Alice Neel

Alice Neel used bold brushstrokes and deliberately left sections of this canvas unpainted. This created a directness and sense of emotional connection in her portrayal of the sculptor Nancy Selvage. 

Late in Neel’s long career, her piercing portraits gained acknowledgment with the rise of the feminist movement. Neel explained, “A good portrait of mine has even more than just the accurate features. It has some other thing. If I have any talent in relation to people, apart from planning the whole canvas, it is my identification with them.”

–Wai Yee Chiong, curator of Asian art

In the 1960s, when abstraction was the dominant style in art, Alice Neel continued to work in a figurative mode, creating portraits of her friend and fellow artist Nancy Selvage. Using expressionistic line and vivid color, Neel captures the particular idiosyncrasies of her subject. Characteristically, she left sections of the canvas unpainted, thereby giving the portrait a sense of immediacy. After years of neglect, Neel gained recognition in her later years, as the women’s movement generated interest in the personal subject matter of her paintings.