ABSTRACT 
 
 
 

Title of Thesis:         VERY ANXIOUS PEOPLE: ALICE NEEL’S LATE 
PORTRAITS  

 
         Maura Callahan, Master of Arts, 2022  

 
 
Thesis directed by:  Professor Joshua Shannon  

        Department of Art History and Archaeology 
 

 

In the mid- to late 1960s, as her previously underrecognized work as a painter started to 

secure visibility in the art world, the American portraitist Alice Neel (1900-1984) began to 

minimize her subjects’ physical environments, often leaving the surrounding area a blank white 

field. She instead concentrated her paint within the figure, the boundaries of which became 

emphasized by a vivid blue outline. This attention to the figure and its borders reveals a critical 

nuancing of the humanist ideals her paintings purportedly defended. Rather than merely 

affirming the autonomy of the human subject, Neel's late portraits suggest an anxiety toward the 

coherence of selfhood and its sheltering within the body. This essay considers a small selection 

of these paintings, created between 1965 and 1982, alongside the work of preceding and 

contemporary artists who used portraiture to work through Western culture’s shifting 

conceptions of the human subject to different ends. These studies ultimately explore the 

possibilities and limitations of portraiture in revealing and validating the subject, and how these 

challenges were negotiated by Neel during the culturally transformative decades which coincided 

with her late career. 





 

 

 

 

 

  
  
 
 

 
VERY ANXIOUS PEOPLE: ALICE NEEL’S LATE PORTRAITS 

 
 

by  
  

Maura Callahan 
 
  
  
  
  
  

Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the  
University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment  

of the requirements of the degree of  
Master of Arts 

2022 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 

Advisory Committee: 
 
Professor Joshua Shannon, Chair 
Professor Tess Korobkin 
Professor Jordana Moore Saggese 

  



 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 

 

 

 

© 2022 

Maura Callahan 

  



 

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For Taha. 



 

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Table of Contents  
 

Dedication………………………………………………………………………............................ii 

Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………………………iii 

List of Figures……………………………………………………………………….……………iv 

Disclaimer………………………………………………………………………………………....v 

Introduction………………………………………………………………………….…………….1 

Chapter 1: The Underdetermined Subject…...…………………………...………………………..8 

Chapter 2: Bursting at the Seams………………………………………………...........................15 

Chapter 3: The Pains of Posing…..................................................................................................24 

Chapter 4: Under the Surface………………………………………………………...…………..31  

Conclusion ……..………………………………………………………………………………..36 

Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………....…..40 

  



 

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List of Figures 

 

Figure 1.  Alice Neel, Black Draftee (James Hunter), 1965 

Figure 2.   Barkley Hendricks, Steve, 1976 

Figure 3.   Alice Neel, Pregnant Woman, 1971 

Figure 4.   Édouard Vuillard, Interior, Mother and Sister of the Artist, 1893 

Figure 5.   Alice Neel, Georgie’s Foyer (Anxiety), 1967 

Figure 6.   Alice Neel, Ginny in Striped Shirt, 1969 

Figure 7.  Alice Neel, Carmen and Judy, 1972 

Figure 8.   Andy Warhol, Screen Test: Edie Sedgwick, still, 1965 

Figure 9.   Alice Neel, Andy Warhol, 1970 

Figure 10.  Alice Neel, Annie Sprinkle, 1982 

Figure 11.  Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #54, 1980 

 

  



 

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DISCLAIMER 
 

The thesis or dissertation document that follows has had referenced material removed in 
respect for the owner's copyright. A complete version of this document, which includes said 
referenced material, resides in the University of Maryland, College Park's library collection. 



 

 1 

Introduction 

“The greatest torture is feeling and then the self… the self is the greater torture,” Alice 

Neel said in 1981, three years before her death. “We have it like an albatross around our neck.”1 

In her characteristically candid interviews and other recorded conversations, Neel frequently 

mused over the toils of being alive in twentieth-century America, but few statements come so 

near to reflecting the complexity of the worldview which underlies her paintings. Over the 

course of her nearly seventy-year career as a painter, Neel worked tirelessly to replicate that 

great weight of selfhood in her portraits of family members, neighbors, fellow creatives, 

activists, and acquaintances from random encounters. Many have commented on the tension and 

anxiety that surfaces in these subjects as they appear in Neel’s canvases. As Linda Nochlin, a 

one-time sitter for Neel, noted, “nobody is ever quite relaxed in a Neel portrait, no matter how 

suggestive of relaxation the pose.”2 Neel described herself as a psychological painter who was 

most interested in painting individuals afflicted by life’s tribulations.3 “I think that we are a very 

anxious people,” she observed in 1978. “There’s a terrible pressure on people, and it gets worse I 

think all the time. The pressures multiply.”4 By this point, Neel had seen and experienced much 

as an underrecognized artist, a single mother, and an observer and outspoken critic of injustice. 

Over the course of her eighty-four years, she observed the unfolding of several wars, the 

anxieties that followed the detonation of the first atomic bomb, and the dizzying effects of a 

 
1 Alice Neel, directed by Andrew Neel (New York: SeeThink Films, 2007), 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZObd29Jv8ks. 
2 Linda Nochlin, “Some Women Realists: Part 2,” Arts Magazine 48, no. 8, May 1974, reprinted in Women Artists: 
The Linda Nochlin Reader, ed. Maura Reilly (New York, New York: Thames & Hudson, 2015), 87. 
3 Alice Neel: They Are Their Own Gifts, directed by Margaret Murphy and Lucille Rhodes (New York: Rhodes-
Murphy Venture, 1978), https://youtu.be/MQtSDLOg05c. 
4 Alice Neel, “Inside New York’s Art World,” interview by Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, Barbaralee 
Diamonstein-Spielvogel Video Archive at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke 
University, 1978, video, 57:47, https://youtu.be/aLG2oNPQ5PA. 



 

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rapidly changing society. Throughout her life, she was acutely aware of the precarity of selfhood 

in a modern world, and it was painting that offered a way to reckon with those conditions. 

Well before Neel began painting seriously in the 1920s, faith in the portrait as a credible 

reflection of the individual had already been shaken by the introduction of photography and the 

ensuing responses from the European avant-garde. The formal experiments of painters like 

Manet and Cézanne reflected the cultural, philosophical, and economic shifts toward 

undermining traditional notions of individuated subjectivity, subsuming their sitters in the 

materiality of the paint or fusing them with their environment. By the mid-twentieth century, 

most painting practices championed in the United States had abandoned the human figure 

altogether, making Neel an outlier in a discipline dominated by abstract expressionism. But when 

Neel’s work finally began to surface in the art world in the 1960s, American artists such as Andy 

Warhol, Philip Pearlstein, and Alex Katz were already reviving portraiture. This resurgence, 

however, was predicated on the disruption of portraiture’s theoretical foundations: In producing 

depersonalized, dispassionate portraits, these artists betrayed the tradition of the portrait as a 

window into the private world of the individual. This critical turn arguably culminated in the 

artists of the Pictures Generation and in particular the photographic self-portraits of Cindy 

Sherman, who positioned the self as nothing more than a series of performances.  

Neel’s late career thus coincided with portraiture’s simultaneous reappearance and, 

ironically, an increasing doubt toward the validity of the humanist attitudes which had 

historically grounded the Western practice of painting the human face. The model of the 

autonomous human being, by the final years of Neel’s life, had become the subject of critique 

through the subversive appropriation of the portrait. The unlikely visibility of Neel’s work was 

made possible during this time by an interest, fueled by the growing feminist and civil rights 



 

 3 

movements, in her reputation as a bold woman artist and in her attention toward subjects from 

minoritized communities and the lower classes. But as a result of the antihumanist shifts 

undergirding the artwork of the contemporaneous avant-garde, Neel’s work has been read as a 

revitalization of the psychological portrait at a time when such work had been determined 

anachronistic. Neel herself was uncomfortable with being called a portraitist and preferred to 

describe her paintings as “pictures of people.” Like other artists of the twentieth century, she 

explained, she had been conditioned to regard portraiture as a lower, outmoded art form.5 

Nonetheless, the unfashionability of “portraiture” was not meaningful enough to deter her from 

painting human figures, nor to disavow humanism, which she claimed to adapt to her own sense 

of “anarchic humanism.”6  

Much has been said and written about the nature of Neel’s humanism and its impact on 

her portraits. For the landmark Neel retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2021, 

curators Kelly Baum and Randall Griffey underscored the political inflections of Neel’s position 

as a “radical humanist,” positing that through her empathetic, intersectional care toward the 

human subject, the artist defended the humanity of people living in an inhumane world.7 This 

work builds upon that of many others invested in the social orientation of Neel’s portraits. 

Pamela Allara’s detailed 1998 book examines how Neel’s portraits reflected the shifting culture 

of the twentieth century and suggests that Neel revived psychological portraiture “by reinvesting 

 
5 Neel, “Inside New York’s Art World.” 
6 Alice Neel, interview by Werner and Yetta Groshans, ca. 1980, Werner and Yetta Groshans papers, 1928-1997, 
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, quoted in Alice Neel: People Come First, ed. Kelly Baum and 
Randall Griffey (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2021), 13. 
7 “Neel meant not only to affirm the fundamental dignity and legitimacy of people in the face of an unjust world but 
also to recognize their agency and autonomy in the face of numerous threats, from the forces of self-interest and 
consumerism to those of technology, racism, sexism, and, above all, capitalism.” See Baum and Griffey, Alice Neel: 
People Come First, 16. 



