The three
pairs of patent-leather shoes are the most striking detail in Alice Neel’s 1970
portrait of the Gruen family—a whimsical quirk one notices before anything
else. The shoes are the first thing Neel noticed, too, when John Gruen, the art
critic; his wife, Jane Wilson, the painter and former fashion model; and Julia
Gruen, their young daughter (now head of the Keith Haring Foundation) arrived
at her apartment to pose. After carefully arranging the three on a loveseat,
“she exclaimed, ‘Oh how wonderful! You’re all wearing patent-leather shoes!'”
recalls John. “And that was so intriguing to her, and I believe that when she
started putting color, she started with the shoes.”
At the time
of the Gruen portrait, both Neel and Jane were represented by Graham Gallery in
New York. As John—an intimate of such members of the cultural elite as Leonard
Bernstein, Rudolf Nureyev, Frank O’Hara, and Larry Rivers—recounts, Neel
approached him and said, “‘I would like to paint you, your wife, and your
child. I have never done a portrait with three people in it.’ So I told Jane,
‘Guess what? Alice Neel wants to paint our portrait,’ and Jane said, ‘oh, how
wonderful,’ and Julia said ‘ooh.’ And I said, ‘you are going to come along any
time she wants us, because this is going to be history.'”
“It’s very
powerful,” John acknowledges, “and I don’t know that many people could bring it
into their home to live with.” Still, he says, “I had always loved Alice’s
work, because it was a mixture of the sublime and the grotesque. The sublime
and the grotesque to me were part of her esthetic, were part of what she was
conveying to the world—that people are beautiful and grotesque, that people are
poignant and tragic, that they had big interior lives. She gave them big
interior lives. She saw the lives in them that even they did not recognize.
What emerged was a kind of desperate beauty.”
Alice Neel:
Collector of Souls is the title given by the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag to Alice
Neel: Painter of Modern Life. The exhibition opened in the Gemeentemuseum Den
Haag on 5 November and runs until 12 February 2017.
Her early
work is broody and scraggy, like Van Goghs
painting of the Potato Eaters. But in the sixties and seventies Alice Neel's portraits open up, loosen, loose the caricatural and their ideological ugliness.
These paintings are clear and intimate, like the portrait of The Gruens.
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