Alice Neel (1900–1984) was an American painter celebrated for her raw, expressive portraits that captured the psychological depth and humanity of her subjects. As the mainstream art of her time pushed further toward abstraction, Neel took a unique path that combined realism, social commentary, and deep empathy, making her a significant portrait artists of the 20th century.
Neel grew up near Philadelphia in a conservative middle-class family. She pursued art seriously and attended the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art & Design), where she developed a strong foundation in traditional art techniques and also began to explore more expressive and emotionally charged forms of portraiture.
In 1925, she married Cuban painter Carlos Enríquez and moved to Havana, where she was exposed to radical politics and modernist movements, expanding her socially conscious worldview. After returning to the US, Neel suffered a series of personal tragedies, including the death of her first daughter and the breakup of her marriage. These experiences marked the beginning of a lifetime of emotional intensity that would be channeled into her art.
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Neel lived in New York City, often in poverty, painting portraits of neighbors, friends, political activists, and fellow artists in Spanish Harlem and later the Upper West Side. Her work was intimate, personal, and deeply human. She rendered her subjects with unflinching honesty, capturing both physical presence and psychological nuance. She also documented marginalized communities, including people of color, immigrants, and the poor, giving them dignity and visibility.
The art world’s preference for abstract expressionism and minimalism left Neel’s figurative work sidelined, and she received little recognition throughout most of her career. In the 1970s however, feminist art historians and activists began to rediscover and champion her work, and in 1974, she had a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, cementing her status as a vital force in American art.
Neel’s legacy has continued to grow, and recent major retrospectives—including the 2021 exhibition Alice Neel: People Come First at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—have reasserted her place as one of the most important and visionary portraitists of the modern era.