Alice Neel: Hot Off the Griddle

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Her personality and sense of humour shines through, along with her immense pride and beaming smile at finally being accepted. The accompanying book Alice Neel: Hot Off The Griddle , edited by Eleanor Nairne, with essays by Eleanor Nairne, Hilton Als and poetry by Daisy Lafarge, is published by Prestel, March 2023. The exhibition shows a reportage style film of the area which crackles with life and personality and brings an extra dimension to the portraits of street children and neighbours that are displayed alongside. Alice Neel: Hot Off The Griddle is the largest exhibition to date in the UK of the work of American artist Alice Neel (1900–1984).

Among others, they rub shoulders with Life magazine editor David Bourdon (purring like “the cat that’s got the cream”, according to Neel) and Gregory Battcock, the legendary secret-keeper of Manhattan’s queer gossip (whose stern expression resembles, oddly, “an Asturian miner”). People Come First, the largest Neel retrospective yet staged in New York, monopolised the Tisch Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last summer. They say way less about the state of American life than her portraits, especially the depictions of her new Harlem neighbours. This one has come from the Pompidou in Paris; Neel’s star has only risen in those intervening years. Neel has observed details about the mother-child relationship that have come from her own mothering experience, the veins of her breast, the dress pushed down to expose the breast, the dark eyes.The format is reminiscent of a story-book – small in stature with a rounded spine and warm paper tone.

Moving downstairs and on through the decades, a large hall of paintings showcased the life and power of her work, fizzing with energy, colour and personality. It’s interesting to look back to who some of those historical figures were during the 20th century who became important role models or influences on those artists. Her commitment to a vigorous, unabashed style is manifest here in her painting of herself with her lover John Rothschild, one pissing into the toilet, the other into the sink, and her madcap portrait of Joe Gould as a manic satyr with a dangling string of penises . Part of what I find so compelling about looking at her work is how they don’t calcify into a single fixed image of a person,” Nairne said. But she was living on welfare, and working out of her home; sitters posed mere moments from where her children slept.

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