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I don't give a damn. I was women's lib before there was women's lib. -Alice Neel
Alice Neel appeared to burst on the scene in the 1970s with her riveting portraits of public figures like a bare-chested and bandaged Andy Warhol after he had been shot by Valerie Solanis (1970), a towering portrait of a roundly-breasted Bella Abzug (1975), and later, New York City's then-mayor Ed Koch (1981). Despite being a regular in New York City's art world in the 1930s, it wasn't until the 1970s that Neel began to gain mainstream visibility when her colorful life's story, ebullient personality, and passion about showing her work began to attract the media's attention. By this point she was in her seventies, and her grandmotherly but ribald persona and outlandish portraits had become the subject of frequent feature stories in mainstream newspapers and magazines including Newsweek and People. Her irreverent sense of humor even helped land her two guest appearances on the Johnny Carson Show.
Critics and scholars lamented this inordinant focus on Neel's personality and life story to the exclusion of sustained attention to the quality of her work and the importance of her contributions to twentieth-century art, a charge that has lessened in recent years as recognition of her work has grown.1 In addition to her visibility in 1970s' mainstream culture, Neel was quite successful professionally during this time, exhibiting widely in galleries and small museums around the country and lecturing tirelessly at college campuses. Among other awards and honors, in 1976 Neel was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1979 she was invited to the White House by President Jimmy Carter to receive the National Women's Caucus for Art Award.
Although the increased attention paid to Neel and her work in the 1970s is attributed commonly to the rise of Second Wave feminism, an association made explicit through Neel's outspoken activism in support of women's rights, in fact Neel had an ambivalent and rather complex relationship to feminism that is evident in her portraits of leftist women artists, intellectuals, and writers and in the other portraits of women she painted and drew from the 1930s to the 1980s.
Neel portrayed some of the most interesting and compelling...