MARVELOUS
Cultural critic Hilton Als
has curated a show at David Zwirner called
Uptown, that collects portraits Alice Neel made of her neighbors in Spanish Harlem during
the 60′s and 70′s. It’s possible to stroll through,
take it in, and reach the simple, uncomplicated conclusion, “Marvelous.” The exhibit offers all the pleasures of painting without troubling intellectual or aesthetic subject matter. The canvases are handsome, vibrantly colored, and simple to appraise. Here is a streetwise but troubled young man. Here is an older woman who must have been a knockout in her youth. Here is a distinguished gentleman, a pillar of the community. But there are richer, more uncommon currents just below the surface.
Neel’s manner of depicting her subjects, in small vertical canvases, in a simple frontal view as they gaze straight back at the painter, fuses portraiture with self-presentation — with performance. As a white woman artist living in an enclave of working class blacks, Latinos and immigrants, Neel was an outsider, and remained keenly aware of of her status. Some of the paintings’ titles wrankle: Arab, Black Spanish Family, Two Puerto Rican Boys, Cyrus the Gentle Iranian. Yet her portraits don’t have the sting of anthropology, or offer an empty celebration of diversity. Her approach is clear-eyed and painterly. These canvases document the world she moves in, just as it is, without adornment, and without drama.
Neel depicts her subjects truly, soberly noting asymmetries and blemishes in face and figure. The sitters offer themselves easily for view but not for judgment. They are preternaturally relaxed, without a need to put on airs, sitting patiently as their portraits are crafted. Neel, in return, grants them a distance and mystery that confer dignity.
Alice Neel, Anselmo, 1962. Image courtesy of Alice Neel and David Zwirner.