A painter of people, Neel didn’t care about being fashionable or in step with avant-garde movements: ‘One of the reasons I painted was to catch life as it goes by,’ she explained, ‘right hot off the griddle. And it is the weird fact of our own mind-body coexistence that seems at the heart of Neel’s ungainly style. At odds with the expected large-sized exhibition catalogue, this publication has been designed to be more considered. Late Neel is relentlessly impressive: expanses of canvas left bare and chunks of the figures barely drawn in while others are immaculately detailed. Among the many arresting, unforgettable moments in this marvellous survey are two portraits of artists in states of undress.

Neel was a dedicated communist when that was a very dangerous thing to be in the USA (even getting her some unwelcome visits from the FBI), so she painted leftwing intellectuals like Harold Cruse and her future partner Sam Brody. Her life wasn’t easy, and she was never well off, but she knew what she wanted, having discovered in herself the qualities needed to be a good artist: ‘hypersensitivity and the will of the devil. This exhibition highlights Neel’s understanding of the politics of seeing and what it means to feel seen; organised in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou Paris, it opens at Barbican Art Gallery on 16 February 2023. She saw herself as “an anarchic humanist” and it was this that motivated her commitment to the figurative: “Human beings have been steadily marked down in value, despised, rejected and degraded. The picture doesn’t feature at the Barbican, but it’s fitting that the son of this daughter of the 20th Century became a Nixon-voting investment advisor.Her youngest daughter had died of diphtheria and Enríques had taken their second, Isabetta, to live with his family in Havana. They say way less about the state of American life than her portraits, especially the depictions of her new Harlem neighbours.

Relentlessly focused on people and human dignity, she described herself as ‘an anarchic humanist’, while the FBI, which kept an eye on her as a member of the Communist Party, described her rather dismissively as ‘a romantic, Bohemian-type communist. Unlike the commotion captured by the split-second shutter of Levitt’s camera, Neel’s paintings aren’t instantaneous. Before leaving, visitors could see a film of Neel being recognised by and inducted into the American Art establishment.

The distracted and forlorn expression on his face, and the hand that holds it up from plunging completely, is rendered in radiant colour; his body remains in outline. It is a type style with a strong sense of openness for legibility, but not without its own stylistic flair. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Neel actively went against the grain of her time, which included disregarding Abstract Expressionism during the 1940s and ‘50s, Pop art during the 1960s, and Minimalism. View image in fullscreen Support the Union, 1937 by Alice Neel, ‘a lifelong feminist, humanitarian, activist and braveheart’.