T. B. Harlem

Abstract

lice Neel, one of the most important 20th century American portrait painters, was born on January 28, 1900, in Merion Square, PA. She was raised in Colwyn, a suburb of Philadelphia, and attended the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art) from 1921 to 1925. During most of the 1930s, Neel lived in Greenwich Village. Although much of her work during this decade represented her very liberal sociopolitical views, she also, like many other artists, joined the WPA (Works Progress Administration) Federal Art Project, for which she produced idyllic portraits of employed industrial workers and of New York City. From 1938 to the early 1960s, Neel lived in Spanish Harlem, where she portrayed the community’s culture through her depictions of its peoples and dwellings. T. B. Harlem was painted during this period and illustrates the ravages of a poverty-induced illness. The young Puerto Rican patient, Carlos Negron, has had a thoracoplasty, a common treatment for tuberculosis in the preantibiotic era. “In the painting, he had just returned from the hospital, but would soon go back. What a crucifixion he went through,” Neel commented [1]. Although throughout her career Neel painted other subjects such as still lifes, urban landscapes, and street scenes, portraits dominated her output, particularly after 1940. Alice Neel, who, like so many other women artists, worked so long in relative obscurity, became increasingly recognized as a preeminent portrait painter during the last 15 years of her life. She had only a few solo exhibitions before the age of 65, but since then has had more than 100, including several major retrospectives. Although portraiture has been historically associated with the rich and powerful, Neel’s gallery is a personal journal of the people who entered her life, including the left-wing artists and activists in Greenwich Village in the 1930s, the residents of Spanish Harlem during World War II and the McCarthy era, the New York art world during the socially turbulent late 1960s and 1970s, and especially her family. Neel’s portraits are quickly recognized. The subjects look directly at and engage the viewer and dominate the paintings. Her nonfamily figures are usually pulled forward and given little environment except for the chair they are sitting on. In many of the numerous portraits of her two sons and their families and a few of the artists who were important to her, Neel deepens the space and increases the complexity of the background of the painting. Her paintings have an uncanny ability to capture the personalities of her sitters. Neel received an honorary doctorate from the Moore College of Art in 1971, was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1976, and received a 1979 National Women’s Caucus for Art award for outstanding achievement in art, the latter presented to her by President Jimmy Carter. Her paintings are in most major American museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art; the National Gallery of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Whitney Museum of American Art; The Art Institute of Chicago; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco. Alice Neel died on October 13, 1984.