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Transcription: [00:12:29]
Anyway, 6 self-portraits. Alice Neel was born in 1900. She went to the Moore College of Art and Design. She married a fellow art student, a Cuban, Carlos Enríquez,
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went back to live with his family after they had a daughter that turned, in Cuba, that turned out not to be a successful strategy on her part.
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The couple came back to New York, ultimately had another daughter, lost the daughter to diphtheria.
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Alice had a breakdown, the marriage fell apart, etc, etc.
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The interesting thing about Alice Neel is that she has always been a great painter.
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She was a great figurative painter in the 30s, in the 40s, and in the 50s.
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But Alice Neel got virtually no recognition until 1970.
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Until the same time as all this ferment was happening in society.
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There's an article that every contemporary historian, art historian, knows -called, was written in- published in art news in January 1971.
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It was written by Linda Nochlin and it was called "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists".
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And her thesis was that women were cut out of accessibility to schools,
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and the only sort of historical people that you hear about are women whose fathers were artists and therefore they got sort of homeschooling
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Anyway, this article was interesting because it again had its share of statistics
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and one of them that was mind-boggling was that of the hundred one-person exhibitions that the Museum of Modern Art had done over its lifetime, only 3 were devoted to women.
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So these numbers that point out these huge discrepancies were again facts that were useful in changing people's perception.
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Alice, who had been painting since the 30s, became the poster child in some ways of the movement among women artists to gain more visibility, she'd always been working.
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So, in the 1970s she gets a show at the Whitney, she gets a show at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art,
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and literally her reputation grew enormously and continues to grow today.
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Why was Alice willing, in 1970, to paint from a photograph as opposed to a live sitting?
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After all, if you look at her portraits, she's great at capturing the personality of the individual
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I think it's because she wanted to be on Time Magazine, and also she too was a supporter of the feminist revolution
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And if you look at photographs of Millett at that time and you look at this portrait, I think you get a sense of the energy and intelligence of this individual.
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So, that's my little talk about this portrait!
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So if you have any questions, feel free to
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Transcription Notes:
---------- Reopened for Editing 2023-06-16 10:58:11