought not only to follow the striver’s time-honored passage from the provinces to the big city, but to shake off what her biographer Phoebe Hoban termed her home’s “very puritanical atmosphere.”# In 1921, after working for several years, she enrolled at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, where the influential realist painter Robert Henri had taught. While she was there, he published his important book The Art Spirit (1923), in which he writes, tellingly, “Many things that come into the world are not looked into. The individual says ‘My crowd doesn’t run that way.’ I say, don’t run with crowds.” Neel herself seems to have absorbed this proposition, adding, “You know what it takes to be an artist? Hypersensitivity and the will of the devil. To never give up.”
JUST A FEW years later, however, having fallen in love with and married her fellow student, the Cuban artist Carlos Enríquez, Neel would confront the particular challenge faced by women artists: maternity. The birth of her daughter Santillana in Havana in December 1926 not only complicated Neel’s ability to make art, but destabilized her relationship with Enríquez. Unhappy in Cuba, Neel returned to the United States with Santillana, first to her parents’ in Colwyn, Pennsylvania, and then to New York, with Enríquez. During this period, Neel painted a number of watercolors that, as Hoban observes, “express what seems to have been her own ‘quiet desperation.’ ” Broke, ambitious, hungry, and perhaps practically hapless in the bargain, the couple struggled to care for their daughter, to work, and to eat. As if the Fates determined that the balance of motherhood and art was simply impossible, the small family was dealt a fatal blow: Santillana contracted and succumbed to diphtheria—tragically, shortly before the advent of the first vaccine—just before her first birthday.
Neel and Enríquez’s grief-stricken response was to conceive again. Their second daughter, Isabella Lillian Enríquez, called Isabetta, was born in November 1928. Within eighteen months (in May 1930), Enríquez returned to his family in Havana with Isabetta, leaving Neel behind. The couple did not reunite; and Neel would see her second daughter only a few more times in her life. Isabetta would eventually commit suicide, in middle age. Neel said, much later, “You see, I had always had this awful dichotomy. I loved Isabetta, of course I did. But I wanted to paint.”
The result of Neel’s “dichotomy” was a serious nervous breakdown, from which she recovered only a year and a half later. She attempted suicide more than once. In one of her poems of this period, she wrote: “Oh, I was full of theories / Of grand experiments / To live a normal woman’s life / To have children—to be the painting and the painter . . . / I’ve lost my child my love my life and all the god damn / business / That makes life worth living.”
Whether or not she is inclined to motherhood, any woman artist can identify with the acute paradox of wanting “to be the painting and the painter.” If the artist is, as Jean Rhys put it, “a stranger,” the outsider whose very alienation enables her to see, to record life, this position is utterly at odds with an “ordinary woman’s” desire to live. This complication—having to choose whether to see or to be—is not unique to women artists, but is experienced differently by women precisely with regard to motherhood.
There is no more fully embodied role. When you’re a mother, particularly of an infant or small child, you are neither dispensable nor replaceable. Nor do you want to be. But if you are, in the true twentieth century sense, an artist—if you are committed, as Neel was, with the will of the devil, with the pure commitment of a religious vocation—then you may be called upon to renounce your child. It’s a perspective that goes against our accepted cultural beliefs—even now, when so little remains untouchable, motherhood is sacred—and yet the bohemian sets herself, precisely, against accepted belief. She doesn’t run with crowds. The cost of this conflict was, in Neel’s case, a significant piece of her sanity.
Once recovered, Neel returned to New York and joined the artistic community in Greenwich Village. There, she was part of the vital artists’ community; she started showing her work in various exhibitions. Her portraits of Joe Gould and Christopher Lazar date from that period. She made friends both artistic and political and met John Rothschild, a wealthy admirer and sometime lover whose support would be crucial to Neel over many years. She joined the Communist Party in 1935; and signed on first with the Public Works of Art Project (in 1933) and the WPA’s Federal Art Project (in 1935).
