Eleanor Nairne
Alice Neel: Hot Off The Griddle

Eleanor Nairne - Alice Neel: Hot off the Griddle

- I’m very pleased to be back on lockdown, and I would like to say hi to everybody and I’d like to welcome Eleanor Nairne, who is the Senior Curator at the Barbican Art Gallery London, where her exhibitions include Imran Qureshi, Where The Shadows Are So Deep. That was in 2016. Basquiat, Boom for Real, that was in 2017, ‘18. Lee Krasner, Living Colour, and Alice Neel, Hot Off the Griddle, 2023. She was previously curator of The Artangel Collection at Tate, organising more than 30 exhibitions and displays across the UK. A regular catalogue contributor for institutions, such as The Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Louisiana Museum in Denmark. She has written essays and reviews for the art newspaper, Frieze, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times, amongst others. She’s a trustee of Art Club, an organisation devoted to neurodivergent artists. Well, very warm welcome Eleanor. Thank you so very, very much. I am thrilled that you agree to do this because I am an ardent fan of Alice Neel. I adore her work and I love the exhibition at The Met, and then of course, over going to the Guggenheim, and then I nab you and I said, please share. I’d missed it twice even on my own home doorstep and you agree to do it. So I’m very, very grateful and thank you, so over to you.

• Oh, thank you Wendy. It’s a real honour to speak to you all. I can see 398, 397 people here, and hopefully some of you have got friends and lovers and colleagues and cats and all the rest joining in by your side. So I thought I’d say a little bit about who I am and what I do. Wendy asked me to speak specifically about the Alice Neel, so I’m going to take you through some slides. I hope some of you might have had a chance to see the show, but I’m imagining many of you won’t have. So forgive me if I’m going over familiar ground for those who did see it. And then I really want to leave some time for questions. I think one of the things that’s wonderful about this as an initiative is that we don’t often hear from the people who work in museums who make these things happen. All of us go to these kinds of exhibitions and events, and it’s sometimes a little bit like they just kind of landed from the sky. And sometimes you’ll see maybe an article in a kind of museum journal, that sort of thing, of someone saying, oh, this took us five years, and the loans were incredibly complicated. And I’m always so glad to share a bit more about the mechanics of exhibition making, and it’s the most fun when there are questions from you and you can tell me all the kind of burning things that you want to know and I’ll do my best to answer them, either about Alice Neel specifically or about exhibition making more broadly. So I work for an institution called the Barbican in London. Some of you might be familiar with it. It’s the biggest, brutalist, cross-art centre.

So that means we have a theatre, we have a concert hall, we have both the main gallery, which is where the Alice Neel show was, but also downstairs gallery where we show new commissions of contemporary artists, and we have restaurants and cafes. We’re a whole kind of little mini township, and it’s an amazing place because it means I can talk to my colleagues who are experts in classical music or theatre. A visitor might come in intending to get a hot chocolate and find themselves lured in by a fantastic photography retrospective, if we’re doing our job well anyway. And the focus of my work at the Barbican has really been about staging these kinds of quite large scale monographic shows in the main gallery. That’s been the kind of heart of what I’ve been up to. So Alice Neel is a good example of that. But I’ve also been doing some new commissions. So in the autumn I’m going to show an amazing new film work with an artist called Julian Knox who has been based in London for a long time and is originally from Sierra Leone. He’s a poet and filmmaker. And anyway, so I invite you all to come along and see that, that’ll open in September. But let me share my screen, and I can show you some images of the Alice Neel. Okay, this is me. It’s always weird to share a picture of yourself. The reason why I’m showing a picture of myself is for a couple of reasons, one of which is that it’s a good shot of the surrounding exhibition design. You can see Alice Neel’s name there, which has actually been painted by hand by a signwriter, and you can see these lovely photographs of her, that’s her at about the age of 29. But also in this picture, I’m looking slightly odd 'cause I’m holding my arms, which is actually 'cause I broke my arm very badly about two months before the exhibition opened. And the reason why I mentioned that is because it was just a kind of funny thing that happened because I’d been, so, one of the things I was so interested in in Alice Neel’s work was her engagement with human fallibility and vulnerability. And I felt somehow like she painted everybody as a kind of broken creature in one degree or another.

And then I found myself all kind of bandaged up and post-surgery and feeling like, God, have I sort of somehow gone through the picture plane and entered into this world that I’ve been writing about for the exhibition? But this gives you a bit of a sense of the scale of the space and where you came in. The first thing you saw really was Alice Neel’s voice rather than mine. So this is a lovely quote from her. “The minute I sat in front of a canvas, I was happy "because it was a world, and I could do what I liked in it.” So you’ve got this quote and you had little introductory text which gave you some basics if you’d never encountered her before. She’s born in 1900 in Pennsylvania. She liked to say, she’s born in January, so she liked to say that she was just three weeks younger than the century. And her career does, she lives through to the '80s. So her career does chart the best part of the 20th century. She became known for being a figurative portrait painter. She did paint other things, landscapes, and still lives and other kinds of works, but it was her, she hated the word portraits, but her pictures of people that she became really not just known for but actually beloved for, unfortunately like many women artists, she didn’t exhibit very regularly within her lifetime. She had some degree of recognition, but it was limited until the 1970s when second wave feminism brought a kind of new degree of interest in her work. And she has a show at the Whitney in the early 1970s. Since then, there’ve been a number of retrospectives over the years.

