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Bsrbican
Alice Neel: Hot Off
The Griddle
Barbican, London
February 16, 2023 –
May 21, 2023
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Neel at Barbican Centre, London
The largest exhibition to date in the UK of American artist Alice Neel (1900–1984) whose vivid portraits capture the shifting social and political context of the American twentieth century.
Visit their website
Guardian
‘She created a space where people could reveal themselves’: the unique portraits of Alice Neel
Skye Sherwin, The Guardian
February 6, 2023
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FT
Alice Neel was a painter of people — and clothes ... her portraits have a sharp eye for fashion too
Annachiara Biondi, The Financial Times
February 4, 2023
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Observer
Alice Neel: Hot Off the Griddle; Action, Gesture, Paint – review
Laura Cumming, The Observer
February 19, 2023
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Observer
‘She really wanted to see my labia piercing’: what was it like to be painted by Alice Neel?
Jonathan Jones, The Guardian
February 21, 2023
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FT 2
Alice Neel, Barbican review — sharp portraits get under the skin
Rachel Spence, The Financial Times
February 23, 2023
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Fad Magazine
Alice Neel: Hot Off the Griddle Review
Bryson Edward Howe, FAD Magazine
February 23, 2023
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Pompidou
Un regard engagé
An Engaged Eye
Centre Pompidou
Paris, France
October 5, 2022 –
January 16, 2023
Pompidou details
Neel at Centre Pompidou Paris
An icon of militant feminism and a precursor of an intersectional approach, Neel often painted women – nudes who were a far cry from the traditional paradigm shaped by the male view and devoid of any sentimentality. The exhibition was divided into two parts structured freely around the notions of class and gender struggle. In total, some 75 paintings and drawings were on display. Visit their website.
Le Monde
At the Centre Pompidou, realist painter Alice Neel emerges from obscurity
Philippe Dagen, Le Monde
October 22, 2022
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Art Newspaper
While her New York peers were fighting over the future of abstraction, Alice Neel was urgently capturing life
Matthew Holman, The Art Newspaper
October 28, 2022
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Les Echoes
Discovering the American painter Alice Neel
A la découverte de la peintre américaine Alice Neel
Judith Benhamoud, Les Echoes, November 4, 2022
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Beaux Arts
The Human Comedy
of Alice Neel
La comédie humaine
d’Alice Neel
Daphné Bétard, BeuxArts
October 18, 2022
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de Young
People Come First
de Young museum
San Francisco
March 12, 2022 –
July 10, 2022
Elenka
de Young details
Neel at de Young museum San Francisco
Alice Neel was one of the twentieth century’s most radical painters. This was the first comprehensive West Coast retrospective of Neel’s work. The award-winning exhibition included paintings, drawings, and watercolors, along with additional artworks and media exclusive to the San Francisco show. Installation view photograph by Gary Sexton, courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Visit their website.
ABC7
Click here to watch an interview with Lauren Palmore, Assistant Curator of American art at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. She describes Neel as "Decades ahead of her time in her sympathy for her neighbors in Spanish Harlem, for LGBTQ+ couples, for creatives of all walks of life. She saw everyone's innate humanity. That's what really set her apart..."
ABC7 News
March 13, 2022
Elenka
Blackbook
This past July 12, a New York Times headline blared what practically sounded like the launch of a full-blown campaign: It’s Time to Put Alice Neel in Her Rightful Place in the Pantheon. They were right; and it should be stated that said pantheon does not just include the top female artists of her generation, but arguably all of the most prominent American artists of the 20th Century. Read more
Nena Hawke
Blackbook
March 15, 2022
business man
San Fran examiner
How could an artist of such relaxed countenance plunge the depths of human existence with such detail and empathy ... without taking on some of those very depths? That’s one of the many questions that art-goers will have as they traverse an exhibit that reveals an artist who was both of her time and ahead of her time in the way she spotlighted people and scenes the art world had previously ignored. Read more
Jonathan Curiel
The San Francisco Examiner
March 10, 2022
KQED
That thrilling combination of representation and abstraction is so contemporary, it’s possible to now take the radicalness of Neel’s work for granted. But one need only to look at Childbirth (1939), thought to be one of the first Western paintings to represent a woman giving birth, to understand how Neel’s desire to depict all aspects of life made her work so remarkable. Read more
Sarah Hotchkiss
KQED
March 11, 2022
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People Come First
March 22, 2021 –
August 1, 2021
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
New York
exterior show
NYTimes Quote large
It’s time to put Alice Neel in her rightful place in the pantheon
Roberta Smith
The New York Times, April 1, 2021
interior show 1
Apartment Quote
In March, the Metropolitan Museum of Art celebrated Neel’s art... This month, David Zwirner gallery will present a collection of the artist’s early works, including streetscapes and portraits, at its West 20th Street space in New York City. Continued and growing interest in Neel’s paintings could be viewed as inevitable — her focus on those who lived on society’s margins speaks directly to our cultural moment.