Throughout the Depression and the run-up to the Second World War, Neel recorded images of human struggle that are both intimate and painful: Untitled (Bowery) (1936); Men from Bleeker Street [sic] (1933); Spanish Mother and Child (1942); and Mother with Children (1943). Such unflinching but occasionally whimsical works—cartoons, almost—recall Goya’s etchings: brutal, almost satirical, profoundly human in their portrayals of suffering. Her subjects in these images are precisely what Henri would have said was “not looked into”: Neel saw it as her role to look. She might herself have uttered the words attributed to the German artist and activist Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945), some of whose drawings resemble Neel’s (both women painted haunting images of wasting children entitled Poverty): “It is my duty to voice the suffering of men, the never-ending sufferings heaped mountain-high.”
But Neel’s own sufferings, too, were never-ending. If the Harvard-educated Rothschild served as Neel’s sugar daddy, her then-boyfriend was a considerably less salubrious—and more appropriately bohemian—figure: Kenneth Doolittle was a sailor and a veteran of the Spanish Civil War who shared Neel’s political views; but he was also a drug addict with a propensity for jealousy. In December 1934, he destroyed around sixty of Neel’s paintings and two hundred of her drawings and watercolors in their Greenwich Village apartment. As Jeremy Lewison explains, their absence gives us a very different sense of Neel’s early work than we might otherwise have. Put in other terms, having sacrificed her children for her art, she was then forced to lose her art as well.
José Santiago Negrón was a handsome musician ten years Neel’s junior—beautifully, even lushly, depicted in his dressing gown in José (1936). With him, she moved from the Village (and its artists) to relative isolation in Spanish Harlem; and by him, she became pregnant again, and again. In 1937, she had a stillbirth; and in 1939, her son Richard was born. (John Rothschild had offered her the money for an abortion, but according to Hoban she “used the money to buy a phonograph instead.” As with her previous relationship, Negrón was not keen on fatherhood, and Neel swiftly found herself alone with an infant.
Sam Brody, a Communist and film critic, entered Neel’s life soon thereafter, and their son Hartley was born in 1941. Brody’s relationship with his young stepson Richard was violent and difficult. Neel’s haunting painting Alice and Richard (1943) reveals her angst; but she did not leave Brody, and the two stayed together until the mid-1950s, when he left her. In the wake of their separation, Neel drew Self Portrait (Skull) (1958), a truly shocking vision that harkens back to the grief she expressed after losing her daughters.
Neel fared much better, mercifully, with her two sons, and raised them lovingly and with considerable ingenuity, ensuring their private education even while the household was sometimes on welfare. For many years during which Abstract Expressionism held sway, Neel’s work was resolutely unfashionable, and her paintings found no outlets. The turning point came in the mid-sixties, after which she began to show again and finally garnered the acclaim that attends her reputation today. Fortunately for us, she never gave up, and apparently never doubted the urgency and merit of her artistic endeavor. Footage from an interview in the early seventies shows Neel’s apartment stacked with unsold canvases, a veritable trove of portraits piled up in her narrow hallway.
During that long period in the wilderness, while the art world was obsessed with abstraction—with rendering the concrete world abstract—Neel’s journey was in the opposite direction: her later portraits are about making the abstract concrete. By this I mean that Neel’s project was to do with paint and ink what novelists attempt with words: to illuminate the interiority of individuals, to put their souls on paper. As Diana Loecher wrote in a review of one of Neel’s shows in the Christian Science Monitor in 1973, “In an entirely contemporary manner she gives universal significance to the individual and realizes the portraitist’s traditional ideal of the portrait as a mirror of the mind.” Or again, Elizabeth Hess, in the Village Voice, of a posthumous show of Neel’s portraits of children: “Her canvases are a psychoanalytic battle between artist and subject (or patient and therapist) demonstrating that Neel not only knew many of her subjects, but was emotionally entangled with them.”