 

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it with its social and political aspects.”8 In connecting the artist’s work to a larger cultural 

backdrop, Allara’s study, while not eschewing Neel’s life story, critically offset the biographical 

focus of much of the preceding writing on Neel. This tendency was symptomatic of the well-

known pattern in which women’s artistic production is understood to reflect little more than their 

personal lives, as opposed to the more expansive and ostensibly more significant implications 

attributed to the work of male artists. Such a misogynist preoccupation with Neel’s biography is 

painfully evident in Henry Hope’s 1979 article, in which he insisted that the psychological 

intensity of Neel’s work was “forged out of Neel’s battered life, her hopes and frustrations, her 

knowledge and fear of men.”9 The ongoing prevalence of Neel’s story in the reading of her work, 

however, can also be attributed to her own frequent practice of describing it in great detail in 

lectures and interviews, which culminated in an 1983 autobiography pieced together by Patricia 

Hills from the artist’s recorded statements and writings.10 

To whatever extent the fascination with Neel’s life and commentary has compelled 

interpretations of her paintings, authors have been apt, like Hope, to identify a psychologically 

penetrative power in her portraits. In 1975, at the height of the artist’s fame, Cindy Nemser 

praised Neel’s ability to “move through the barriers of class and position in order to reveal the 

essential traits which each sitter adds to the ongoing human comedy.”11 Twenty-five years later, 

for an exhibition celebrating the centennial of Neel’s birth, curator Ann Temkin echoed Nemser 

in her claim that the artist’s greatest strength was her capacity to “excavate the character beneath 

 
8 Pamela Allara, Pictures of People: Alice Neel's American Portrait Gallery (Hanover, New Hampshire: University 
Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1998), 14. 
9 Henry R. Hope, “Alice Neel: Portraits of an Era,” Art Journal 38, no. 4 (1979): 275. 
10 See Alice Neel, “Alice by Alice” in Alice Neel, ed. Patricia Hills (New York, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.: 
1983), 11-186. 
11 Cindy Nemser, “Alice Neel—Teller of Truth,” in Alice Neel: The Woman and Her Work (Athens: Georgia 
Museum of Art, University of Georgia, 1975), 7. 



 

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the surface” and “evoke the essence of another personality.”12 Such assertions have stopped short 

of questioning what exactly that hidden essence is and to what extent its legitimacy is actually 

affirmed by Neel’s paintings. Other studies have revealed nuances in Neel’s means of 

engagement with the human subject and with painting, such as a number of essays analyzing her 

previously underrecognized formal strategies, Jeremy Lewison’s essay on the role of the 

grotesque in Neel’s portraits as a means of working through suffering, and Hilton Als’s moving 

reflections on her portraits of Black and Brown subjects from her five decades spent in Upper 

Manhattan.13 But rarely are the core assumptions behind Neel’s humanism—the possibility for 

painting to truly endow a subject with “agency” or reveal their “inner life” or “essence”—

meaningfully questioned.14 I argue that the complexity of Neel’s humanism lies not simply in its 

political impetus, as has often been demonstrated, but also in the anxious ambivalence toward 

humanism’s promise of subjective autonomy and coherence that surfaces in her portraits.   

The psychological acuity of Neel’s paintings has often been read in terms of the 

emotionally resonant facial expressions and poses of her subjects, and the expressive brushwork 

used to render these features. The impulse to focus on the figure in understanding Neel’s 

paintings seems all the more justified as one studies her output during the final decades of her 

life, when many (though not all) of her backgrounds became more sparsely painted, often with 

large areas of the surface painted as a field of bright white or pale gray. During this period, the 

 
12 Ann Temkin, Alice Neel (Philadelphia, Pa.: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2000), 13, 22. 
13 For more on Neel’s formal engagements with painting, see Mira Schor, “Alice Neel as an Abstract Painter,” 
Woman’s Art Journal 27, no. 2 (2006): 12–16; Barry Walker, “Dividing Up the Canvas” in Alice Neel: Painted 
Truths, ed. Jeremy Lewison and Barry Walker (Houston, Texas: Museum of Fine Arts, 2010), 78-91; and Julia 
Bryan-Wilson, “Alice Neel’s ‘Good Abstract Qualities’” in Alice Neel: People Come First, 103-113. See also 
Jeremy Lewison, “Showing the Barbarity of Life: Alice Neel’s Grotesque” in Alice Neel: Painted Truths, 34-63; and 
Hilton Als, Alice Neel: Uptown (New York, New York: David Zwirner Books, 2017). 
14 Tim Griffin’s brief introduction to a slim catalogue of Neel’s late portraits and still lifes eloquently critiques 
cliched discussions of Neel’s ability to capture the inner life of her individual sitters, advocating instead for an 
understanding of her oeuvre as “an ever-lengthening record of contingency” that relies on an accumulation of 
subjects. See Tim Griffin, Alice Neel: Late Portraits & Still Lifes (Santa Fe, N.M.: Radius Books, 2012), 5-7. 



 

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figures themselves began to dissolve into the picture, sometimes with entire limbs left as 

unfilled, broken contours. But even in these disintegrating portraits, the figure remains the most 

articulated and central component of the composition. In other paintings which display more 

“finish,” the more fully realized environment still remains minimal, with no attempt to indicate 

the sitter’s identity or their particular world by populating the space with objects or perspectival 

space. To read Neel’s focus on the figure as mere disregard for the world around them, however, 

would be to miss the greater significance of the artist’s attention to the physical boundaries of her 

sitters. While Neel took great interest in the ways the “soul… starts and ends in your body,” I 

suggest that this concentration of paint, color, and detail on the human form in Neel’s late work 

does as much to draw a line between interiority and exteriority as it reveals the tenuousness of 

that boundary.15 In this way, Neel’s portraits are less concerned with individual identity than 

with the experience of being a person in the world.  

Neel was frequently reluctant to fully align herself with any established ideological camp. 

She was at times skeptical of both mainstream communism and, especially, feminism despite her 

lifelong concern with the burdens of capitalism and patriarchy, equally oppressive forces in her 

own life.16 This independence extended to her painting practice. Refusing to choose between the 

bourgeois individualism that had historically grounded portraiture and the newer models which 

reduced human beings to the products of social interaction and media consumption, Neel instead 

sought out a third option to underpin her work. In this thesis, I argue that this conception of the 

human being recognized an inner subjecthood which was neither separate from the body nor 

 
15 Neel, “Inside New York’s Art World.” 
16 Although she was a party member, Neel was, in her own words, “never a good Communist. I hate bureaucracy... 
The Communists said [in the 1930s]—the big Communists—when there is socialism there would be no need for art. 
I thought they were just stupid.” See Neel, “Alice by Alice,” 60-61. For more on Neel’s complicated relationship 
with feminism, see Allara, “The Women’s Wing,” in Pictures of People, 191-216; and Denise Bauer, “Alice Neel’s 
Feminist and Leftist Portraits of Women,” Feminist Studies 28, no. 2 (2002): 375–95, 
https://doi.org/10.2307/3178749. 



 

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guaranteed protection from social conditions, but was nonetheless real, even if it could never be 

fully accessed by the artist. This perspective crystallizes in portraits produced in her late career, 

which I define broadly as the last twenty years of her life, when large areas of many (though not 

all) of her canvases appeared unpainted and color converged over the figure. These portraits, in 

particular, picture the body as the shell of subjectivity while undermining its impenetrability. 

Despite the overreliance of scholars and critics on Neel’s words and biography to 

understand her work, I reject neither here, as the first paragraph of this essay can attest. After all, 

talking and reflecting played an active role in her engagements with her sitters during their 

painting sessions, and many of her subjects were important figures in her life. However, I also 

realize that the image of Neel as a traditional humanist generated by interpretations of her 

statements and life story can eclipse the complexities and difficulties of that position, the nuance 

of which emerges through her paintings more so than anything else. Quotes and (to a lesser 

extent) biographical detail are included here to complement and clarify close readings of her 

portraits, but not without a healthy dose of skepticism toward their ability to reveal all that we 

can possibly learn from her enormous artistic output. In my study of a small group of her late 

paintings, I will also look to the work of Barkley Hendricks, Édouard Vuillard, Andy Warhol, 

and Cindy Sherman to place Neel’s late work in conversation with preceding and 

contemporaneous portraiture which approaches the autonomy, construction, or dissolution of the 

self. Through these comparisons, I find that Neel did not simply reject the modernist challenge to 

the image of the autonomous subject, but attempted to return self-determination and coherence to 

the individual while emphasizing the great difficulty of sustaining oneself as such under the 

pressure of existence. 

