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1936
January 28: Receives notice of a WPA pay
adjustment (to $95.44 per month).
June: Art Front, the journal of the Artists’ Union, an
informal group of young radical artists who demand government
patronage for the arts, publishes an illustration of
Neel’s painting Poverty, 1930, now known as Futility
of Effort.
September: Exhibits at the A.C.A. Gallery,
New York, in a show of the winners of honorable mention in a
contest held by the American Artists’ Congress. This
organization was founded in 1935 by a group of artists that
included Stuart Davis, Louis Lozowick, and Moses Soyer.
According to Davis’s introduction in First American Artists’ Congress (New York, 1936), their aim was to
‘achieve unity of action among artists of recognized
standing in their profession on all issues which concern their
economic and cultural security and freedom, and to fight War,
Fascism and Reaction, destroyers of art and culture.’
Neel’s painting, Nazis Murder
Jews, is singled out in a review by
Emily Genauer in the New York World
Telegram (September 12):
Alice Neel brandishes aloft the torch which
she and the members of the Artists Union along with her hope
will eventually lead to enlightenment and the destruction of
Fascism. One, depicting a workers’ parade, would be an
excellent picture from the point of view of color, design and
emotional significance if the big bold black-and-white sign
carried by one of the marchers at the head of the parade,
didn’t throw the rest of the composition completely out
of gear by serving to tear a visual hole in the canvas.
1937
July: Neel is hospitalized for a
miscarriage in her sixth month of pregnancy. Her mother writes
to her at Gotham Hospital in New York (July 12, Neel Archives):
‘You poor child suffering so, and no one with you ... you
were sick longer than with Isabetta. I am so very sorry for you
but for myself delighted, you don’t realize all you would
have had to face.’ Nadya Olyanova (Mrs. Egil Hoye) also
writes to Alice from Stormville, New York, asking her to visit
and promising to take care of her (July 16, Neel Archives):
‘Could you get some word to me some way? Through John
perhaps? Take care of yourself as your mother says,
“Alice don’t get wreckless.”’ Sometime
after her hospitalization, she moves with Negron to 129
MacDougal Street in the Village.
July 10: Receives notice of another WPA pay
adjustment (to $91.10 per month).
1938
Moves to Spanish Harlem (East Harlem), 8
East 107th Street, with Negron.
May 2-21: Exhibits sixteen paintings in her
first solo exhibitions in New York City, at Contemporary Arts,
38 West 57th Street. Howard Devree, a critic for the New York Times, writes
(May 8): ‘Alice Neel in her debut at Contemporary Arts
tempers her firm constructions with a somewhat sardonic humor
in which a couple of remarkable cats play a part. Her
“Classic Fronts” (red brick facades) and a
still-life with torso and sprays of foliage are outstanding in
the show. It is an excellent “first”.’
Neel is included in at least three group
shows at Contemporary Arts this year.
May 23-June 4: Shows four paintings in the
exhibition The New York Group at the A.C.A. Gallery. Also in the show are
Jules Halfant, Jacob Kainen, Herb Kruckman, Louis Nisonoff,
Herman Rose, Max Schnitzler, and Joseph Vogel. The exhibition
brochure declares:
The New York Group is interested in those
aspects of contemporary life which reflect the deepest feelings
of the people: their poverty, their surroundings, their desire
for peace, their fight for life. However, we believe that this
laudable attitude can best be transformed into living art by
utilizing the living tradition of painting. There must be no
talking down to the people; we number ourselves among them.
Pictures must appeal as aesthetic images which are social
judgements at the same time.
1939
February 5-18: Exhibits three paintings in
the second exhibition of the New York Group at the A.C.A.
Gallery. In the brochure, the poet Kenneth Fearing writes:
With its second showing, The New York Group
gives lively emphasis to its original program ... These
pictures ... are as savage, as primitive, as man is in
today’s civilization, as sensitive, as the individual is
against the contemporary background of sheer chaos. That,
essentially, is the point that these pictures, esthetically
sound and socially valuable, make through the separate and
distinct personalities of this exhibit.
July 18: Receives notice of a WPA pay
adjustment (to $90.00 per month).
Summer: Isabetta travels from Havana to
visit Neel who is in Spring Lake with her parents and Jose
Negron.
Neel visits the World Fair in New York with
John Rothschild.
August 17: Neel is terminated from the WPA.
September 14: Birth of Neel’s and
Negron’s son, Neel, later called Richard.
October 24: Alice Neel is reassigned to the
WPA.
December: Negron leaves Neel and his
3-month-old son. According to Neel he met a saleswoman at Lord
and Taylor.
1939-40
Winter: Meets Sam Brody (1907-1985), a
photographer and filmmaker who was one of the founding members
of the Film and Photo League, a radical filmmaking cooperative.
She and Brody begin a relationship. He is married and has two
children, Julian and Mady, of whom Neel paints several
portraits. (He will marry again later and will have one more
son, David, whom Neel will also paint). They will live on and
off together for the next two decades.
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Negron with Neel’s parents and his
daughter Sheila at Spring Lake, N.J. railroad station 1939
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Isabetta standing with Negron’s
guitar 1939
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Neel sitting with her mother in Spring
Lake, holding Negron’s guitar 1939
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Isabetta in Spring Lake with Neel’s
parents and Neel, pregnant with her third child, Richard 1939
(photo presumed taken by Negron)
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Neel and Sam Brody c.1940
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