Haunting portraits of twins, emasculated mothers, patients and the famous make for an eerie yet emotional experience at the Whitechapel Gallery’s current exhibition, ‘Alice Neel: Painted Truths’.

This is Alice Neel’s (1900–84) first major retrospective, which brings together more than 60 works spanning the nearly seven decades of the American artist’s career, divided into thematic sections. Though the works reveal a variety of evolving styles and subjects, ‘Painted Truths’ does what it says on the tin. Neel’s portraits, almost always set in the interior, are unforgiving and brutally honest – the sick and elderly are deathly pale; children are gawky, devilish and vulnerable while their mothers appear bitter and exhausted. The works are successfully unsentimental yet filled with compassion and empathy, aided by her later loose brushwork and, no doubt, personal experiences – Neel lost her first two children, one to diphtheria and the other in a custody battle.
 

Andy Warhol, 1970 (see above) is a prime example of the artist’s style and one of several ‘art celebrities’ depicted, including Meyer Schapiro and Linda Nochlin. The Warhol portrait reveals an ordinary-looking middle-aged man, yet he is semi-naked and, as the victim of a gunshot wound, sporting a medical corset. This picture, more than any other in the show, demonstrates Neel’s accomplishment as a portrait painter. Andy Warhol offers itself as a fascinating and ironic counterpoise to the celebrities seen in Warhol’s own art – while she exposes vulnerability and the personal, her subject is famously associated with the idea of the constructed persona. The image is further astonishing given Warhol’s notably elusive nature and tight control over his own image.
 

Neel continued to paint intimate portraits of her family and friends (famous or not) throughout her entire career. Her dedication to the portrait is demonstrated by her refusal to join the more popular Expressionist movement in New York at the time. She has since become a figurehead for feminism and a younger generation of artists concerned with the painterly and honest portrait – artists such as Peter Doig, Elizabeth Peyton, Marlene Dumas and Kaye Donachie.
 

Congratulations to the Whitechapel for putting Alice Neel firmly on the map and revealing a more complex history of 20^th-century art in New York.
 

‘Alice Neel: Painted Truths’ is at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, until 17 September 2010.
 

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