 



 

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Chapter 1: The Underdetermined Subject 

The Ashcan painter Robert Henri, a prominent faculty member at the Philadelphia School 

of Design for Women prior to Neel’s enrollment from 1920 to 1925, argued in his influential 

book The Art Spirit that the simpler the background, the stronger the portrait: “The background is 

more air than anything else.”17 Neel at one point owned Henri’s book, and its impact on her 

approach to painting evolved over the course of her career.18 In much of her early and mid-career 

portraiture, she appeared to heed this advice and the author’s attendant warning that while best 

kept minimal, the background should be continually reworked in accordance with the 

development of the figure. Painting during the thirties, Neel tended to fill her backgrounds with 

shades of a single, usually muted color applied with visible brushstrokes to ground the subject, or 

sharp geometric abstraction to frame and echo their pose. The forties and fifties saw more lively 

brushwork in Neel’s backgrounds, which seemed to take note of abstract expressionism and 

remained undefined, though she also experimented during this period with more recognizable 

environments in interior scene portraits such as Hartley on the Rocking Horse (1943). But 

beginning in the 1960s, Neel took the minimal background to new extremes, leaving much of the 

figure’s environment unrepresented so that the subject instead emerged from a white void. As 

Jeremy Lewison points out, this development roughly coincided with the emergence of bright 

white backdrops in the influential photography of Richard Avedon.19 But while Avedon’s blank 

backgrounds, like Neel’s, centered all attention on the figure, the untouched areas of Neel’s 

 
17 Robert Henri, The Art Spirit: Notes, Articles, Fragments of Letters and Talks to Students, Bearing on the Concept 
and Technique of Picture Making, the Study of Art Generally, and on Appreciation (United Kingdom: J. B. 
Lippincott Company, 1923), 33. 
18 Neel recalled owning Henri’s book until she gave her copy to the writer Alejo Carpentier while living in Cuba 
from 1926 to 1927. See Neel, “Alice by Alice,” 21. 
19 Lewison, “Painting Crisis,” in Alice Neel: Painter of Modern Life, Ateneum Publications, Vol. 80 (Brussels: 
Mercatorfonds, 2016), 24. 



 

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canvases also suggested the incipience of the subject’s world, a sense of liminality far removed 

from the polish and instantaneousness of fashion photography.  

One particular painting from 1965 marks Neel’s shift toward leaving large areas 

surrounding the figure void of subject matter. While a few portraits painted during the early 

sixties displayed sparsely painted environments, it was the circumstances surrounding the 

making of Black Draftee (James Hunter) (fig. 1) which seemed to prompt Neel to adopt 

conspicuously unfinished figures and bare backgrounds as a part of her style. This development 

came not long after her 1962 relocation from Spanish Harlem to the Upper West Side, where she 

would live and paint until her death in 1984.20 Although she had left behind El Barrio’s Latin 

American community, her new neighborhood hosted a richly diverse population of African-

American, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Haitian, Cuban, and Jewish residents including and in 

addition to fellow artists and members of the LGBTQ community, all of whom she invited into 

her studio-living room.21 Black Draftee depicts one of these new acquaintances, a young man 

who was to be sent to Vietnam within a week of his portrait being painted. In his portrait, he 

appears on the cusp of dramatic change. Only his head (save for the ears) and the hand it rests on 

are colored with the deep browns and blues of his flesh; the rest of his body and the armchair 

beneath him are defined only by sketched black lines. Viewed from above, the sitter seems to 

sink into the chair and the chair into the otherwise blank canvas, as if the figure’s unpainted 

contours might slip away from his head, which is fixed to a single painted hand. Hunter, a 

stranger Neel met on the street, failed to appear for his second sitting, and as a result, the rest of 

the canvas was left unpainted. Why Hunter didn’t return to Neel’s apartment and what ultimately 

 
20 Neel’s new Upper West Side studio was considerably better lit than her previous base in Harlem, which would 
account for the overall brighter palette of her post-1962 paintings. See Lewison, Alice Neel: Painter of Modern Life, 
151. 
21 Ibid. 



 

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happened to him is unknown, although he is thought to have survived the war as his name does 

not appear on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.22 But rather than scrap the 

painting, Neel decided it was complete as it was and signed the back, and even went on to 

include it in her 1974 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art.23 

Henri’s call for an economic mode of representation extended not only to the subject’s 

background. In The Art Spirit, Henri wrote that in portraiture, “completion does not depend on 

material representation. The work is done when that special thing has been said.”24 While the 

circumstances of Black Draftee’s unfinished appearance are incidental, Neel’s judgment that it 

already did what it needed to do—that it said some “special thing”—is justified by the loss it 

anticipates. In life, Hunter was still in-process; in his portrait, he remains largely unrealized on 

the canvas because he himself was about to be thrust into chaos that would change the way he 

saw and experienced the world. In Neel’s painting, Hunter is both present and not present, glued 

to Neel’s familiar striped armchair but psychologically elsewhere. “Death, the great void of life, 

hangs over everyone,” Neel wrote as she neared the end of her own life.25 For her draftee, that 

void is especially pronounced in the blankness that engulfs his body. In this space, he is coming 

together (as a young man still growing into a sense of self) and falling apart (into imminent 

destruction) all at once. He can never, therefore, be “complete.”  

As the painting’s title indicates, the subject is both a socially loaded but obfuscating type, 

a Black draftee, and a named individual, James Hunter. All portraits which represent an 

individual inevitably if not intentionally also locate them within some type or group, whether 

 
22 Carl Swanson, “What Happened to ‘James Hunter Black Draftee’? A Mystery at the Met Breuer,” Vulture, March 
8, 2016, https://www.vulture.com/2016/03/are-you-the-guy-in-this-famous-met-painting.html. 
23 “Black Draftee (James Hunter),” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, accessed December 6, 2021, 
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/656757. 
24 Henri, The Art Spirit: Notes, 10. 
25 Neel, “Alice by Alice,” 185. 



 

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that be, for example, nobility or the working class. Neel’s title emphasizes this duality but gives 

precedence to the sitter’s type over his name, signaling his transition from private citizen—an 

individual in Neel’s eyes, at least—to serviceman. Given the United States military’s pattern of 

neglect toward the long-term care of its recruits, especially those of color, the name “James 

Hunter” might mean even less once “Black Draftee” becomes “Black Private” and eventually 

“Black Veteran.” As a contribution to a catalogue for a 2010 survey of Neel’s work, the British 

painter Chris Ofili wrote a poem in response to Black Draftee. Apparently imagining Hunter’s 

internal dialogue, Ofili writes, “I am shedding my skin for camouflage fatigues to blind the 

faceless enemy.”26 In Neel’s portrait, Hunter is dissolving into a foreign landscape he does not 

yet know to become one nameless body fighting another nameless body. In effect, the painting 

acknowledges the crisis of subjectivity imposed on people in being defined both categorically 

and as individuals, to the extent that they are afforded that status at all. While he is defined 

categorically in both the painting’s title and in the racist military state he is compelled to serve, 

James Hunter is nonetheless individualized on the canvas by the particularities of his features, 

expression, and pose, but also by what is absent. One senses a preemptive loss of his former self, 

not simply in his despondent expression but also in the literal disappearance of his figure.  

Rather than restore this loss by working from her memory of Hunter, Neel must have 

intuited that it would be more appropriate to render him as a subject who has been partially 

deferred.27 Tracing the parts of the sitter and the environment which are left undefined, the 

viewer is called upon to complete the image, and in effect becomes implicated in the experience 

of that sitter as imagined by Neel. The painting suggests what it would feel like to be this person, 

 
26 Chris Ofili, “Thoughts on the Love that Forgives,” in Alice Neel: Painted Truths, 96. 
27 While Neel preferred to work from life and never used photographs (except for some late-career, commissioned 
portraits), she did sometimes paint from memory. See Jeremy Lewison and Barry Walker, “Portraits from Memory,” 
in Alice Neel: Painted Truths, 166. 



 

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rather than speculating who James Hunter is as an individual. Perhaps Neel understood that she 

could not possibly know James Hunter, only the Black Draftee with whom she spent a few hours. 

Nor could she replicate on the canvas what Hunter himself felt sitting in that chair, only what she 

imagined of his interior world based on what little she knew of him.28 The incompleteness of 

Black Draftee acknowledges the limitations of portraiture—it can never create a complete record 

of anyone—but powerfully evokes the state of living in between different lives and different 

selves.  

Eleven years after Neel painted James Hunter, Neel’s friend and fellow figurative painter 

Barkley Hendricks began his “limited palette” series with a portrait which, like Black Draftee, 

sets a partially disembodied Black man against a white background.29 But far from Neel’s 

vanishing, melancholic figure, the model in Steve (1976) (fig. 2) insists on an autonomy and 

confidence typical of Hendricks’ crisp portraits. With one foot forward, both hands behind his 

back, and a toothpick protruding from his slightly parted lips, Steve stands tall with the grace and 

self-assuredness of a superstar. Modeled with faint tonal shifts, his white trench coat and pants 

merge with the blank expanse around him so that his head and black loafers appear in sharp 

focus at the top and bottom of the canvas. A narrow glimpse of a real-world environment appears 

in his aviators, where a reflection reminds us that Steve is in fact posing in Hendricks’s studio. 

Just as I have described James Hunter, Huey Copeland sees Steve as “both present and absent.”30 

The embedding of Steve within the white background, Copeland writes, renders him “unmoored 

 
28 One can easily interpret Hunter’s averted gaze as a sign not of his dread for the future, but of his boredom or even 
annoyance over being coerced into a portrait session with a stranger. 
29 Hendricks described Neel as a friend in a taped visit to the Whitney exhibit “Human Interest: Portraits from the 
Whitney’s Collection,” where he contemplated Neel’s portrait of Andy Warhol. See “Whitney Stories: Barkley 
Hendricks on Alice Neel,” Whitney Museum of American Art, June 28, 2016, video, 2:04, 
https://youtu.be/dnkZRqzacHk. 
30 Huey Copeland, “Figures and Grounds: The Art of Barkley L. Hendricks,” Artforum vol. 47 no. 8 (April 2009), 
148. 



