Alice Neel: Painted Truths

This is the book that argued Alice Neel belongs in a European lineage of figure painting, and it was the first survey to make that case at scale outside the United States.

Organised by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and published in 2010 with distribution by Yale University Press, Painted Truths accompanied an exhibition that travelled to the Whitechapel Gallery in London and the Moderna Museet in Malmo. Jeremy Lewison, formerly director of collections at Tate, edited the 296-page volume and led its reassessment, placing Neel's sitters alongside Munch, Kokoschka and the school of London rather than reading her only as an American realist working against the grain of abstraction. The plates cover the full span of her work, from the 1930s to the portraits of the 1970s and early 1980s, and the essays take up her handling of the nude, of pregnancy and of the sitter's psychological exposure.

Neel (1900-1984) painted the people around her for fifty years with almost no institutional support, and the run of exhibitions that began with this one has since made her a fixture of the museum canon. The collection also holds Alice Neel: Uptown and the Metropolitan Museum's Alice Neel: People Come First.