I had not seen the work of American painter Alice Neel until I saw this film, and the desire on the part of her family for her to be more widely recognised is partly what drives the telling of her story. This desire is not misplaced. Neel’s expressive portraits are often powerful and technically developed, but as a female figurative painter during a period when abstraction and masculinity were all the rage, her work was obscured for most of her lifetime.
Over the course of her career she traversed a range of visual styles, however she adamantly retained a commitment to the exploration of the human psyche. I was most convinced by her mid period work. In Mady, 1948, the subject is seated in front of a red door, her deep blue skirt standing out from the rusty background. While this red background/blue foreground recalls Matisse, Neel’s colour is more solid, and she paints heavy noir-ish shadows that cut across one side of the face. In John, 1933, the subject’s ghostly face is painted in sharp profile. The shape of the head has a naive quality, a tender line tracing up the back of the neck, across the top of the head, over the forehead and down the long thin nose. The blood red tie set almost in the centre of the painting is like a long tear, or a cut in the image. For me, the sombre tones and the angular quality of these figures are more striking than the fluid style of her late paintings.
The film was made by Neel’s grandson, Andrew Neel, and examines her life through her family and friends as well as the usual array of other painters and art historians. The film uses Neel’s paintings as a departure point for each part of her story, and these are shot well, often using slow pans to observe the details of the work before pulling out to reveal the whole. There is also archival footage of Neel painting which gives an insight into the way she worked.
However it is the personal element of the film that gives it it’s voice. Neel’s commitment to painting meant she struggled financially, and she seems to have been prone to falling in love with unreliable and unstable men. Her sons reacted against this bohemian lifestyle, Hartley becoming a doctor and Richard a lawyer. Richard comes across as the most hurt of Neel’s two sons, but also as the most honest and accepting of his feelings. Hartley, Andrew’s father, avoids questions regarding their financial situation when they were children, and doesn’t acknowledge his father Sam, who is depicted here as abusive and unhinged. In a touching moment Hartley notices a family of birds outside on the lawns, and his enthusiasm for watching them with a pair of binoculars shows a man who copes with his pain by looking outside himself, and at the same time provides the film with an image of a nurturing family unit so unlike his own.
