The light filters down from the rooflights through the grid of roughly-hewn old timber beams and joists. This is not the shiny skyscraper architecture of downtown London, nor is it out in the suburbs and, indeed tall new residential blocks are appearing all around. In London, where does downtown start and uptown start? Given its location , is the area around the Angel, Old Street and City Road perhaps midtown?
Appropriately, in this warehouse space, several of Alice Neel’s paintings sit underneath the exposed warehouse timber roof, with an exhibition that covers 50 years in which she was based in upper Manhattan, first in East Harlem, then in the Upper West Side, where she lived from 1962 until her death in 1984.
Against the odds, Neel became one of the most important artists in America of her time. Born in Pennsylvania in 1900, Neel had to support her parents after she left school, but after three years took art classes and, in due course, graduated from the Philadelphia School of Design for Women in 1925, by which time she had met the Cuban painter Carlos Enríquez, whom she married in 1925 before moving to Havana to live with Enríquez’s family and joining the Cuban artistic community of young writers, artists and musicians which established her lifelong political consciousness and commitment to equality in all forms.
Neel is best-known for her portraits of friends, family, neighbours, lovers, poets, artists and strangers, several of which are on show here in London at Victoria Miro’s gallery and who have apparently simple expressive images, but yet they hint at deeper meanings, with psychological and emotional depths which probe the character of the people she painted and didn’t care if they were rich and famous or poor and insignificant – all had a story to tell at a time when New York was a hotbed of racial and societal tensions and, quite shocking at the time, her work represented Latinos, blacks and Asians, while mainstream artists still focused on white middle-class men and women.
The exhibition, curated by US critic and author Hilton Als, places Neels work in context alongside other items which set the scene for this era which transformed the world – photographs, musical album covers and books of the time. This was a time of great change and Alice Neel played a leading role in that.