A substantial proportion of Neel’s work was devoted to her family. In a letter from the mid-fifties to her close friend, the Communist writer Phillip Bonosky, she wrote, “At first one resists children, tries to keep on with one’s life, etc, however as time goes on more and more one becomes that normal thing—‘a parent’ and relates with it . . . I’m working like mad painting Richard Neel and Hartley Neel. I’ve done one painting of Neel—strong I think—I’m never sure.”
Her drawings and paintings of her sons are remarkable, and differently so in different moments. From the fragile, bulb-headed, moon-eyed children of the early sketches (Richard, 1943; Hartley, 1943, Richard and Hartley, c. 1943) to the nuanced, stylized portrayals of Richard as a young adult, Neel is unafraid of their vulnerability and, at the same time, of their privacy. In the two ink portraits of Richard from the late fifties, he looks away from his mother, sidelong, as if willing himself out of the frame: in the first, his face is open, as if he’s listening to someone, engaged; in the second, his hand raised behind his head, his expression is jaded and sardonic, almost disgusted, and the crease in his cheek has the aspect of a vicious scar.
But it’s in her numerous and varied depictions of her daughter-in-law Ginny that Neel most clearly reveals her analyst’s fierce probing: in the extraordinary acid-yellow and blue painting Hartley and Ginny (1970), Ginny with her black hair and piercing green gaze glowers at Neel, her arm draped possessively around a pensive Hartley (whose eyes are averted). Ginny appears both hostile and triumphant; but Neel has painted her dangling hand upon Hartley’s shirt as limp, almost dead-looking, as if to suggest that Ginny’s power is less absolute than Ginny believes. The complex relations of a mother and her daughter-in-law are present in the painting for all to see, even though Neel herself isn’t there.
We see a different woman in Ginny (1975), in which she now appears almost a supplicant, girlish and expectant in her blue and green running gear, perched upon a slight stool, tanned, delicate, and openmouthed, her long neck vulnerable. And again, a radically other incarnation just two years later, in the colored ink drawing Ginny (1977), in which she reclines, exhausted, upon cushions, her face haggard, her lips a red gash, and her forehead a prominent dome, a curiously circled void. She is posed so that her crotch is front and center, behind it the virulent red blot of her T-shirt; her spidery hand off to the side, her bony feet, all convey a profound exhaustion that seems somehow maternal. The phrase that comes to mind is, “That really took it out of me”—in all its possible implications.
In this last image, Ginny seems somehow both mother and artist/intellectual, with the white-space emphasis like light upon her brain, the inked attention to her vagina, and the bloody sea of red between them. She is, it’s true, immobile, for the moment épuisée; but you’d be mistaken to think she is spent. Her shadowed eyes are wary, and alert; and that spidery hand could spring at any moment. It is, again, a portrayal of complex energy and emotion, distinct and utterly memorable.
IN HERSELF, IN spite of the artistic “theories” of her youth, and in spite of her terrible losses and suffering, Neel was eventually able to reconcile the great dichotomy of the woman artist, to bring together her capacity to see and her capacity to live, to be the painter and the painting at once. Her beloved children, paradoxically, along with their spouses and children, enabled that resolution. As subjects, they were the source of some of her finest paintings, and the complex emotions Neel evokes in her art are nothing less than the contradictions of life itself.
For other artists, as for this novelist, she is a powerful inspiration, in the resilience and commitment of her life and in the wisdom and frankness of her painting. She did many things wrong—she suffered and caused suffering—but she did nothing for the wrong reasons. Passionately and unwaveringly committed to her art from the earliest days, she learned also to balance that commitment with the passions that matter for life—not for material things, nor for worldly success (though she was glad to have it when finally it came), but for the people that she loved, and loved with all their flaws.
As she wrote in the New York Times in 1976, “As for people who want flattering paintings of themselves, even if I wanted to do them, I wouldn’t know what flattery is. To me, as Keats said, beauty is truth, truth beauty. Altered noses always look much worse. I paint to try to reveal the struggle, tragedy and joy of life.”
# Phoebe Hoban, Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010).