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I was born in Merion Square, Pennsylvania and studied art at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art).

I then married and went to Cuba where I stayed for a year and had my first show.

Returning to New York I was on the WPA as an easel painted in the early thirties. I painted the bohemian intellectuals of those days, Kenneth Fearing, Joe Gould, Sam Putnam and others. Also on the easel project I did many street scenes of New York City.

I lived in Spanish Harlem for many years and have numerous paintings of the Puerto Rican and black people.

I try to paint the scene, a human comedy like Balzac - the past, present and future interlaced with the levels of society like Proust. It's terrible to think that life just happens and goes, disappears. I paint my time using the people as evidence. Like Gogol's Chichikov I am a collector of souls.

I believe in art as history. The swirl of the era is what you're in and what you paint. By now I need a retrospective. A forty year observation of the human race. It is hard for me to sort myself out. However in another sense only "now" exists.

Alice Neel

Attached list of shows, etc.