Feature: THE BIG PICTURE - Exhibition - Alice Neel: Painted Truths at The Whitechapel Gallery, E1

Published: 15 July 2010

ALICE Neel (1900–1984) called herself a “collector of souls”. She painted friends, family and neighbours in the Manhattan district of Spanish Harlem, delving into their personalities with rare frankness. 

Visitors to the Whitechapel Gallery can now experience this art for themselves at the first major retrospective her work. 

Beset by a turbulent personal life that included a year of hospitalisation following a nervous breakdown and the destruction in 1934 of more than 250 paintings and drawings, she did not gain widespread recognition until her later years. 

At a time when New York was witnessing the birth of Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and Pop Art, Neel pursued the less fashion­able discipline of painting people  and was a key force in reviving portraiture. She became a figure-head for the feminist movement and is now much admired by a generation of younger artists including Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas, Chris Ofili, and Elizabeth Peyton.

Shown for the first time in Europe are 60 major works spanning seven decades of Neel’s career. 

They include a portrait of Andy Warhol, who was famously sensitive about his ordinary looks and bad skin, which reveals the scars of his 1968 gunshot wounds. The exhibition is divided into sections according to Neel’s thematic preoccupations: allegory, the essential portrait, the psychological portrait, portraits from memory, cityscapes, nudes, parents and children, the detached gaze and old age. 

In addition, two archival films are on show: an eight-minute silent film by Neel’s son Hartley, documenting the artist painting her daughter-in-law Ginny, and Michel Auder’s film showing Neel painting. 

• Tickets £8.50/£6.50 concs, telephone bookings 0844 412 4309 (fee £1 per ticket), Alice Neel: Painted Truths is at The Whitechapel Gallery, 82 Whitechapel High Street, E1, July 8-September 17. Tuesday-Sunday 11am-6pm, Thursdays 11am-9pm.  
020 7522 7888, info@whitechapelgallery.org, whitechapelgallery.org