 

 13 

from the sites to which black subjects are presumed to belong,” such that we must engage with 

the figure “on the grounds they offer rather than those that we supply.”31 In this sense, 

Hendrick’s portrait reclaims the autonomy historically reserved for white portrait subjects. But 

whereas Steve presents himself to the viewer on his own terms, Neel’s draftee recedes into 

himself and further still into the grim unknown that awaits him. Hendricks’s white spaces are 

blank slates upon which his subjects fashion themselves; Neel’s, on the other hand, suggest 

oblivion. 

Neel was a close observer and advocate of her Black, Latin American, and immigrant 

neighbors in Manhattan. She invited them into her home and watched some grow into adulthood, 

and participated in protests against the misrepresentation and underrepresentation of people of 

color in the art world.32 But for Neel, as a white woman, there was always a distance in 

perspective that no amount of empathy, awareness, or observation could bridge. That distance is 

respected in Black Draftee, which determines nothing of James Hunter’s identity except the 

impossibility of its determination. To declare through painting who James Hunter was would 

mean only to reduce him. The subjectivity of Hendricks’s Steve, too, cannot be fully penetrated, 

thanks to the gloss and iconic character of his posturing. Hendricks painted Steve well into the 

Black Power movement and during a period of tumultuous uncertainty for African American 

identity that necessitated the adoption of distinctive styles of dress and speech for “iconographic 

cover,” as Richard J. Powell has suggested.33 Steve’s self-presentation, then, can be understood 

as a protective layer to preserve the coherence of his selfhood. This is no futile exercise, 

 
31 Ibid. 
32 Neel joined multiple demonstrations organized by the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, including the protest 
against the exclusion of Black artists from the 1969 Metropolitan Museum exhibition “Harlem On My Mind” and 
the picketing of the white-curated exhibition “Contemporary Black Artists in America” at the Whitney in 1971. See 
Phoebe Hoban, Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty, 1st ed. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2010), 260, 281. 
33 Richard J. Powell, Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 
128. 



 

 14 

however. Hendricks grants Steve the agency to stand in bold defiance of society’s threat toward 

his self-fashioned identity. We find an optimism (perhaps, for Hendricks, a necessary one) absent 

in Neel’s portrait, which intimates the subject’s inability to cohere and even an unwillingness on 

Hunter’s part to resist disintegration. Steve is a portrait of self-possession, Black Draftee of 

surrender. James Hunter’s transitory situation at the time of his single portrait session enabled 

Neel to paint a figure who could not be bothered with presenting an identity with any specific 

intent, or even troubled by looking the painter in the eye. As we will find, many of Neel’s 

subjects in the following years reflect the desire for composure that usually comes with sitting 

for a portrait, but never do they grasp that self-possession with the agility of Steve. Rather, in 

these portraits we encounter people in a state between coherence and total unraveling. 

 

  



 

 15 

Chapter 2: Bursting at the Seams 

As evidenced by Black Draftee, Neel did not work from preliminary sketches and instead 

chose to draw directly into the canvas to work out the composition. Frequently leaving the 

contours of her subjects and their reassessed positions within the frame visible, she suggests the 

parallel nature of identity itself as always in-process and subject to as much loss as growth. 

Moreover, by emphasizing the place where the body and the environment, interior and exterior 

meet, Neel draws attention to the fragility of those distinctions, evoking the unease that 

permeates so many of her portraits. As Randall Griffey writes, “Neel’s painting technique 

accentuates her subject’s vulnerability; indeed, the slender lines register metaphorically as 

precarious lifelines threatening to trail off completely.”34 The nature of these borders as 

“lifelines” became more stressed with the introduction in the mid-sixties and increasing use in 

the seventies and eighties of Neel’s exposed blue wash used to lay out her compositions. In some 

portraits, such as Benny and Mary Ellen Andrews (1972) and David Boudon and Gregory 

Battock (1970), the ultramarine lines fuse the sitters to Neel’s blue-striped armchair, troubling 

the boundary between interior and exterior, self and not-self. In these and other late portraits, the 

blue is also suggestive of veins, drawing the force of blood flowing within the body out and 

around the figures’ visible surfaces. In other ways, as we will see, Neel animates the pressure 

between the inside and outside of the self contained within the body. “Just as the mind makes 

metaphors on the basis of embodied experience,” suggests Pamela Allara, “so Neel’s portraits 

are metaphors for a concept of identity that is characterized by a continual traversing of 

boundaries between public and private, interior and exterior.”35 

 
34 Randall Griffey, “Painting Fruit(s)” in Alice Neel: People Come First, 88. 
35 Allara, xix. 



 

 16 

This metaphor is perhaps no better exemplified than in Neel’s portraits of pregnant nudes. 

Pregnancy, as Neel knew well as a mother of four (though she raised only two into adulthood), 

entails a strain of bodily containment and a shifting sense of selfhood. In Pregnant Woman 

(1971) (fig. 3), the nude figure is fully painted (apart from two vanishing toes) within a bright 

ultramarine contour while reclining in an otherwise sparsely rendered living room. Far along in 

her pregnancy, her body no longer familiar, she is on the verge of yet another transformation in 

which something once a part of herself will be removed and become something that is distinctly 

not her. The concentration of detail and color within and around the woman in Neel’s painting 

makes the anticipation of the impending expulsion from her body painfully palpable, like a deep 

breath held too long. Neel seems to have reveled in painting this tension: “...plastically, it is very 

exciting,” she said of pregnancy. Discussing Pregnant Woman, she observed: “it’s almost tragic 

the way the top part of her body is pulling the ribs.”36 This bodily stress seems to spread all over 

the woman’s figure. Her belly and nipples appear inflated near to the point of bursting, while her 

head is framed and locked into place by her arms, as if to keep it from rolling away. Although 

her body is held together within its edges, there is seepage of the sickly green hue of her flesh 

onto the surface of the sofa, producing a shadow of excess around her form which creeps up to 

sculpt the imposing male face behind her. This face belongs to Neel’s son, Richard, and the nude 

model is her daughter-in-law Nancy, pregnant at the time with twins. Like that of the male figure 

in Pregnant Julie and Algis, painted four years earlier, Richard’s head seems nearly attached to 

his counterpart’s as if we are seeing a kind of psychological doubling. Richard’s gaze directed 

from overhead and out of Nancy’s view aggravates her loss of self-containment; she cannot see 

what sees her, and so she attempts to block his view with her arm. At the same time, Richard’s 

 
36 Neel, “Alice on Alice,” 162. 



 

 17 

disembodied head, colored in patches by the excess emanating from his partner, also lacks 

coherence. Because we view Nancy opposite Richard, mirroring his position, that lack is then 

reflected in ourselves as we, too, look upon Nancy’s body, which is no less anxiety-provoking in 

the viewer than suggestive of her own discomfort. This is not the female nude of the Western 

canon which endows the (male) viewer with a sense of dominion or pleasure, nor does it grant 

the female subject strength or dignity.  

Neel painted Nancy once previously during her pregnancy and multiple times thereafter 

with her young children. Despite her close relationship with the model (to whom she even 

referred as her best friend in a late interview) Neel in this instance chose to remove her identity 

from the title, framing her not as an individual but as a social category which had become 

particularly fraught in the course of feminism’s second wave.37 By painting pregnant women 

unclothed and under the stress of their own social and bodily containment, Neel troubles the role 

of the female nude described by Lynda Nead as a “magical regulation of the female body, 

containing it and momentarily repairing the orifices and tears.”38 Characterized by smooth, 

unbroken surfaces, the female nude of the Western artistic tradition has historically assured the 

viewer a unified subjectivity. Given the entanglement of the body and the perception of self, the 

female nude can therefore be understood as “a metaphor for these processes of separation and 

ordering, for the formation of self and the spaces of the other.”39 Neel’s distressed pregnant nude, 

conversely, can be seen as a metaphor for the immense energy required to maintain that 

separation. 

 
37 Said Neel, “If it wasn’t for Nancy, I couldn’t exist.” See Murphy and Rhodes, They Are Their Own Gifts. 
38 Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1992), 7. 
39 Ibid. 



 

 18 

Whereas men have historically been permitted and in certain ways encouraged to take up 

space, the demand for women to minimize themselves physically and socially compounds the 

strain we see in Nancy’s confinement. This gendered double standard is apparent in Neel’s 

portraits of heterosexual couples from around the same time, such as Ian and Mary (1971) and 

Benny and Mary Ellen Andrews, in both of which the male is seated in Neel’s armchair with his 

legs spread, taking up as much space as possible, while his female partner is tucked into the 

space at his right. In these portraits, Neel represents social expectations enforced and inscribed 

onto the subjects’ bodies. Her outsized, pregnant woman, however, can only attempt to curl into 

herself and still spills out across the canvas. As in Pregnant Julie and Algis and Margaret Evans 

Pregnant (1978), the area where the pregnant body and the environment meet is highlighted by a 

bold blue border, as if to draw attention to its own instability and evoke the pressure of Nancy’s 

insides against her outsides, literally and metaphorically. The line itself, while more or less 

intact, seems to tremble. 