It was a great show that Ann Temkin from MoMA was involved in organising at Philadelphia Museum. And of course more recently, we’ve had this kind of wave of exhibitions including the show at The Met, which Wendy mentioned at the beginning, which travelled, and our show, which we organised in collaboration with the Centre of Pompidou. So when you are planning an exhibition of this kind of scale, this had been the first large scale overview of Alice Neel’s work in the UK since we’d had one other show in 2010 at the White Chapel. But other than that, her work really hadn’t been seen. And so the question is always kind of, well, where do I start the story? And if you start the story with the earliest student work, it’s not always very kind to the artist. It’s can feel a little bit juvenile sometimes. So you want to start somewhere that feels really striking and engaging, and says something about the kind of overall thesis of the exhibition. But you also want it to be quite arresting, like the start of any story. So I had this idea which was to start with this self-portrait. And so we showed this painting as a single painting you can see here, with my lovely colleague, Georgia, in the picture. One room, one painting, that was it. And I’ve got a detail so you can get a better sense of it.

So this is Alice Neel at 80 years of age unapologetically naked on what became this famed stripy blue chair that she had in her studio. And she started the painting in 1975, and it was the only large scale painted self-portrait that she made. So all these years she’s painting pictures of other people but she doesn’t paint herself. And that’s sort of interesting if you think about the ways in which she’s trying to grapple with not just something about how a person styles themselves, but something of who they were. She wanted, she described it as plumbing, the depths of the inner psyche. And that’s one thing to do when you are confronting another person sat in your studio. But to do it with yourself, of course, literally involves facing yourself, facing down any demons. And there’s so many things I find interesting about this painting and it was, you know, over the course of the exhibition up, I found myself spending a kind of inconceivable amount of time just looking at this painting and thinking about it. One of the things I like is that she leaves her glasses on. And for anybody who wears glasses, we know the vanity of the minute a kind of camera comes out whipping them off and wanting to act like they’re not there. So why does she keep them on? I guess for me it’s about she wants to encircle her sight. You know, she, as an artist, her sight is her primary weapon, her tool of her trade. And so they literally delineate that which is most important in the image. And then she has the paintbrush in hand, she holds it kind of like a, you know, conductor with the baton, and then of course she presents her body in all of its kind of ageing splendour, and there is something just wonderfully vibrant and alive. I think that’s a very important quality that we can come back to as we look through some of these paintings that anyone who’s ever attempted to draw a portrait themselves will see how quickly you kill your subject.

There’s a number of different ways you can kill your subject, but the most obvious is that they just don’t feel like a living, breathing, fleshy human. And when we think about what makes Alice Neel particularly interesting against other painters at that day, she wasn’t fashionable for painting figuratively, but she also wasn’t alone. You know, we could think of other American painters like Fairfield Porter, who were also making figurative portraits at this time. If we think about what’s distinctive about her, I’d say she knows how to get the right degree of wrong so that people have this kind of wonkiness to them. You can see how she leaves mistakes in like the back of that chair, which she sketched the first time, and then she’s kind of washed over it, but it’s still there. So they’re not quite right, and yet they feel more fullsomely themselves because of that. So it was a pretty brazen opening to the show. This was also a very rare painting to be able to present in London and in the UK, it came from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. So it was a really, for me it was a really kind of thrilling opening to the show. And in the second room, we then wound back to start to tell some of the beginning of the story, which is about her time in Havana. She grows up in what she calls an artless little town, Colwyn, Pennsylvania. And she doesn’t quite know why she wants to become an artist. Like many women, she has a mother who says to her, I don’t know what you expect to do in the world, Alice.

You are only a girl. And this becomes this fantastic fuel for her. And she gets herself to art school, and then she goes to a summer school, and it’s there that she meets this rather dashing Cuban artist called Carlos Enriquez, who you can see on, in the middle of that back wall. They get married, and together they move to Havana for about a year in the mid 1920s. And you have to imagine this is her first time abroad, it’s her first time leaving the US. It’s also a moment of real kind of political ferment in Havana at that time. And Carlos is, you know, he comes from a very aristocratic family. His father is the doctor to General Machado, and he’s moving in very connected Bohemian circles. So she’s privy to kind of a lot of conversations at that time about the direction that politics might be going in. And you can see on that right hand wall, we had this lovely photograph to give you a kind of sense of what did Havana look and feel like at that time. But next to it, this quote as well that said, “My life in Cuba conditioned me. "The artists and the writers and the poets "all got together”. This very simple statement about comradeship and community, which was something that she would come to really seek out in New York, but it was a big part of what drove her as a painter at this time. And I’ve just pulled out the work on the far left you can see here, which is a mother and child for us to just spend a minute with.

