Alice Neel the Family

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Alice Neel, The Family, 1982, Signed, Lithograph, Edition 175, 39 1/4" x 35" Framed Size, 31 1/2" x 27" Sheet Size

Born outside Philadelphia in 1900, Alice Neel was one of the great American painters of the 20th century and a pioneer among women artists. Influenced by European expressionists and the darker arts of Spanish painting, Neel honed a style that was distinctively her own while training at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women.
Neel had a strong social conscience and equally strong left-wing beliefs, and never conformed to avant-garde movements. She was a member of the Works Progress Administration while living in New York City’s Greenwich Village in the 1930s, painting urban scenes and portraits of left wing figures. Between 1940-1950, Neel’s popularity significantly diminished due to her affiliation with the Communist Party and relocation to Spanish Harlem. In the 1960s, however, she made a determined effort to reintegrate with the art world by moving to the Upper West Side and producing a series of dynamic portraits of artists, curators, and gallery owners.
Even as her fame increased, Neel was never restrained by convention. She continued to focus on the people of New York who intersected with her life – from art world figures and neighbors to strangers facing social discrimination. Neel was interested in all humanity, celebrating the freedom of women to express their independence and sympathizing with the causes of gay rights, racism, and trade unionists.
She exhibited widely across the United States throughout the 1970s and was honored with two retrospective exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art: once in 1974 and again in 2000. In 2010, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston organized a retrospective that traveled to the Whitechapel in London and the Moderna Museet Malmö in Sweden. It was well received, and another traveled through Europe in 2016 – resulting in her finally being recognized as a world renowned artist of the 20th century.