The sitters’ troubled boundaries in Neel’s late portraits appear particularly stressed when 

compared to the paintings of her predecessors who were similarly concerned with the subject’s 

inability to cohere as a secure whole. In a close study of Édouard Vuillard’s double portrait 

Mother and Sister of the Artist (1893) (fig. 4), Susan Sidlauskas reveals how the artist diffuses 

energy across the domestic interior rather than exclusively within the two bodies that occupy it. 

While Vuillard’s lively brushstrokes merge figure and ground, the two subjects display radically 

different states of being in relation to their surroundings, which appear equally if not more 

animated than the human figures. The mother, appearing as a black monolith seated comfortably 

in her chair, seems “condensed” while her daughter Marie hunches over to adapt herself to the 

claustrophobic interior, her plaid dress camouflaging with the patterned wallpaper. If she were to 



 

 19 

stand straight, her head would go off the frame. Madame Vuillard, a single mother and the 

authority of the household and her corset-making business, appears stable, her boxy shape 

echoing that of the bureau behind her, in stark contrast to the active dissolution of her daughter 

into the environment.  

Like Neel’s Pregnant Woman, Vuillard’s Mother and Sister of the Artist appeared at a 

time marked by advancements toward women’s sexual and economic independence as well as 

opposition which sought to reaffirm their place in the household. Although female artisans like 

the Vuillards were increasingly valued in the 1890s for their supposedly natural talents for 

decoration, this celebration was really an effort to reestablish women’s place firmly in the 

household, a part of the social contract of the bourgeois family which had been challenged by the 

independent “New Woman” of France.40 Vuillard’s double-portrait finds the older woman firmly 

established within the domestic space—and, in the absence of a patriarchal figure, even 

empowered in her enthroned and almost masculine position—while the younger woman begins 

to vanish within its surfaces, perhaps pulled between contested expectations of womanhood and 

her own evolving identity. The contrast between Madame Vuillard and her daughter indicates the 

artist’s conception of the human being as neither fully autonomous nor entirely dependent on the 

exterior world, but existing in fluctuating degrees of both states to the extent that, as for Neel, a 

coherent self demanded considerable effort and was never a given, nor ever fully achieved. 

The “ideological goal” of integrating body and place shared by the Nabis at the fin de 

siècle is apparent in Vuillard’s interior scenes and affirmed by his journals.41 In the figure of his 

sister, however, Vuillard also painted a struggle against this pressure placed upon the 

 
40 Susan Sidlauskas, Body, Place, and Self in Nineteenth-Century Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Press, 2000), 101. 
41 Ibid., 94-95. 



 

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containment of the self within the body. As Sidlauskas indicates, the constricted figure of Marie 

suggests a pained attempt at self-containment, not unlike Nancy folding into herself on the sofa. 

Forever devoted to the domestic interior, Vuillard attends to all areas of the canvas with equal 

attention in “an agitated act of space-filling done to combat the fear of nothingness.”42 Despite 

the lively daubing of paint over and around Marie, this application falls short of fully concealing 

the blankness of the unvarnished canvas peeking beneath the brushstrokes. In her late portraits, 

Neel’s subjects seem to shake within their physical containers or even begin to break apart, but 

not into a knowable interior space like those found in Vuillard’s paintings. The void is instead 

laid bare and her subjects are at risk of being dispersed and absorbed into a blank plane in which 

little, if anything, is defined. Both painters intimate an anxiety toward the otherness beyond the 

limits of the knowable self, but whereas Vuillard disperses the figure across the painting’s 

surface in an attempt to block out the nothingness surfacing underneath, Neel confronts and 

defends against the void by exposing it and by concentrating her paint within the circumscribed 

boundaries of the subject. In Pregnant Woman, Neel provides for Nancy what Marie attempts to 

provide for herself—unity—while signaling the inevitable seepage of her subject into the 

exterior world. While Nancy’s swollen body anticipates this outward diffusion, the confusion of 

daubed brushstrokes constituting Marie and her surroundings elicits permeation in both 

directions: the self spreading outward and the world penetrating the self. But if Nancy and Marie 

are both, in different capacities, beginning to fall apart, Richard and Madame Vuillard, husband 

and matriarch, are more grounded in their positions, though their stability is not absolute either. 

Vuillard and Neel, it appears, share a sympathy for their subjects’ efforts to hold 

themselves together. Their difference lies in how they manifest their concern for this precarious 

 
42 Ibid., 107. 



 

 21 

state: for Vuillard, through the creation of a veil formed by subject and environment over an 

unknown void, and for Neel, through the near-wholeness of the subject as an entity that is 

distinct from its surroundings. Still, like Vuillard, Neel “leaves the seams showing.”43 Subjects 

such as Nancy in Pregnant Woman appear condensed like Madame Vuillard but nonetheless 

struggle and ultimately fail to fully maintain that compressed unity, at risk of collapsing into 

Marie’s state of imminent bodily disintegration. Vuillard’s “seams” knit together figure and 

ground; Neel’s repair the breakages in the body, sutures in the human subject’s protective shell 

which she attempts to reinforce in order to separate rather than merge subject and environment. 

While Marie’s interiority is spread out into a social space and vice versa, Nancy’s is just barely 

contained within her body, tightly bound within a thick blue border which tellingly becomes 

darker (and thus more visibly asserted) around her stretched abdomen and between her head and 

her husband’s. Neel’s attention to the sitter’s physical boundaries reveals a pained desire for 

coherence, as if her thick blue lines functioned like thread accumulating over a repeatedly re-

sewn yet still fragile seam. At the same time, and like the gaps between Vuillard’s brushstrokes, 

Neel leaves visible ruptures, unevenness, and revisions in her dividing lines. 

Although many of Neel’s canvases became increasingly bare around the figure post-

1960, she continued to articulate the subject’s environment to varying degrees in other portraits. 

Even the more filled-out compositions, however, rarely included distinctive objects which might 

act as cues to construct the human subject’s identity, but rather suggested interior space or 

nondescript furniture. She saved her attention toward non-human objects for her still lifes and 

cityscapes, in which figures rarely appeared at all. An unusual painting in Neel’s oeuvre, 

Georgie’s Foyer (Anxiety) (1967) (fig. 5), is at once still life, room interior, and portrait, with 

 
43 Ibid., 123. 



 

 22 

equal attention paid to all areas within the frame. A tropical plant arrangement occupies the 

center of the picture while Neel’s young granddaughter, Olivia (Nancy and Richard’s oldest 

daughter), is squeezed between the wonky side table supporting the vase and the edge of the 

canvas. Although Olivia did not accompany Neel to her nephew’s home in Pennsylvania, where 

the painting was created, Neel chose to paint her into the scene.44 Wide-eyed and frozen, the 

infant appears sucked into the corner of the armchair, nearly out of the frame of the image. 

Roughly the same size as the vase, she acts almost like its double. Her stiff, claw-like fingers 

resting on her lap mirror the red flowers grazing the top of the canvas, while her outline is 

warped into a squiggle-shaped fragment like the edge of the fragile glass vessel. Not only do the 

household objects here appear as fully rendered as the human subject tucked into the lower right 

corner; they also rival that subject’s animism, much like the furniture in Vuillard’s scene. 

Just as the genre of the painting is neither quite here nor there, the figures (both human 

and plant) occupy an in-between space, the outskirts of a home. It is the child, however, who is 

displaced from the center of the image, which one might expect her to occupy as the sole human 

subject. Unlike Olivia jammed into the corner of the frame, the plant—like Madame Vuillard—is 

accommodated by the surrounding space, which dissolves into a halo of blank canvas around the 

leaves and flowers. But this too evokes the anxiety to which Neel refers in the painting’s title; 

like Vuillard’s dabs of paint, Neel’s swaths of color do not completely cohere to mask the white 

void beneath them. And while the plant appears fixed to the top of the canvas, the vase teeters on 

the edge of the table; its legs bend to exacerbate the instability. That sense of uncertainty 

spreads: The doorframe presses against a jagged void, and it is unclear whether we are looking 

 
44 Ann Temkin, Alice Neel (Philadelphia, Pa.: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2000), 184. 



 

 23 

into the home or out into the street.45 Like Vuillard’s sister, Olivia is both swallowed by and 

dispersed across the interior space, although, as Lacan might suggest, she is not yet aware of the 

ostensible centrality and unity of her subjectivity which these pressures place under threat. 

Georgie’s Foyer is therefore populated with fragments, repetitions, and incongruent surfaces 

which collectively replicate the child’s underdeveloped sense of self. Not yet having reached the 

mirror stage, Olivia still lacks the ideal of subjective coherence which Neel’s older subjects 

nervously and often ineffectively hold on to as they pose for the perceptive portraitist. This is 

still a quintessential Neel painting to the extent that tension has been loaded onto the canvas, but 

rather than locate that pressure within the human body as she typically would, Neel here has 

diffused it across the composition. Young Olivia, blissfully unaware of the anxieties her 

grandmother sees and feels as a conscious individual in the world, merges with an environment 

from which she cannot yet distinguish herself. In Pregnant Woman, Olivia’s mother appears at 

risk of losing that distinction and therefore a stable sense of individualized selfhood, but having 

long ago adopted the fiction of wholeness, she can never return to the state of unawareness that 

precedes the fear of such a loss.   

 

  

 
45 Georgie’s Foyer (Anxiety) is not the only work of Neel’s to be titled with a term for human emotion while 
minimizing or excluding physical human presence. Loneliness (1970) depicts an empty chair positioned in front of 
an open window looking out to another window across the street. 