• [Wendy] Eleanor, I’m so sorry to interrupt.

• Yeah, please.

• [Wendy] There’s a black bar on the top of your screen. I’m not sure if it’s a a Zoom window, if you could just move that up.

• It’s a Zoom window.

• [Wendy] Is there any way you can move that up a little bit so that-

• I can move it, it’s offering me down. Is that better?

• [Wendy] That’s much better, perfect.

• Okay. Perfect, thanks Lauren. Yeah, so hopefully now you can get a good sense of this mother and child. Sorry, Zoom’s a bit limiting in what it allows me to do. So she’s trained in Pennsylvania, she’s reading at the point of which she’s in Cuba. Robert Henry’s the art spirit, which some of you I’m sure will be familiar with. And you know, he was a kind of key figure in relation to the Ashcan School of Painting. And he is the first person really saying, or who she’s encountering, who’s saying, paint what is real to you, paint what you know. And so she’s trying to find a way to paint people in a more kind of vivid form. So you can see that this is a kind of mother and child who she’s probably encountered just out on the street. She was sort of casting people who she’d meet, she’d take her easel and her paints, and she’d be working kind of on planner. And she’s painting with these very kind of loose brushstrokes if you look at the kind of backdrop. And yet this girl, this kind of, she’s somewhere between a sort of baby and a toddler, there’s so few strokes to capture her. And yet for me she seems so vivid, that arm reaching up towards her mother’s face, and the kind of downward turn of her mother’s kind of careful good humoured gaze as she kind of looks down on her little girl being looked at. It feels to me a very important painting in terms of giving a sense of where Alice Neel is going to go within her work, but also showing how kind of incredibly accomplished, she already was at this point as a painter in her 20s. And there are lovely details to see as well. Like if you look at the kind of shirt that the mother is wearing, just how many colours are kind of in that laced into that brush work, the kind of soft green, and light pinks, and bits of blue. And one of the things that became so interesting about Alice Neel was that she was a great colorist. So you can see signs of that in this period already. Here we go. So this is the section that was then dedicated to Greenwich Village. This is a kind of incredibly difficult chapter in Alice Neel’s history.

So she’s gone to Havana in the '20s, she becomes pregnant with a child, they name Santillana del Mar. And just short of Santillana’s first birthday she dies of diptheria. And it’s especially tragic because I think about a year later, they invented the vaccine for diptheria. So it’s this sort of sense of being almost preventable. And the medical advice at the time, which is pretty kind of appalling to think of now, is that she should get pregnant again as soon as possible, which she does. And so she has a second child, Isabetta, who Carlos then takes to live with his family in Cuba. And so suddenly she finds herself without either of her children, she’s living back in New York, they are really on the breadline, you know, it’s kind of after the Wall Street Crash, the early '30s, the Depression. And she finds herself in a psychiatric ward and she says, I didn’t do anything but fall apart and go to pieces. And she has a kind of near total nervous breakdown. But thankfully she’s able to get access to some good medical care. And one of the doctors in particular notices that she has this kind of, you know, artistic interest and she begins to make work. And it’s really as she begins to make work that she begins to recover. And one of the things that’s quite interesting about that is she has essentially a pretty full recovery. She at no point in her life, you know, she lives into her 80s, and at no subsequent point does she find herself in that kind of acute medical care. And there’s one really noticeable difference, which is that she no longer wants to paint anyone with their clothes on.

So this room was a kind of pretty rowdy room of these nude paintings. So you can, that pans around so you can get a better sense of the whole room. And within that, this is one of the little works on paper that you can see I gathered on that right hand wall. So here she is in the mid 1930s with her lover, John Rothschild. And he is peeing into the sink and she’s peeing into the toilet. And it’s this kind of wonderful, bizarre quotidian scene of sort of everyday intimacy between a non-married couple, which at the time in the '30s just could not have been more radical. I mean I’d say that in some ways it’s not an image that I think we see very often today either. And it has quite a kind of caricaturish tone to it. There’s a kind of playfulness about it. The way in which she depicts her own kind of facial expression doing up her hair. But she’s wanting, it’s, again, it’s that question of realness, she’s wanting to get at something that she doesn’t see in the world around her. There’s some sense that she’s kind of, you know, she’s gone through something unthinkable, unconscionable in terms of personal trauma, and now, you know, she sees the world in this completely different light. We then also showed from the 1930s a number of works that she made related to the Great Depression.

