Hot Off The Griddle

Alice Neel (1900-1984)

I visited the Alice Neel retrospective; Hot Off The Griddle at The Barbican this week. It’s on until the 21st May if you want to go and see it yourself.

I’d never heard of Alice Neel until I read Katy Hessel’s fantastic book; The Story of Art Without Men. Katy has a Substack, if you want to know more about what she does. She also has an Instagram account called The Great Women Artists and a podcast of the same name. Everything she creates is worth reading/watching. Her enthusiasm and knowledge are infectious, and she wears her considerable expertise lightly. I find her to be super inclusive, no matter where you’re coming from with your interest in art. My knowledge and enthusiasm has expanded exponentially since I discovered Katy and I am deeply grateful to her for her bringing Alice Neel into my life.

Neel was an American artist who had a long but largely under the radar career until quite late on in her life. She was a painter who delighted in the human form when portraiture was considered old fashioned. She loved capturing people’s lives and particularly painting those who would never normally be considered portrait material. She was a political activist who made her art political and her politics into art.

The title for the show comes from a quotation that’s all you really need to unlock an understanding of Neel’s work.

‘One of the reasons I painted was to catch life as it goes by, right hot off the griddle.’

There are loads of things you can read about Neel, by people far more qualified to write about her than me, so I won’t pretend to know her in that way. I simply wanted to capture what I was thinking and feeling as I stood in front of the paintings.

I was heartened, and often am, by looking at an artist’s work over their creative lifetime. As an artist/maker myself I often forget that people don’t always start out brilliant, or knowing what their style is, or what medium they want to work in. Their work grows and changes as they do. A retrospective exhibition is, to my mind, a supremely comforting thing.

I am not blowing my own artistic trumpet here, by the way. Even Neel’s early works are fantastic, and far more accomplished than I will ever be, but it is clear that she was on a journey to her own style and that it took time and hard, hard work for her to be the Alice Neel that is instantly recognisable as her.

In the early pieces I thought you could see a nod to French painters like Berthe Morisot and Pierre Bonnard. After a while there seemed to be a switch to a clearer form of painting that reminded me of German expressionism. Some of the sketches made me think of a mash up of Egon Schiele and Hockney’s pencil drawings of his friends and lovers. Long, etiolated limbs and a looseness that implies intimacy and connection to the subject.

Right from the beginning she exhibits an ease with the human form that translates into a form of empowering self-acceptance that simply grows and blooms over time.

Over and over again I saw glimpses in her work of some of the more surreal, character paintings by L.S. Lowry, and he was the person I thought of most as I walked around the whole exhibition. His seemed to be a more shy passion for people, as if he couldn’t quite give himself full permission to grab life. Neel’s approach was far more open, both permissive and permissible. I would really like to see an exhibition of his and her works hung side by side like the Emin/Munch exhibition at the RA a few years back.

Again, I know that Hockney’s drawings were later than Neel’s pieces and that she may or may not have been directly influenced by the people I am talking about. It’s not about accuracy of the art history timeline for me. I’m just trying to capture my impressions.

You can clearly see a point where she suddenly realises who she is as an artist in her own right - and what an artist she is. In the exhibition the curators have marked this by hanging the earlier works upstairs and the later, more Neelish paintings downstairs.

If you wanted to get all metaphorical here (something I would never do, obviously) you could talk about the journey down the stairs as a mapping of the artist’s journey down and into herself and that translating into total confidence in capturing other people. She didn’t have to prove anything to anyone after a certain point, which meant that the later paintings have a supreme generosity to them that is just a gorgeous treat for the viewer.

There is a great sense of physicality in the paint on the canvas which marries itself beautifully to the lives she chooses to paint. You can see thick, wodges of paint that define the body in a sculptorly way. Dashes and runs of paint commit to the living movement of the subject that is by necessity still for a moment. She often outlines the people she paints in dark colours, which any art teacher will tell you is an absolute no-no, but which works so well for Neel. Her people exist solely and utterly for themselves and in the private world that is created between the painter and the painted. They are never part of the background. They could be cut out and dropped anywhere and still be themselves.

She is a mistress of making the subject the most important person/people in the world in that moment, but without the pomp that portrait painters often bring to their work. She is not about making the person look ‘better’ than real life. She is all about making them realise that real life is lucky to have them, just as they are.

Sometimes she leaves areas of the paintings unfinished. A naked chair leg, a cushion, an arm, a hand. To me, this felt like as soon as she knew that the painting was right, there was no need to carry on painting. She wasn’t painting for anyone else but herself and the person being painted. It gives an intimacy to the paintings that is more telling than any of the nudes she paints.

Sometimes she paints her subjects as if they are about to climb out of the canvas. They peer and hunch forward, they push the edges of the painting. Even in their stillness there is so much movement and life that at times you fully expect them to grab you and pull you into their world.

I was completely mesmerised by the way she paints hands. I have a minor obsession about painters and hands which started with Tracey Emin (I will write about this another time) and Neel very much satisfied that particular itch for me. The hands she paints are often front and centre of her portraits. They rest, but you know they are the life of the painting, the vehicle by which things happen. Hands are a verb for Neel and she gives them sanctity in her depiction of them in an almost Medieval way, with long, agile fingers, sitting still in moment but ready to pick up the beat of life at any moment.

I think I may have done Neel dirty, here. I make her sound terribly worthy, and that’s one thing she most definitely is not. She fought for causes she believed in and painted people she believed in, and she most certainly believed in herself, but there is such humour and beauty and life here too. You get the sense that sitting for Neel would have been a lot of fun. And you can never overestimate the importance of fun.