 

 24 

Chapter 3: The Pains of Posing 

As we have seen, Neel’s paintings register a sense of unease in sitters who may share 

little in life but that underlying instability of identity. Virginia Neel, wife of the artist’s son 

Hartley, suggested that her portrait, Ginny in a Striped Shirt (1969) (fig. 6), tapped into “a certain 

passionate anxiety for life” which was acutely felt in the period of radical change and upheaval 

that was the 1960s. “It… sees in me all the aspiration, conflict, determination, doubt, certainty, 

expectation, passion and disillusionment that was swirling around and within me: a young 

idealistic and earnest member of the sixties generation who had seen just enough to doubt but 

still wanted to believe in a utopian future.”46 Ginny appears in the portrait to be stabilizing 

herself as she leans forward from a stool with uneven legs, her long toes precariously perched 

upon the bottom edge of the frame. As her seat dissolves into the white vacuum of the primed 

canvas, her hands grip her upper thighs to point toward her spread crotch just barely covered by 

her miniskirt. Any potential eroticism, however, is belied by her fatigued demeanor and the boxy 

shape of her torso emphasized by the thick blue stripes of her shirt. Her portrait is marked by the 

contradictory presences of stability and insecurity, sexual undercurrents and an overwhelming 

sense of exhaustion. Although Ginny is individualized in her portrait, her apt comment points to 

a sense of disquiet shared within, and likely beyond, her generation. Her visible fatigue appears 

in the face James Hunter; her fragile resilience is likewise reflected in her sister-in-law, Nancy. 

Part of recognizing individual humanity, for Neel, was registering the weight felt collectively, 

albeit by varying degrees and under different circumstances (Ginny’s struggle is certainly not the 

same as nor equal to Hunter’s, for example), amongst those living and surviving in the twentieth 

century. 

 
46 Brandon Brame Fortune, “Ginny in a Striped Shirt,” in Face Value: Portraiture in the Age of Abstraction 
(Washington, D.C.: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 2014), 128. 



 

 25 

But if this palpable stress was a matter of the zeitgeist which Neel, in her expressed goal 

as an artist, intended to capture, it was also the result of the discomfort experienced by her 

subjects during their modeling sessions.47 Ginny later described the physical pains of sitting for 

Neel, who would insist that the model hold her pose no matter how often she complained of 

aches: “Alice would keep you intensely connected to her. When she felt you were faded she 

would start making little noises, the kind of thing you’d do to get a horse to prick its ears up.”48 

Sittings were long and frequent; Cindy Nemser, who posed with her husband, Chuck, in 1975, 

recalled six four-hour sessions with rare ten-minute breaks.49 At times, intentionally or not, Neel 

would also provoke psychological or emotional discomfort in the sitter. The art historian Mary 

Garrard recalled that as she was sitting for Neel for a rare commissioned portrait in 1977, Neel 

asked if she was a lesbian. Despite her friendships with gay men and general enthusiasm for 

sexual freedom, Neel admitted to feeling uncomfortable around gay women and was frustrated 

with the prevalence of lesbianism in the women’s lib movement, even at one point attributing her 

exodus from Greenwich Village in 1938 to what she perceived to be an overpopulation of gay 

women.50 In Garrard’s distinctly masculinized portrait, in which she sits leaning forward with 

her fingers tightly clasped together, the sitter appears to have sensed this attitude in Neel. “If I 

appear guarded,” Garrard later wrote, “that was probably the reason.”51 In other portraits, anxiety 

 
47 “After all, I represent the twentieth century. I was born in 1900, and I’ve tried to capture the zeitgeist. When 
painting or writing are good, it’s taken right out of life itself to my mind, and put into the work.” See Murphy and 
Rhodes, They Are Their Own Gifts. 
48 Virginia Neel, “Virginia Neel talks about being painted by Alice Neel,” Deichtorhallen Hamburg, December 13, 
2017, video, 1:37, https://youtu.be/Gt4e482-aVI. 
49 Cindy Nemser, “Undergoing Scrutiny: Sitting For Alice Neel,” interview with Michel Auder, Gerard Malanga, 
Cindy Nemser, John Perreault, Dorothy Pearlstein, Benny Andrews, and Nancy Neel, moderated by Anna Temkin, 
Philadelphia Museum of Art, April 6, 1999, printed in Alice Neel, ed. Anna Temkin (Philadelphia, Pa.: Philadelphia 
Museum of Art, 2000), 71-72. 
50 Alice Neel, interview with Cindy Nemser, May 14, 1975, Box 27, R37a-b, Cindy Nemser papers, 2013.M.21, 
Getty Research Institute, quoted in Alice Neel: People Come First, ed. Kelly Baum and Randall Griffey. 
51 Mary Garrard, “Alice Neel and Me,” Woman’s Art Journal 27, no. 2 (2006): 4. 



 

 26 

seemed to be drawn out by the painting itself while remaining undetectable in the actual sitter. 

Linda Nochlin noted from her conversations with Neel during her portrait sessions that the artist 

at one point mused: “You know, you don’t seem so anxious, but that’s how you come out.”52  

As in most portraits (an exception will soon follow), Neel’s paintings capture not simply 

the subject but the encounter between the subject and the artist. The dominant presence of 

drawing in her late works conjures an immediacy of that interaction and the sitter’s presence 

which tends to be lost in the surfaces of more polished paintings. In effect, the portraits vividly 

capture her sitters’ suspended struggle to compose themselves for Neel. Never are her subjects 

unaware of being seen. Although her early works included paintings of protests, erotic scenes, 

and other social activity, Neel’s human subjects post-1950 are rarely shown doing anything but 

posing, a hyper-conscious act on the part of the subject for the artist. Even in her occasional 

street portraits like Dominican Boys on 108th Street (1955), the subjects stand in their urban 

environment but do not appear interrupted in the middle of their activities. They are posing, 

much as they would if they were pictured in Neel’s studio. Had she depicted her subjects caught 

in interstitial moments—if she painted them, say, looking up briefly from their work or play—

they might appear less weighted by their own self-awareness, less strained under the labor of 

what Harry Berger Jr. described as the “fiction of the pose.”53 The closest Neel came to candid 

portraiture in her mature work might be her two paintings of breastfeeding mothers: A disturbing 

1971 portrait of a visibly tired Nancy with the newborn twins and, from the following year, a 

painting of Carmen Gordon, a woman from Haiti who worked for Neel as a cleaner, struggling to 

breastfeed her sick daughter, Judy (fig. 7). Despite their attention to their daughters, both 

 
52 Nochlin, “Some Women Realists: Part 2,” 88. 
53 Harry Berger, “Fictions of the Pose: Facing the Gaze of Early Modern Portraiture,” Representations, no. 46 
(1994): 99. 



 

 27 

mothers attempt to pose for Neel; admirably, Carmen even manages a smile. While giving up 

their bodies for their children, there is still an attempt, at least, at self-possession. 

Like Neel’s portraits, Pop art addressed the strain of presenting and maintaining a 

coherent self. The Pop artist’s conception of the human subject, however, was radically different 

from Neel’s, whose paintings of people looked toward something deeper than surface level by 

showing signs of its emergence beneath the subject’s weathered composure. For the Pop artist, 

nothing was to be found beneath the surface, for everything was surface.54 Rather than 

suggesting an inner truth, subjectivity was now understood to be an invention assembled from 

images, which had become increasingly powerful in the shaping of identity through the 

proliferation of consumer culture and mass media in the late 1950s and 1960s. Identity was 

constituted not by self-governance but by, for example, the consumption and re-channeling of 

marketed products and tabloid photography. To the extent that Vuillard was concerned with the 

dispersal of the subject into their environment, his paintings anticipated the ways in which Pop 

art explored the externalization of interior subjectivity onto banal material surfaces. As Andy 

Warhol famously claimed, Pop could be described as “taking the outside and putting it on the 

inside or taking the inside and putting it on the outside.”55 Neel herself could not (or would not) 

distinguish Warhol’s work from the consumer culture with which it engaged: “I think he’s the 

greatest advertiser living, not a great portrait painter.”56 

Warhol understood that despite contemporary culture’s distrust of interiority, subjects 

still sought to present a self-image that was unified and composed. His paintings and short films, 

 
54 “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol,” Warhol famously said, “just look at the surfaces of my paintings 
and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.” Gretchen Berg, “Andy: My True Story,” Los Angeles 
Free Press (March 17, 1967), 3. 
55 Andy Warhol quoted by Hal Foster, The First Pop Age: Painting and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamilton, 
Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter, and Ruscha (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012), 8. 
56 While she believed he represented “a certain pollution of this era,” Neel did concede that “as a person, Andy is 
very nice,” and that “his tomato cans are a great contribution.” See Neel, “Alice by Alice,” 138. 