And we also showed a little bit of a film that I wanted to share an excerpt of, just online on YouTube from Helen Levitt. So Helen Levitt was an artist who was also supported by the WPA. So what becomes Alice Neel’s saviour, in essence during this period is that Roosevelt starts the WPA programme, and suddenly artists are able to earn a wage, and she’s one of the first artists to be signed onto the Easel division, but she also has this community, you know, of artists who were also signed up who would, you know, either like her on the Easel division, or they’re making murals, or like Lee Krasner, who I did an exhibition of a few years ago. She was making these incredible kind of storefront windows advertising ammunitions courses that you could do to help the war effort. So it’s a really, really important moment in American history in the 1930s. And towards the end of that period, Alice Neel decides to move up to Spanish Harlem. And there are a number of reasons for it. She’s fallen in love with a nightclub singer, which is one reason. But she also I think kind of wants to turn her back on the sort of nascent avant-garde art scene that’s there. The American abstract artist, you know, she feels that to be working in an abstract vein is a kind of betrayal of your politics. You know, she signs up to be a card-carrying member of the Communist Party in the 1930s, and you know, she believes in people, she feels committed to people and their stories. And so moving up to Spanish Harlem is a part of that. And Helen Levitt wasn’t a close friend, but she was someone who moved in similar circles, and she felt very similarly about why she wanted to be up. So this is actually, it’s a silent film, and you can just see an excerpt of it here.

So one of the reasons why I wanted to show this film is because when you talk about New York, it’s very easy for people to imagine New York as it looks now. And of course at the time in the late 1930s and 1940s, you know, there was still horse-drawn carriages in parts of the city, and you have children kind of playing wantonly out in the street. And Helen Levitt was a fantastic kind of, well, this film is called In the Street, but she’s an amazing kind of chronicler of these just like everyday scenes and interactions between people. You can see that there’s a similar kind of tone to somebody like Dorothea Lange, who we’ve also shown at the gallery. And it just gives you this sense of an artist just being arrested by the kind of sheer vitality of life around her. And then that just feeling so absent from the art that they’re looking at on show in kind of museums. So some of these figures you can kind of almost imagine what they would look like as Alice Neel paintings. Okay. Going to come out that, going back into the presentation. But I really invite you to go and have a look at that. It’s just on YouTube if you’re interested. Okay, so you’ve had a sense of that kind of Helen Levitt film. You’ve got this kind of snapshot of life in Spanish Harlem, and then you come into a room where you get to see some of the people who Neel invited to sit for her. And it’s important to remember that because the Jose Negron, the nightclub singer who’s one of the figures who kind of lures her to Spanish Harlem, she has a child with him, Richard, who is her eldest son. And so some of the people she’s painting are her extended family, and others are her neighbours.

So the painting I wanted to look at here is this incredible painting of a young, so here is Georgie Arcie, I was about to say he’s a young man, but actually he’s a kind of, he’s in this cusp between childhood and adolescence. So we think that he’s only about 11 here. And she had met him out in the street 'cause she’d been walking her dog, and he was liked her dog, and she asked if he might like to sit for her, and he sat for a whole number of paintings that are kind of amongst some of the most charming and interesting and arresting works that she makes. What I find, there’s so many things I find interesting about this painting, but one of them is that we are obviously all multiple. And one of the things that I think Alice Neel was especially good at doing was seeing these different versions of ourselves, the version of ourself that we might be tentatively trying to put forth into the world, the version of ourselves that we might feel that we somehow need to shroud or protect or cover. And you can see in this image, some sense of him kind of yearning for a degree of kind of manhood to be taken seriously, the kind of the set of his shoulders, the frown, and he is holding, it’s a rubber knife that he’s holding, but there’s a degree of kind of menace to that nonetheless. One of the things that we also did as part of the exhibition was we tried to do quite a lot of research into the people who came to sit for Neel. So for instance, it was already known that Georgie Arce sadly goes on to be incarcerated, he’s convicted of double homicide.

But we found these amazing cards that he continues to send Alice Neel during that period of his life, including Mother’s Day cards, and birthday cards, and writing these incredibly affectionate messages that speak to this sort of quasi parental role that she had in his life at that time, and this, you know, enduring interest in him and his life, and kind of affection between them. So it was always, you know, some of the stories that we uncovered were really sad like this, and some of them, of course, you have to be careful not to kind of overly place it onto the painting. She doesn’t know who he will become and nor does he. And yet there’s a sense of the kind of tension, and also the kind of, the real struggles for him at that time. It’s just being a bit slow to load. And then the final rooms upstairs were devoted to, it was called Anarchic Humanism. And when Alice Neel was asked how she would describe herself politically, she said, I’m an anarchic humanist, which is a fantastic phrase, and I think very accurate actually as well. You know, the Communist Party investigated her throughout this period. She has two FBI agents who come to interview her, and she rather winningly tries to persuade them to sit for her, and they have to politely decline. But many of the people who she paints during this period are people who are kind of icons for her. So you can see on the painting to the right here is a painting of Ella Reeve Bloor, who was known as Mother Bloor, who was one of the kind of really important intersectional socialist feminists.

