ADAA: The Art Show
Alice Neel February 27 – March 1, 2020
ADAA: The Art Show - Alice Neel - Art Fairs - Cheim Read

Alice Neel at ADAA The Art Show 2020

Alice Neel (1900 - 1984)
NANCY AND OLIVIA  1968
Oil on canvas
30 x 30 inches
76.2 x 76.2 centimeters
© The Estate of Alice Neel

Cheim & Read will present a group of important historical works by Alice Neel, with a focus on her early work from 1928 — shortly after her move from Havana to New York and the tragic death of her first, infant daughter in 1927 — through 1973. Though active and established in New York, it would not be until the rise of Feminism in the 1970s when Neel would receive her due with a 1974 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. This body of work is essential to the artist’s development of her signature mark-making and irreverent style. Throughout her life, Neel’s paintings changed dramatically in terms of style and subject matter. Neel paints views out her Spanish Harlem apartment window, sweeping seascapes, and images of New York streetlife in addition to her iconic portraits.

 

In Ninth Avenue El, 1935, the artist’s attention to the electric lights — once a symbol of Modernist urbanity in the work of painters like Robert Delaunay — here lends a foreboding aura. Neel was resolutely focused on the pedestrian view of the street, and included figures, train cars, and street lights. In the wake of the Great Depression, the figure are oppressed by their urban environment, weighted under the twilight blue sky and the black train tracks. Neel was forward-thinking in her use of content and narrative and anticipated later works by political and social artists.

 

In an exquisite 1968 double portrait, Nancy & Olivia, Neel painted her daughter-in-law, Nancy Neel, with her granddaughter, Olivia. Neel frequently painted mothers and daughters, and the subject cannot be separated from the traumatic loss of her first daughter to sickness, and her second to her husband’s return to Cuba. The minimal application of the almost-abstract background underscores Neel’s affinity with contemporaneous abstract painting techniques.

 

The artist will be the subject of an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Alice Neel: un regard engage will open in June 2020. A comprehensive retrospective exhibition, Alice Neel: Painter as Radical Humanist, will open in March 2021 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

 

For additional information, please contact Stephen Truax, stephen@cheimread.com.


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November 21, 2019 – February 29, 2020
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The Female Gaze, Part Two: Women Look at Men
The Women in Our Life
The Women in Our Life
A Fifteen Year Anniversary Exhibition
June 30 – September 17, 2011
The Female Gaze
The Female Gaze
Women Look at Women
June 25 – September 19, 2009
I Am As You Will Be
I Am As You Will Be
The Skeleton in Art
September 20 – November 3, 2007
Soutine and Modern Art
Soutine and Modern Art
The New Landscape, The New Still Life
June 22 – September 9, 2006
Soutine and Modern Art
Soutine and Modern Art
The New Landscape/The New Still LIfe
May 31, 2006
Alice Neel: Men in Suits
Alice Neel: Men in Suits
Also on view: Photographs from the 1920s and 1930s of businessmen, entrepreneurs and industrialists by August Sander
March 4 – April 25, 1998

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