Alice Neel, Uptown

The show is a new chapter of the London show curated by Hilton Als. This concise presentation includes a number of previously unseen paintings and works on paper Alice Neel realised over the 5 decades she lived in upper Manhattan (1938 – 1984).
Alice Neel’s portraits are an unparalleled chronicle of New York personalities – both famous and unknown – she encountered when she decided to give up the relative comfort of Greenwich Village to live in Spanish Harlem, to search for the “truth”. The exhibition opens with a 1945 portrait of the musician Armando Perez and includes other figures from Harlem’s cultural circle, including Sarah Shiller who, with her husband, supported left wing artists such as Neel during the period. Neel’s portraits of women and children, such as Mother and Child, 1938, and Baby and Blue Sofa, 1939-40, are especially expressive of intimacy and compassion, as seen through the prism of her own experience as a woman and a mother.