And that’s painting is made largely from a photograph from Life Magazine we think. Or to the left, you can see this painting she made in response to the protests around to save Willie McGee who had been sentenced to execution after being accused of raping a white woman. And to the right are figures like Mike Gold and Art Shield who were great, you know, unionists and labour organisers, and Mike Gold was also an editor for masses. Some of them I just have as installation images, but it gives you a sense anyway of some of the figures who she’s painting at this time, and who are real, yeah, real kind of heroes for her. It’s also interesting to think again about her relationship to abstraction. So she says, at this time, I’m not against abstraction, you know what I’m against? I’m against saying that man himself has no importance. So she keeps kind of hammering that point home. And you can see in some of these paintings that they’re set against an almost solid background of colour, or it might be kind of subtly undulated, you know, there are often abstract paintings in there, but she’s then painting figures or people alongside. And then the downstairs spaces were really devoted to kind of two main sections. So I wanted to show this kind of body of work from the 1960s and body of work from the 1970s, these two decades in which suddenly her career kind of burst to life. That’s partly 'cause there’s a real shift in the historical context and climate. There’s a sort of new energy to civil rights protests, second wave feminism emerges, and many of her kind of political commitments are seen in this new light. But it’s also because she then in turn responds to that, you know, she has the first pieces of press or criticism being written about her in the '60s. Her work begins to be included in exhibitions. And so you see this kind of brightening up within the palette, and also this kind of newfound confidence within the work.

So on the back wall is a film that she featured in with many of the kind of poets from the beat generation. It’s got this kind of mad soundtrack, sort of basically Jack Kerouac riffing, and Allen Ginsberg is in it, and Gregory Corso. And it gives both an impression of that period of time, but it also gives a sense of her as being porous to kind of younger generations of artists and writers. And on the right wall, right hand wall, this is one of the paintings that you can see, which is an especially, really especially tender image, I think. And I wanted to kind of set it out here to be able to think about in dialogue with that earlier mother and child image that we looked at from the 1920s. And so here you have something that in many ways is kind of more detailed in terms of the brush stroke, the detail of the flowers on the sari. But there’s that same sense of an almost kind of devotional quality to the faces of this mother and child. And then other aspects being left quite loose, like the hand of the right hand of the mother and the kind of foot of the child. But for me they have such a strong sense, it feels like this child is going to wriggle off its mother’s lap at any minute. You know, there’s a kind of serenity to the face, but then this little kind of foot that looks like it’s about to go flying. And then again, if you take the figures away, it’s really interesting to look at the background. I mean you ostensibly have a kind of Clyfford Still-esque kind of abstract background to this. And at the moment we know very little about who this couple were, but there are some instances like this where I’m hoping that we might continue to be able to discover more about the figures as we go along. And you can see again that we kept these kinds of quotes written into the exhibition space.

“I am a collector of souls. "I paint my time using the people as evidence.” So this sense of her still wanting to be a kind of chronicler, you know, interested in sort of two things at the same time. Something of the essence of who a person is if we believe that each of us has an essence, or you know, the kind of multiple essences that we might have swirling within us. And then something around that of the context of our time. So this is an example where we were able to find out a little bit more information. So this is in my opinion, kind of one of the most sort of unusual striking paintings that Alice Neel made. And it was really a bit of an enigma. So it’s a painting that she made of a man called James Hunter. And he came to sit for her once and then was drafted into the Vietnam War. It’s painted in 1965. So it’s just at that point when Lyndon Johnson is wanting to kind of escalate troops on the ground, and she doesn’t know what becomes of him. And so she decides to leave the kind of this skeletal underdrawing of the painting as it is, and to declare it finished as a kind of statement about the unknown future of so many of these young men drafted into the Vietnam War. And it’s the first time she does that and it becomes a kind of experiment for her with the notion of the finished or the unfinished, and the idea that, I guess in a way, we are all quite provisional. You know, we’re all a work in progress of different kinds, and none of us actually knows how much more awaits us in terms of time. And so there’s something that feels very true about having aspects of work that are left kind of unpainted. And we set out to try and find a bit more about him.

And it was really difficult because his name was James Hunter, and as you can imagine, that’s an incredibly common name in the US. But we were basically through a process of elimination in terms of we went through all of the military records for conscriptions during that time into Vietnam, and we were able to find a fit of one, it had to be one person basically in terms of the timing of when this sitting happened. And we were able to trace him, and he was a man called James Leroy Hunter, who sadly is no longer alive but who did survive Vietnam. So that felt to me enormously important, that of course when you stage an exhibition of this kind, you are presenting Alice Neel, but you are also presenting all of the lives of these people who came and sat for her. And you feel an enormous kind of burden of responsibility to tell their stories to the best of your ability as well. And then this is the kind of gallery showing some of the work from the 1970s. And on the right you can see the work that Neel became is perhaps her most famous painting, or one of them, which is her painting of Andy Warhol. And this is a good example, this is painted in 1970, so it’s five years later, but it’s a good example of where she’s taking that formal innovation basically in her own practise of wanting to leave bits of the canvas bear, and she’s applying it to a very different kind of subject. So this is painted just a matter of a couple of years after Andy Warhol had had the attempted, you know, assassination attempt on his life by Valerie Solanas, and he’d had this terrible emergency surgery. And you can see he’s sort of laced with these scars, and he’s wearing a surgical corset.

