Alice Neel

Alice Neel was born near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1900 and died in 1984 in New York. 

Alice Neel is known for her daring honesty in her pursuit of what she termed ‘the truth’ – of the individual and the broader society in which individual lives were lived. A painter of people, cityscapes, landscapes and still lifes, she was a woman with a strong social conscience and equally strong beliefs.

Neel’s is an art characterised by honesty. Throughout her career-long commitment to depicting the human condition and her practice of painting people from many walks of life, she addressed her subjects on canvas without preliminary sketches. The result of this direct approach is a body of work that preserves the spontaneity of initial ideas and the liveliness of the one-to-one encounter. Her paintings of mothers and babies reveal her deep understanding of their close bond while her depictions of the elderly reveal an empathy for the changes that accompany old age.