 

 28 

like Neel’s portraits, exposed the pains of this undertaking. Warhol’s serial silkscreen paintings, 

in which the same image becomes more distressed with every repetition, present a literal 

breaking down of the subject not entirely dissimilar to the vanishing bodies in some of Neel’s 

later paintings. His Screen Tests (fig. 8), produced between 1964 and 1967, depict each 

participant’s active struggle to project and sustain a self-image over a period of less than three 

minutes that seems to drag on forever. These works, while arguably portraits, often sidestepped 

the portrait-as-encounter: Warhol was known to wander off from the scene as the filming 

continued, leaving the sitter to retain their composure despite being trapped in the gaze of no one 

but the machine vision of the camera.57 The experience was psychologically corrosive, 

prompting some sitters to tear up and others to panic.58 As Hal Foster suggested of Warhol’s 

Screen Tests, “there is no humanist redemption in the face of the camera.”59 Neel’s presence by 

the easel ensured her subjects the human reciprocity between artist and sitter, even if her 

demands and interrogations provoked some distress in the process (as they did for Ginny Neel 

and Mary Garrard). Just as the concentration of paint within the contours of her sitters imparted 

some coherence while revealing the porousness of their subjectivities, Neel’s active presence 

throughout the portraits’ making provided an affirmation of their selfhood (which they would be 

denied if sitting for a Screen Test) while simultaneously prompting some unease. This duality of 

reinforcement and distress that unfolded both on the canvas and behind the easel distinguishes 

Neel’s portraits from Warhol’s straight erosion of his subjects’ composure. 

Emerging concurrently with the Pop era, Neel’s late work, often devoid of fully 

articulated material objects, attempted to return subjectivity to the body while exposing the 

 
57 Blake Gopnik, Warhol (New York, NY: ECCO, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers, 2020), 355. 
58 Ibid., 356. 
59 Foster, 168. 



 

 29 

fragility of that restoration in a society engrossed with consumer products and images. In light of 

this indirect dialogue with Pop, it is useful to consider her portrait of its leading figure from 1970 

(fig. 9). This painting exposes the frailty of the half-nude sitter’s damaged body, held together by 

stitches and a corset he was required to wear following the attempt on his life by Valerie Solanas 

two years prior to his sitting for Neel. We see Warhol’s figure laboring to quite literally keep his 

insides inside and, by closing his eyes, the outside out. His wounded body functions as a 

metaphor for strained self-containment like Neel’s Pregnant Woman, painted the following year. 

The traces of his sutures divide up his bare torso like the cracks between shards of a shattered 

plate haphazardly glued back together. Above the scars, the chest is distorted to appear as if his 

folds of drooping, pallid skin were female breasts. Seated on a sparingly drawn ottoman, his feet 

appear to dangle, somehow not quite reaching the floor despite the shallow height of his seat. In 

effect, the monumental art world figure appears reduced in size and authority.  

Deeply aware of—and artistically invested in—the psychological exertion involved in 

presenting oneself as authentic and whole, Warhol seems to accept, if uncomfortably, the 

vulnerability he must have known Neel would register vividly in her painting. Like a prisoner 

who has accepted his impending execution, he clasps his hands together as if in a final prayer. 

While at first glance Neel’s exposure of the famed Pop artist might appear brutal and unflinching 

(Nochlin described the portrait as “terrible”), Neel seems to have offered her subject some small 

acts of restorative kindness.60 She undresses Warhol but permits him to close his eyes, perhaps a 

concession to his need to withhold something of what she understood as his interior self, or at 

least prevent the outer world from penetrating it. This allowance is noteworthy considering that 

for Neel, as I have indicated, the overall comfort of her sitters could be expendable in service of 

 
60 Nochlin, “Some Women Realists: Part 2,” 87. 



 

 30 

the portrait. Other details suggest a sense of care toward the subject: Warhol’s left knee is left 

underpainted, as if to redirect the sense of brokenness away from his traumatized core.  

Though she represents him as damaged, feminized, and isolated, stripped of the artificial 

veneer that characterized his own portraiture, there appears to be a reverence for his 

vulnerability. As one scholar expressed, Neel painted Warhol as “a hauntingly ethereal image of 

an androgynous secular saint.”61 But Warhol is not quite transcendent of his physical container; 

as in similar portraits of Neel’s late career, the restriction of Warhol’s interiority within his body 

is not without signs of weakness. Once again, the blue outline around his figure emphasizes the 

vulnerable boundary between self and the disturbingly unknown, unrepresented other suggested 

by the unpainted environment. Like Pregnant Woman, Warhol’s porousness is indicated by the 

slippage of paint from within its concentration in the body into the areas just around him. Neel’s 

portrait of Warhol represents not a test of his ability to compose himself, but a provision of 

sympathetic space for that composure to break down. For Warhol, a seemingly unlikely 

participant, to step into this space and away from his calculated public persona makes the portrait 

all the more startling.  

 

  

 
61 Barry Walker, “Andy Warhol” in Alice Neel: Painted Truths, 152. 



 

 31 

Chapter 4: Under the Surface 

Up to her death, Neel continued to paint subjects who, like Warhol, made a practice of 

staging themselves for a public. Her 1982 portrait of the feminist sex worker (and later bonafide 

performance artist) Annie Sprinkle (fig. 10) pictures the sitter, necessarily bold and uninhibited 

in her own work, as an anxious and oddly unerotic subject. As Nochlin observed, Neel’s Sprinkle 

is decidedly naked, not nude.62 Although she appears in a black leather one-piece with cutouts 

revealing her breasts and pierced genitals, posing on one knee to draw attention to her right calf 

and stiletto heel, there is an awkwardness that makes Sprinkle seem less like a brazen seductress 

than someone who showed up to the wrong event thinking it was a costume party. She appears 

older than twenty-eight, her actual age at the time of the sitting. The arch of black brushstrokes 

over her head more closely resembles a crow perched on her yellow wig than a hair accessory. 

Her face, caked with garish, blue-tinted makeup, bears a sustained but wavering smile while her 

distracted eyes look just to the side of the viewer, as if dodging the gaze she is obligated to 

invite. The cartoonish rendering of her body in some areas, particularly the breasts, is in tension 

with this nuanced expression, which seems more suited to a family photo of reluctant 

participants than a portrait in lingerie. Rather than occupy the center of the picture, Sprinkle 

appears swept into the lower right corner, leaving half the canvas bare and the composition 

cross-sectioned diagonally, an indelicate use of pictorial space which further contributes to a 

sense of unease. The scrawled contours running along her left thigh and forearm not only imply 

the artist’s revision of the composition, but also suggest the sitter’s fidgeting in her pose. 

 
62 Nochlin, “Alice Neel,” lecture, Victoria Miro Gallery, London, May 2004, printed in Women Artists: The Linda 
Nochlin Reader,” ed. Maura Reilly (New York, New York: Thames & Hudson, 2015), 286. 



 

 32 

Although Sprinkle was originally seated in a chair, Neel chose to omit the seat altogether, further 

destabilizing her sitter on the canvas.63  

Any impulse on the part of the viewer to cast Sprinkle as a type (such as a whore or 

femme fatale) quickly becomes frustrated, despite her costume and nakedness, by the 

nervousness that permeates the canvas. Neel’s image of an unidealized and desexualized porn 

star, posing self-consciously in her typical “uniform,” situates Sprinkle as a worker like any 

other. If Neel was “not kind” to Sprinkle’s body, as Nochlin suggested, this was in the service of 

destigmatizing the sex worker.64 In the ultra-conservative 1980s, when a booming porn industry 

was threatening bourgeois “family” values and prompting reactions from feminist groups like 

Women Against Pornography, this was no minor gesture. But for Neel to normalize Sprinkle has 

nothing to do with palatability; on the contrary, Sprinkle’s exposed vulva, ballooning breasts, 

and BDSM garb clearly align her with the world of freaks and bohemians Neel so loved. The 

portrait of Annie Sprinkle suggests that to be a freak—and moreover, to wear the anxiety and 

fatigue that comes with sustaining oneself as such in a hostile society—is to be human. 

Jeremy Lewison understands the normalization of Neel’s socially marginalized subjects 

like Sprinkle as the product of her profound ability to identify with them by “exploring their 

folds, creases, and idiosyncrasies with her brush, sculpting them as though they were extensions 

of herself.”65 Neel viewed empathy as a critical and even painful aspect of her process. “I get 

terribly involved,” she said, “so I leave myself and I go into that person. Sometimes after the 

person goes, I feel just as though I have an empty inside, that I have nothing inside.”66 Perhaps, 

when painted by Neel, her subjects could only be extensions of herself—products of her attempt 

 
63 Ann Temkin, “Alice Neel: Self and Others,” in Alice Neel, 30. 
64 Nochlin, “Alice Neel,” 286. 
65 Lewison, “Showing the Barbarity of Life: Alice Neel’s Grotesque,” in Alice Neel: Painted Truths, 50. 
66 Murphy and Rhodes, They Are Their Own Gifts. 



 

 33 

to recover her own selfhood from decades of tumultuous personal and collective struggles. 

Despite her prolific output, Neel painted very few self-portraits in her life, the most famous 

being a nude self-portrait produced at age eighty. She was far more interested in being a 

“collector of souls” than in exploring her own image.67 But Neel’s account of inhabiting her 

subjects during their portrait sessions presents a rather literal description of what all portraits 

arguably do: embody some piece of the artist’s subjectivity in the guise of another person. We 

can only see Annie Sprinkle as she is represented by Neel; we are closer, therefore, to accessing 

the artist than we are to reaching the “real” Annie Sprinkle. In this way, as Lewison suggests, 

Neel’s sitters reflect back Neel’s own persona.68 But as I have tried to show, my impression is 

that Neel’s portraits are not so much invested in representing identities as in reflecting back the 

continuously compromised persistence of her subjects’ sense of self. 