And it is just the most remarkable painting. I mean one of the things that’s remarkable about it is that he agreed to it. You know, if we think of Andy Warhol, the first thing we think of is probably vanity. You know, this is an artist who used to describe how Andy puts his Warhol on, you know, and he once described nudity as a threat to his existence. And so the idea that he would sit for her, that he would be shirtless. So he would have this kind of very tender, vulnerable, you know, slightly kind of sagging chest, and then that he would have his eyes closed, which is this real kind of act of trust, means that it feels almost, to look at this painting feels almost like trespassing. There’s something very, yeah, really a kind of remarkable exchange in terms of her imagining her gaze on him, and him entrusting her to be able to then set that down in paint. And I also think it’s really interesting, her decision, I’m afraid I’m going to move this black bar so you can see it properly, but those brogues, those painted shoes, you know, no one looks as naked as they do when wearing kind of lace up shiny brown shoes. So the Warhol painting remains really one of my favourites. I wanted you to just get a sense of the scene, and this great line, I always felt much more truthful and courageous on canvas.

And then as a perfect demonstration of that, this is a rather amazing painting that she made of a man called John Perreault, who was a curator and he was an art critic as well, and he was organising a show for the School of Visual Arts about the male nude. And he wanted to show, I didn’t pause and talk about it, but some of you will have seen that pretty incredible shocking portrait she makes of Joe Gould with the multiple tears of genitalia in the 1930s, which was in the Greenwich Village room. And he wanted to borrow that, you know, that was astonishing for its time. And she said, but don’t you know, won’t you have other artists, you know, showing kind of contemporary new work? And he said, well, yeah, that’s true. Some people will be. And she said, well I think you should sit for me, because how can you curate a show about the male nude if you haven’t been a male nude? And so she really, you know, she was so naughty, she really kind of pushed him into doing it. And you can see that she presents him here as this kind of repast to Manet’s Olympia. And with his kind of raised knee, and you know, his genitals very centre stage, and there’s a great line, the painter, Chantal Joffe, who I’m sure some of you like me are fans of, Chantal is a great admirer of Alice Neel’s work. And she wrote a great piece about some of the paintings in advance of the show, and she said about this painting that he looks like nothing so much as a big sprawled ginger tom, which I think is a kind of great line. And then from one kind of brazen image to another.

So this was where we then decided to end the show, which was with this amazing painting of Annie Sprinkle. So right into her 80s, like she said, she died at the age of 84 in 1984, but she doesn’t lessen her commitments during that time. You know, there are some artists we might think of who become perhaps a little conservative in their golden years, and that certainly wasn’t the case for Alice Neel. So Annie Sprinkle, who is very much still active as an artist at this time, was working as a sex worker and also an activist, performance artist. And she really describes this quite kind of collaborative process of picking out this fetish costume with Neel, and just like the sheer glee with which they kind of went about it. And you can, you know, you can really feel in it, that sense of it as a sort of shared endeavour basically. And we ended the wall text with this line where a friend of hers said that right up until the end, she used to call up friends sometimes and say, guess what? I’m alive. And I think you really, you feel that kind of gleefulness within that work, that kind of joie de vivre. And she actually at this time painted, she’d become more prominent. So she’d started to be able to paint some more celebrated figures, including Ed Koch, the mayor of New York. And when he invited her to come to Gracie Mansion, she said she’d go, but only if she could take Annie Sprinkle as her date. So she was not shy of a little bit of kind of provocation.

And so we also showed at the end of the exhibition, a video that was made in the '70s of her talking about her work that’s a video by Nancy Baer, which you can also access online. It’s really fun to watch because she’s just so funny and so kind of charming and insightful about her work. And then we also made this kind of reading space, which we called the Living Room, because I kind of wanted to remind people of the fact, you know, I started by talking about the elements of intimacy within her work, the sense that everybody is a bit of a broken creature that she’s setting down in paint, but she also only ever worked at home. So at one point in her life that’s clearly from necessity, you know, there’s a point when she has two boys that she’s raising on her own, and she paints basically at night when they’re asleep. But later she could afford to be somewhere else. And she likes to have her easel and her sitter in the midst of the kind of clutter of her domestic life. And there’s something really powerful, really important about that in terms of what we then encounter when we see one of these works, when we think about why Alice Neel matters today, or why those paintings feels so striking, I think it’s partly because these are people who’ve been invited into her home. So that’s the end of the images, and the kind of the other thing, I’m going to ask some questions in a minute so you can start thinking of your questions. But I guess the other thing I wanted to say was just to think about Alice Neel’s work in relation to this project, the Lockdown University, because it was partly the pandemic, I think, that really made me think that Alice Neel’s work would be especially interesting to look at now, because we had all been in situations like this, mediated by screens, and in many instances, you know, feeling very kind of atomized and remote from our communities.

