Ara Osterweil
IN A 1978 INTERVIEW, Alice Neel recalled that an
acquaintance once approvingly told her she painted
“like a man,” but the artist herself rejected the very
notion of gendered painting. “I don’t feel that there is
definite female painting,” she said. “I don’t feel that you
could tell a man’s painting from a woman’s painting.”
Transcending any essentialist approach to gender, her
portraits of mothers register a complex ambivalence that
resonates poignantly with anyone who has ever experi-
enced the terror of keeping another being alive. In spite
of her resistance to gendering the creative process, Neel’s
vision is inextricable from her mothering of both paint-
ings and children. By imaging radical confrontations
with others who are also extensions of the self, Neel cap-
tures the wonder of procreation and the inclusive profun-
dity of caregiving. This kind of mothering is more than
a recurring motif in Neel’s work; it is a way of seeing. In
her portraits of pregnant and postpartum women, Neel
shows that the body is a changeling vessel, sometimes
bloated, sometimes tired, anxiously attuned to the other’s
gaze, and always in the thick of relationality, even when
alone. As early as 1930, when she painted Degenerate
Madonna, Neel had rejected idealized images of mother
and child in which the labor of parenting has been ren-
dered as immaculate as Jesus’s conception.
Neel envisions not just all of her mothers, but all of
her others in their vulnerability and ragged persever-
ance, her famous blue line limning the gestural idiosyn-
crasies her subjects adopt to survive. It is as if Neel’s
paintings returned to the specular scene that Jacques
Lacan famously analyzes in his essay on the mirror
stage. In Lacan’s account, the infant only achieves self-
recognition after being held up by their mother in front
of the looking glass day after day for many months. The
revelation of the startling coherence of their surprisingly
bounded body catalyzes the development of the ego
(“That’s me! I am that!”) and the accompanying recog-
nition “I am not that.” By which they mean “I am not
her,” the mother (Lacan myopically presumes that the
parent who gives birth and who performs these rituals
is always female). Yet the inception of ego in and as an
image is a fraught business. For although the infant
appears far more coherent than experience might lead a
fledgling consciousness to expect, the mediating force of
the image cleaves the very ego it births. To be one with
one’s image is to be inevitably doubled and divided. The
primary recognition of the self is simultaneous with the
discovery of one’s alienation from it.
But Lacan forgets about, or maybe is just not inter-
ested in, the mother holding up the infant—what she sees
in the euphoric scene of egoic recognition unfolding in her
arms. Neel doesn’t forget. The mother doesn’t disappear
just because the child may become blinded to her. The
mother sees. She watches the other shed the carapace of
her skin and try on the contours of a new self. In nearly
all of her portraits, Neel becomes the mirror into which
her subjects look. In Nancy and Olivia, 1967, Alice sees
her daughter-in-law Nancy and paints her in a way that
recognizes the renewed drama and crisis that mother-
hood brings. It is not only the infant who is surprised to
encounter their uncannily bounded self. Yet what did
Neel’s daughters-in-law—painted by the artist with
expressions that telegraph I am overwhelmed—make of
their mother-in-law, a bohemian who had married a
Cuban painter and moved to Havana before settling in
Harlem, who had four children with three different men,
lost two of them, and raised the other two in such poverty
that her older son suffered from malnutrition?
As her own kin must have known well, Neel was inti-
mately familiar with the way in which precarity chal-
lenges the capacity of maternal protection. In The Spanish
Family, 1943, she depicts a shadowed mother, Margarita
Negrón, surrounded by three of her children. Neel made
this work not long after Margarita’s husband, Carlos
Santiago Negrón, was diagnosed with tuberculosis;
Harlem, where the family lived, was one of the worst TB
hot spots in New York. Neel eschewed the universalizing
humanism of white progressivism that oversimplified the
very real effects of socially constructed differences. While
her gaze is not that of the sympathetic yet pathologizing
outsider, it doesn’t presume the absolute intimacy of the
insider, either. Carlos, whom Neel painted in T.B. Harlem,
1940, was the brother of Neel’s partner, José Santiago
Negrón, a Puerto Rican singer and guitarist with whom
she moved from Greenwich Village to Spanish Harlem in
1938, just before the birth of their son, Richard. Although
they never married, Negrón’s family was Neel’s own. Yet
all of her pictures have this simultaneous quality of famil-
ial intimacy and observational amplitude. For a less
expansive artist, this might be a contradiction, but for
Neel, this simultaneity was the very definition of look-
ing. Whether they were lovers, neighbors, family, friends,
acquaintances, allies, or rivals, all of Neel’s subjects were
worthy of the same nuanced attention.
