Alice Neel

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.