There was something about Alice Neel’s work that felt like this incredible tonic to that because she almost, she pretty occasionally she’d worked from memory earlier on in the '30s, but basically she only ever paints from life. And sometimes that’s over a really long period. I mean that John Perreault, the male Olympia, she makes him sit 17 times for her. And I sometimes say that, I don’t know that it took 17 sittings to paint that painting, but she clearly was having a good time. But they’re really born out of shared humanity and living together, and I think people responded really powerfully to that on the other side of the pandemic. So I think it’s added a particular charge to this exhibition and also to kind of how we’re responding to her work at the moment. So that’s a whistle stop tour of the exhibition, but I hope that some of you might have a few questions about either Alice Neel, or exhibition making, or you are welcome to ask anything you might like to, and I think Lauren’s going to have a read through them.

• [Lauren] Oh yeah.

• I just want to jump in, Lauren. I just quickly want to say thank you very much for the outstanding presentation. I’m a, as I said earlier, I’m a big fan, and thank you for showing that the Indian lady with her daughter. That’s yeah, I love that painting, belongs to me, as you know, so thank you so much. It was very nice for you to show it.

• It’s a true highlight. I mean it’s genuinely one of my favourites.

• Oh, me too. Just gorgeous. And I missed it because it’s just been travelling for such a long time. I’m hoping to get it back.

• [Elanor] I know.

• It was really fabulous. You know, she really is close to my heart. I think we should get shut down. You know, she’s very shy but I’d love to get her on Lockdown and just talk about her work. Maybe you can convince her.

• Oh definitely, yeah, she’s absolutely brilliant.

• Yeah, she’s great. Alright, well thank you again. Lauren, I’m going to hand you over, and once again many, many thanks.

• Actually, I can see your questions, Lauren, so don’t worry I can read them, I can read them from here. Just pull them up.

• [Lauren] Just read them out loud so that the participants also know which one.

• The six of the open ones, will do. Okay, great.

Q&A and Comments:

So to all the Southern Californian participants, there is currently Alice Neel show at the Orange County Museum of Art. It looks amazing. So it is about her kind of, and it’s very different show about, its about her relationship to family and the kind of idea of a patchwork family. So massively recommend that.

WPA, I’m sorry, too many shorthands, that was the Works Progress Administration. So that was set, it was part of Roosevelt’s kind of project to try and deal with surging unemployment in the wake of the Wall Street Crash, and rather an interesting inspiration in terms of, you know, the times we’re going through now.

Q: When and why did nudity stop being a defining part of her art?

A: Also a fantastic question. This is why it’s so good to ask for questions 'cause you tell me all the things that I haven’t been clear enough on, which is great. So thank you for that. So, and it relates to the last question, which is the, it was the one condition of the WPA programme was that you weren’t allowed to submit any nudes. So it’s this kind of complete miracle, suddenly she can earn a wage, she gets paid every six weeks, set dimensions of a canvas. But the one rule is no nudes. So she goes, as you’ve seen, she goes back to painting people naked, including painting some amazing portraits of pregnant women. But there’s a period during the kind of '30s, '40s, '50s, where that becomes less part of her practise.

Q: How prolific was she? How do you as a curator select what you put in the show? Do you have a theme in mind?

A: Very good questions. So with some artists, you know exactly how prolific they are because there’s a catalogue resume that gives you a kind of total overview of their practise, and with some you don’t. So Alice Neel was pretty prolific, but we don’t have any single kind of overview of everything she made. So I couldn’t tell you a precise number of works. And in terms of making the selection, you really, it sort of depends on what the most recent exhibition has been. So whether you are trying to, you’re trying to think about what people have had access to see. So you want to present slightly different works, but you also want to make sure that the kind of cornerstones to present the artist in all their kind of glory are there. And yes, you generally do have a particular theme in mind because you’re only ever going to show a fraction of the total works they made. So in this instance I really wanted to kind of have that political undercurrent running the whole way through. So if you’d never come across Alice Neel in your life, you could learn everything you needed to about her full career. But if you’d seen every Alice Neel show to date, you could also still take something specifically for you about the nature of her political commitments.

Q: Is this exhibition related to the retrospective of it young?

A: So, no, it’s confusing. It’s very, very confusing because basically The Metropolitan Museum organised a show in tandem with in the Pompidou, as in at the same time, parallel shows. And The Met Show went to San Francisco, and then went to the Guggenheim Bilbao, and our show was with Paris. So there are definite similarities between them, but they were slightly different projects.

Ed Koch was my husband’s cousin. How interesting. His sister also tunes down into Lockdown University Often he is shown as a bit of a clown, but he was an elegant, graceful man, caring and wise. She caught that because she captured him as I saw him. That’s so lovely. And, that we made a little book to sit alongside the show, and there’s a good example of what your describing, Linda, which is that in the archives I found this photograph of the two of them together at Gracie Mansion with the portrait that she made of him, and he’d signed it to her, and underneath he’d said, next time without the fig leaf, because presumably she tried to get him to sit naked too. And I just thought it was so like charming and funny and delightful.

Q: Did she paint Kerouac or any of the beat poets?

