Alice Neel's Women from the 1970S: Backlash to Fast Forward (Portaits, ISSUES AND Insights) (Report‪)‬

When criticized during the Depression by her fellow radical intellectuals for painting portraits rather than 'the masses,' Alice Neel (1900-84) responded, "One plus one plus one is a crowd." (10 It is worth considering what she meant by that statement. The majority of Neel's portraits are indeed of individuals, but Neel did not share modernism's cult of individuality. As an unrepentant (if erratic) Communist, she thought in terms of the individual's relation to society as a whole, and only rarely, in bald caricatures such as the suburban art mavens Irene and Eva (1972), did she depict her sitters as mindless social constructs. Rather, the members of her "American Portrait Gallery" (2) were included less as types than as random samples for investigation. Literally sitting at the conjunction of often conflicting forces: social, psychological, political and biological, each depicted individual fits multiple categories: gender, race, age, sexual orientation, class, profession, belief system. In deciding how to balance her sitter's multiple attributes, Neel described her task as the visual summary of "what the world has done to them and their retaliation." The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has used the more academic term 'habitus' (or social education) to define personality: "...the inscription of social power relationships on the body ... at once produced and expressed through our movements, gestures, facial expressions, manners, ways of walking, and ways of looking at the world." (3) It is no small measure of Neel's achievement as an artist that she was able to consistently translate each sitter's habitus into paint. With some justification, therefore, Neel has been characterized as a sort of artist-sociologist who revived and redirected the dying genre of ameliorative portraiture by merging objectivity with subjectivity, realism with expressionism. In visually interpreting a person's habitus, Neel understood that she could not be an objective observer, that her depictions would of necessity include her own response. Her portraits do not so much reveal a personality or a 'unique self,' as provide a record of an encounter or conversation. Like the anthropologist/sociologist Sara Lawrence Lightfoot, who described her educational research as "the art of portraiture," Neel positions her sitters in relation to her own changing situation. Her approach to portraiture as a quasi-sociological investigation requires, in the end, that the individual take her place among the group, to be seen as part of an era (synchronically) and as persons evolving and changing over time (diachronically).