As we may glean from her portraits of individuals
whose lives are visibly complicated by their gender, race,
ethnicity, class, and neighborhood, Neel was attuned to
intersectionality avant la lettre. Over the years, her vision
became increasingly attuned to women in their multiplic-
ity. Her portrait Linda Nochlin and Daisy, 1973, depicts
its intent adult subject as an intellectual, a feminist, a
critic, a woman, and a mother simultaneously. One pro-
tective hand rests on the thigh of her small daughter, a
ginger-haired doppelgänger of her mother already
dressed in a feminist pantsuit. Although we don’t see
Neel, this is a portrait of two women who spent their lives
devoted to seeing and making art history anew, engaged
in the act of looking at each other. The portrait captures
more than the recognition of camaraderie and complicity
between a Great Woman Painter and the groundbreaking
feminist critic who demanded to know why there have
been no great women artists. Nochlin insisted on making
the contributions of women artists legible in the male-
dominated genealogy of Western art history. Neel’s por-
trait of the “engaged feminist intellectual” likewise insists
that we recognize Nochlin not only as a thinker but also
as a mother. But the painting implies, too, that we recog-
nize the unseen painter as the very answer to the question
Nochlin’s famed essay poses, which is, of course, a trick
question. There have been great women artists—though
they have been rendered invisible.
Yet I can’t help but wonder about Neel’s charged
investment in paintings of mothers and daughters. Her first
daughter died of diphtheria before her first birthday; her
second daughter, Isabetta, was virtually kidnapped when
Neel’s then partner, the Cuban painter Carlos Enriquez,
took the child back to Cuba. Gutted by despair, Neel
was hospitalized after trying to commit suicide. She only
saw Isabetta three more times. During one of those visits,
in 1934, Neel painted her six-year-old daughter, naked,
as children are wont to be. The portrait is provocative.
Far more than her other portraits of children from this era,
it captures the child’s defiance of the painter’s scrutiny.
With her determined hands on her tiny hips, her vulva
exposed, and her hair blown back into sculpture, the
six-year-old Isabetta is a force of nature portrayed with
an absolute lack of sentimentality. Neel sees as a mother
who recognizes that our children never fully belong to us,
and we only partially to them. “In the beginning I didn’t
want children, I just got them,” Neel once said. “I loved
Isabetta, of course I did, but I wanted to paint.”
In Neel’s portrait Carmen and Judy, 1972, we are
again confronted by a daughter’s exposed body and raw
vulnerability. In this tender portrait of maternal love and
filial need, the infant’s exposed pudendum is mirrored
by the mother’s exposed breast. The child’s hunger is
answered by the mother’s sustenance. Yet the painting
also suggests the limits of this synchronicity. You don’t
need to be a mother to feel the insatiability of need and
the heartbreaking insufficiency of the mortal body that
Neel’s portrait reveals. As Hilton Als writes, “There is
not one of us who has not been Judy—life has harmed
us, injured the brain and heart, and yet there is the soft-
ness of the woman who holds us. As she does so, we
imagine she holds up the world too.” Yet care is not
equivalent to possession and is certainly no guarantee
of protection. As Neel knew so well, sometimes our chil-
dren slip away from us, even become unknown.
Neel’s portraits of relationality are not just for other
mothers but speak to and include us all. Endless need
and poignant insufficiency. Multiplicity and defiant self-
reliance. Self-fashioning and its seams. Intimate entwin-
ing. Solitude in togetherness. If Neel’s vision of complex
personhood was indelibly impacted by her own mater-
nal loss, then perhaps this intimate estrangement is what
makes room for us and allows for our simultaneous
identification and disidentification with her subjects. We
are all Judy, none of us is Judy, only Judy is Judy, and we
only know Judy through Carmen’s love for her, which
is to say not at all, which is only part of what Alice Neel
gives us here. “A face that only a mother could love”
was every face that Neel painted.
Neel’s irradiating eye is legible not only in her portraits
of mothers and children. Take her haunting, unfinished
portrait Black Draftee (James Hunter), 1965. Neel never
completed the painting because Hunter never returned to
her studio for a second sitting; one presumes he was sent
off to Vietnam. Although his face is rendered exquisitely,
the unfinished canvas speaks to how much we don’t know
about this young Black man whose control over his own
body was colonized by a racist military state. His expres-
sion registers poignantly, but his body is quite literally miss-
ing in action. Neel doesn’t try to fill in the gaps. Instead,
she allows them to register as signs of the chasm
between what we see and what we understand. Though
effaced by history, his life is nonetheless more complex
than any frame an artist could put around it. “People
come first,” said Neel, as the exhibition of her work at
New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art insistently
reiterates, but people are more than we can ever know
or need them to be. We are all disappearing in the way
of all flesh, but we are not all James Hunter. We are not
all casualties of state violence. Some of us get to live—
and look. n
“Alice Neel: People Come First” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York, through August 1; travels to Guggenheim Bilbao, September 17,
2021–January 23, 2022; Fine Awrts Museums of San Francisco, March
12–July 10, 2022.
ARA OSTERWEIL IS A WRITER AND PAINTER AND A PROFESSOR OF WORLD
CINEMA AND CULTURAL STUDIES AT MCGILL UNIVERSITY IN MONTREAL.