A: She didn’t paint the beat poets, but she did paint Frank O'Hara. So there are two paintings that she made of Frank O'Hara. One is a kind of angel, and one is a kind of devil. So one she spent longer on, and he’s got these kind of romantic lilacs behind his head. And the other which we showed in the exhibition, it’s kind of gnarly, you know, he has these teeth that look like, she described them as looking like gravestones. And I have a theory about it, which is that we think of Frank O'Hara now as a poet, but at the time he was much better known as a curator, and he was a curator at MoMA, and in 1960 when she paints it, he had just done a retrospective of Helen Frankenthaler at the Jewish Museum. So I think she paints him because she’s like, oh maybe you could give me a show, huh Frank? And I think maybe it doesn’t go down very well because then she does the second one, and he looks really ugly. So it’s just a guess.

Q: How many paintings are borrowed from other galleries, and which have lent them?

A: Well we don’t have a collection, so everything we present is borrowed. And all of the details of what’s kind of borrowed from whom are in the back of the catalogue if you are interested. And I’d say for this show, we had about 70 artists in total. 70 works by the artists in total. And I’d say about half of them came from museums and galleries, and half of them came from private collections like Wendy’s. Thank you Wendy Who represented her as an artist, where did she exhibit? So it’s a very good question. Obviously it changes over the years. She exhibits, well, in different places.

So when, in the kind of earlier years, it’s important to remember that there aren’t really commercial galleries in New York in the '30s or '40s. You know, you have someone like Peggy Guggenheim who comes and sets up her gallery but with very specific parameters of kind of who she wants to show. So someone like Alice Neel is having like, you know, she has a show in the '50s at the new Playwrights Theatre, you know that you are having kind of little bits of shows. And so it’s a real kind of sharp contrast to now when she shows for David’s Vanner Gallery, you know, who represent the estate. So it’s a bit in kind of bits and pieces in terms of different commercial galleries over the years to be honest. But we did, if you want to know the exact details of the kind of, you know, listing all the different galleries and all the different dates, we did do quite a nice chronology in the back of the book, and that sort of sets that out quite clearly.

Q: What is next for you or for the Barbican?

A: I will be there in October. Great, come. You can see loads. So we’re going to have a couple of things on in October. In the gallery, in the main gallery, my colleague Alona Pardo has curated amazing photography show about the intersection between feminism and climate change. And then in the Curve Gallery, I’m doing this new commission with this artist, Julian Knox, that I mentioned. He is really kind of a visionary with, in the process of finishing at the moment, and it’s epic, it’s like 13 channels of videos. He’s been working with choirs all across Europe from the black diaspora, and he’s creating a kind of choir of choirs basically. So you can come and see that.

Q: Were you spoiled for choice in works, or were there limiting conditions?

A: Oh, you missed, yeah, the women’s hospital scene from the 1920s. Yeah, I tell you what’s tricky, is you’ve got to tell a story. So there was some works, you always have this with an artist, and it’s not true of every space, but at the Barbican space because you’ve got those individual rooms, each room is like a kind of chapter in your novel. So it doesn’t work very well. If so, the painting that was being referred to, there is a painting from soon after she’s had her second daughter, Isabetta, and she paints the kind of maternity ward, I think that’s the one you’re referring to. And she says that like one of the babies looks like a hamburger, and it’s a kind of gnarly scene. And she never makes anything else like it. It’s the only painting that she makes of that kind. It’s sort of a one off. So sometimes it’s not so easy to show things like that.

I was captivated by the post of the exhibition. Hooray. We argue so much about that. So I went to see the show and loved it. Just wondered what happened to her daughter. Well it’s really sad. So if you’re interested in more of the family history, I’d really recommend Andrew Neel, her grandson, one of her grandsons made a documentary in which he interviews his father, Hartley, and other members of the family, and they speak about Isabetta. She’s raised by two aunts in Cuba basically. And she has a very light on-off relationship with Alice Neel. She comes to stay with her out in Jersey on some holidays and things like that, but it’s really sad. So you can find out a bit more about that there.

Q: Do you think Eileen Cooper has been very influenced by Alice Neel?

A: I know that she really admires the work and she wrote a piece actually, I think it was maybe for Harper’s time to coincide with the show so you can read more about her there.

Q: And final question, what’s the role of her gender on her career? Why did she emerge as one of the best known women of her generation?

A: It’s a really complicated question, 'cause in some ways I’m always kind of cautious about gender during that period, because I think, I don’t know that Alice Neel, you know, she’s kind of pre-second wave feminism, right? So I’m not sure that she really sees herself as a woman artist per se. I think she just sees herself as an artist. You know, I think she kind of thinks that sex makes no difference to who she is as an artist, and she’s just been kind of blessed with talent. But in reality, obviously second wave feminism has an enormous impact. So one of the great paintings she makes is of the feminist, Linda Nochlin, with her daughter Daisy. That’s now in the MFA’s collection, and we were very lucky to borrow that. So someone like Linda Nochlin is very active in supporting and promoting Alice Neel’s career, and has a, yeah, huge impact on her being considered as a kind of important figure from that period.

Okay, there you go, you’re so welcome. Thank you for having me. I’ve really enjoyed sharing more about it.

• [Wendy] Thanks Eleanor, thank you. Thanks Lauren.