Alice Neel: People Come First

Alice Neel called herself a collector of souls, and this catalogue makes the case that her portraits are less likeness than testimony.

Published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2021 for the retrospective of the same name, the book surveys seven decades of Neel's painting through more than a hundred works reproduced across 201 colour plates. The sequence moves from the Depression-era portraits and the Communist-affiliated work of the 1930s through the years in Spanish Harlem, where her sitters were neighbours, children and the people the art world was not looking at, and on to the later New York portraits of political organisers, queer artists, critics, pregnant women and her own family. Cityscapes, still lifes and erotic drawings are included alongside them. Essays by Kelly Baum and Randall Griffey and contributions from Meredith A. Brown, Julia Bryan-Wilson and Susanna V. Temkin take up her depictions of queer subjects, her mixture of abstraction and figuration, and her lifelong engagement with civil rights, feminism and the politics of who gets painted. The volume is a 256-page hardcover at 20.3 x 29.2 cm.

Neel (1900-1984) worked in obscurity for most of her career, given her first museum retrospective at the Whitney only in 1974, and has since become one of the defining American figure painters of the twentieth century. The collection also holds Alice Neel: Uptown and Alice Neel: Painted Truths.