The idea that a “real” subject exists at all is tested by the photographic portraits of Cindy 

Sherman, a contemporary of Neel’s in the late seventies and early eighties who continues to use 

her own body to explore how subjects are constituted through representation. In her series of 

Untitled Film Stills, Sherman placed herself in ambiguous, cinematic scenes wherein various 

women (all Sherman in disguise) appear in incomplete but familiar narratives, often responding 

to something taking place “off-screen.” In Untitled Film Still #54 (1980) (fig. 11), Sherman 

poses as a blonde woman walking alone at night, her eyes scanning the darkness as she clutches 

the collar of her coat, a to-be victim in a film noir. She appears illuminated like a deer in 

headlights, exposed and powerless in a black void that threatens to swallow her. Her 

vulnerability carries the unmistakably erotic charge that characterizes helpless women pinned 

 
67 Neel frequently described herself as a “collector of souls” in her artist’s statements, lectures, and in interviews. 
See Alice Neel, “Bloomsburg State College Lecture,” March 21, 1972, Alice Neel papers, Box 1, Folder 21: 
Writings, 1960-1979, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 4. 
68 Lewison, “Showing the Barbarity of Life,” 52. 



 

 34 

under the voyeuristic gaze of classic Hollywood cinema. As Judith Williamson argues, in each 

photograph Sherman invites the viewer to participate in the construction of the depicted mystery 

woman’s identity, and specifically her femininity, not to reward this effort with a conclusive 

answer but to demonstrate that “woman” is located within the image and not in the individual.69 

The variation of feminine types across the series, furthermore, undermines the viewer’s ability to 

settle on a singular concept of “woman”; it is always produced and reinforced by the surface of 

the image.  

Reflecting on critic Patricia Bailey’s assessment that Neel’s work was “a way of 

diminishing her personal sense of separation from life,” the artist replied: “That’s right. It is my 

way of overcoming the alienation. It’s my ticket to reality.”70 Neel and Sherman arguably occupy 

opposite ends of a spectrum representing the breadth of twentieth-century portraiture: At one 

end, representation can at least begin to bridge the gap between oneself and reality; at the other, 

representation itself constitutes what we perceive to be reality. As Rosalind Krauss writes, 

Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills reveal to us that “as far as femininity goes, there is nothing but 

costume.”71 Whereas Sherman compels the viewer to enact the construction of the subject’s 

identity (and in doing so underscores its artificiality), Neel precludes the viewer’s attempt to 

define her subjects by stripping the sitter of a physical context and by refusing the sentimentality 

or authority of culturally embedded configurations of represented types like those Sherman 

exploits in her work. And while Sherman presents herself as fictional, generic women to suggest 

that there is no essential truth (of herself or the characters she inhabits) to be gleaned from 

 
69 Judith Williamson, “Images of ‘Woman,’” Screen 24, Issue 6 (Nov.-Dec. 1983): 40. 
70 Neel, “Alice by Alice,” 183. 
71 Rosalind Krauss, Cindy Sherman, 1975-1993 (New York, Rizzoli, 1993), 17. 



 

 35 

representation, Neel throws herself into her subjects in an endeavor to get at some authenticity of 

that person’s existence, or, perhaps, affirmation of her own.  

But in inhabiting her subjects through painting, Neel does not arrive at truth. She 

approaches the idea of Annie Sprinkle as she exists in herself, but this destination remains only a 

possibility. On one level, the portrait incessantly reminds us that we are looking at a painting. 

Between the incoherent patches of ochre and pale blue clinging to the contours of her body, and 

the sketchy remnants of a reconsidered composition, Annie Sprinkle transparently displays its 

own construction as an image. The figure’s awkward location within the canvas, furthermore, 

underscores the authority of its four corners. On another level, we are reminded that the painting 

depicts a person who is presenting herself in a particular way that cannot amount to who she is. 

The portrait’s campiness, evinced by Sprinkle’s makeup and costume, and by the cartoonish 

rendering of her body, announces her self-presentation as a masquerade. In Sherman’s work, 

there is nothing to be found behind the mask. In Neel’s, the very fact that Sprinkle wears a kind 

of mask endears the viewer to the artificiality of her performance and the person behind it, 

however distant she may be. We don’t get to know the real Annie Sprinkle, but we do find that 

there is more to her than we can ever reach. 

 

  



 

 36 

Conclusion 

Alice Neel’s work achieved greater relevance in the final decades of her life through her 

portraits of subjects whose autonomy and individuality had long been systematically denied but 

were now asserted by the women’s liberation and civil rights movements. Indeed, her six-decade 

career contributed to the history of figurative painting a vast picture gallery of sitters from 

groups rarely dignified by portraiture, though Neel steered clear of the sentimentality and 

idealization that would distort the people she believed to represent the chaos, cruelty, and 

transformation of the twentieth century most authentically. However, the social movements 

which made the appreciation of Neel’s work possible coincided with new conceptions of the 

human being which conflicted with the foundations of portraiture. Now understood to be socially 

constructed and beholden to hierarchies of power, identity could no longer refer to the 

autonomous, Cartesian subject which portraitists had attempted to capture for centuries. But Neel 

was able to carve out her own space in portraiture because her model of the human being was 

aligned with neither the passive, socially determined subject of the twentieth century nor the 

bourgeois individualism of the past.  

Contrary to the mind-body dualism which had characterized Western humanism, the 

world for Neel is experienced through the body, and the psyche is irrevocably shaped by the 

world. As such, her unrelenting attention to the human figure allowed her to feel through human 

experience in all its repression, pain, and anxiety. But although Neel understood the effects of the 

world and its oppressive conditions on the human being, these did not, for Neel, constitute the 

subject in its totality. Buried beneath the weight of self-consciousness, the subject was not fully 

accessible to Neel nor anyone else, but painting could gesture towards its presence. Rather than 

define the people she painted, Neel’s late portraits impart the palpable exhaustion—the “greatest 



 

 37 

torture”—of upholding an identity, a ubiquitous yet private experience which asserts her 

subjects’ humanity more than mere likeness ever could.72 This investment in a never-complete 

struggle that is both collective and individual exemplifies Neel’s position that these categories 

are not mutually exclusive. To closely study the physical and psychological presence of a very 

particular individual, such as an enigmatic art world superstar or an uneasy porn performer, does 

not mean to sacrifice commonalities of experience—namely, the pain of asserting and protecting 

that sense of individuality. At the same time, picturing shared experience does not necessitate the 

rejection of difference, such as that between an elderly white woman from small-town 

Pennsylvania (the artist) and a young African American man drafted into a costly war. It is about 

recognizing that this distance can only be partially and never completely bridged. Understood in 

Neel’s portraits, then, the human being is less a fixed entity than a perpetually shifting 

experience, something to be more felt than definitively established. Portraiture, for Neel, was not 

about reflecting who a person is—this would suggest that who a person is can be grasped, and 

therefore minimized—but about registering how they sustained that identity. As an “anarchic 

humanist,” Neel believed in a kind of soul, but her portraits suggest doubt toward its existence in 

any stable form and refuse the power of the artist to pin it down. We can never fully know 

another person, but through an empathetic recognition of others, we can approach an 

understanding of their predicament of being in the world, and perhaps to an even greater extent, 

our own. Painting can be a vehicle for empathy to arrive at that understanding.  

Despite asserting collective experience over insight into the sitter’s authentic selfhood, 

Neel’s oeuvre nonetheless fits to some degree within the contested portraiture tradition which 

celebrated the portrait’s ability to convey an inner quality of the individual human subject. Her 

 
72 Neel, Alice Neel, directed by Andrew Neel. 



 

 38 

portraits evoke an undeniable psychological presence, whether that presence truly emanated from 

the sitter themselves, the artist’s own projected subjectivity, or an encounter between the two. 

Though she insisted that “soul… starts and ends in your body,” she also recognized that “your 

soul can take a little flight.”73 Neel’s evacuation of herself, which she described as a part of her 

process—when she would “go into that person”—implies a fracturing of Neel’s own subjectivity 

and reflects her belief in the mutability of identity. Psychological depth, for Neel, does not 

measure interiority as a single recess to be mined, but a network of shifting cracks in a fragile 

exterior. Still, we can locate in Neel’s portraits the suggestion of something genuine beneath the 

performance of selfhood that is denied by the photography of Cindy Sherman. Neel’s work 

struggles against the corrosive forces which threaten the coherence of the individual, forces 

which are conquered by the confident figures painted by Barkley Hendricks, yet she also imbues 

her subjects with a kind of resilience that is quickly extinguished in the victims of Andy 

Warhol’s Screen Tests. In Neel’s late portraits, coherence is anxiously defended through the 

stark but imperfect division between the saturated figure and their underdetermined environment, 

in contrast to Vuillard’s portrait of his sister, whose body he sutures to the surfaces of the 

domestic interior. While many of Neel’s subjects face splintering into the void of the canvas, she 

attends to the exterior containers of their “souls,” attempting to reinforce their boundaries as she 

simultaneously exposes the precarity and incompleteness of those very borders.  

The fact that the human being could not be understood in the twentieth century as it had 

been before was not lost on Neel, a meticulous social observer who was born in 1900 and lived 

to see, from near and afar, that century’s most turbulent events and transformative cultural shifts. 

By painting people, it was not her mission to disprove the modernist claim that identity is always 

 
73 Neel, “Inside New York's Art World.” 



 

 39 

porous and unstable, but to repair the breakages the modern subject inevitably sustains in a 

constantly changing world. Her portraits, in other words, suggest that to be human is to endure. 

  



 

 40 

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