Rennie McDougall
New York Times, September 10, 2021
Audio
interior show 1
Apollo Winner
Apollo Magazine: Exhibition of the Year
Alice Neel: People Come First
The Met, New York 2021

In around 100 paintings, drawings and watercolours the largest retrospective of Neel’s work in New York – and the first in 20 years – argued for her as one of the great American painters of the 20th century. The artist’s urgent, sympathetic portraits of her fellow New Yorkers felt particularly welcome in 2021, and this show awarded them with the status they have long deserved.
interior show 1
NewYorker Quote small
There’s a profound spiritual component to the work; her intense and casual surfaces feel like a wall that she wants her subjects’ souls to walk through to meet ours. At times, her focus, her desire to understand who her subjects are and, by extension, who you might be, can have you rushing out of the galleries for a breath of air.
Hilton Als
The New Yorker, April 19, 2021
interior show 1
TheVulture Quote small
Experiencing Neel’s work at the Met — after a full year of loss and social upheaval — her gigantic vision, perseverance, and the tragedies of her life tell us that we could be heroes like her and the people she painted. It’s easy to recognize her greatness in retrospect, when her work is celebrated in a setting like this. For most of Neel’s 84 years, though, she was artistically on her own. “I broke all the rules,” she said.
Jerry Saltz
The Vulture, April 6, 2021
interior show 1
NYTimesquote small
A large retrospective feels at home in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s grandest galleries and should silence any doubt about the artist’s originality or her importance... The latest evidence is the gloriously relentless retrospective of Alice Neel (1900-1984), the radical realist painter of all things human, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Roberta Smith
The New York Times, April 1, 2021
interior show 1
WashingtonPost Quote small
Days after seeing “People Come First’’ ... an afterimage of her brisk vision of vibrant humanity still pulses behind my eyes. Even in memory, Neel's paintings never sit still. They squirm, shiver and jiggle. Particularly memorable is her astonishing sequence of tender yet frank, unidealized portraits of pregnant women, women in childbirth and women breastfeeding. Regarded cumulatively, they are one of the signal achievements of modern American art.
Sebastian Smee
The Washington Post, March 25, 2021
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People Come First
March 22, 2021 –
August 1, 2021
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
New York
exterior show
NYTimes Quote large
It’s time to put Alice Neel in her rightful place in the pantheon
Roberta Smith
The New York Times, April 1, 2021
interior show 1
Apollo Winner
Apollo Magazine
Exhibition of the Year
People Come First
The Met, New York 2021
The artist’s urgent, sympathetic portraits of her fellow New Yorkers felt particularly welcome in 2021, and this show awarded them with the status they have long deserved.
Read here
Audio
interior show 1
NewYorker Quote small
There’s a profound spiritual component to the work; her intense and casual surfaces feel like a wall that she wants her subjects’ souls to walk through to meet ours. At times, her focus, her desire to understand who her subjects are and, by extension, who you might be, can have you rushing out of the galleries for a breath of air.
Hilton Als
The New Yorker, April 19, 2021
interior show 1
TheVulture Quote small
Experiencing Neel’s work at the Met — after a full year of loss and social upheaval — her gigantic vision, perse­verance, and the tragedies of her life tell us that we could be heroes like her and the people she painted. It’s easy to recognize her greatness in retrospect, when her work is celebrated in a setting like this. For most of Neel’s 84 years, though, she was artistically on her own.
Jerry Saltz
The Vulture, April 6, 2021
interior show 1
NYTimesquote small
A large retrospective feels at home in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s grandest galleries and should silence any doubt about the artist’s originality or her importance... The latest evidence is the gloriously relentless retrospective of Alice Neel (1900-1984), the radical realist painter of all things human....
Roberta Smith
The New York Times, April 1, 2021
interior show 1
WashingtonPost Quote small
Days after seeing “People Come First’’, a career-spanning Alice Neel survey at the Met in New York, an after­image of her brisk vision of vibrant humanity still pulses behind my eyes. Even in memory, Neel's paintings never sit still. They squirm, shiver and jiggle... they are one of the signal achievements of modern American art.
Sebastian Smee
The Washington Post, March 25, 2021
interior show 1
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Xavier Hufkens
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The Early Years next arrow
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Xavier
Alice Neel:
Seeing who we are
Xavier Hufkens
Brussels
January 27 –
March 5, 2022
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Neel at Xavier Hufkins, Brussels
Painted over a fifty-year period, this thoughtfully selected group of paintings includes many never previously exhibited works, illuminating the creative evolution of her oeuvre across the decades. Pairing portraits of youth with the elderly, we are led to reflect on life’s most meaningful questions: when do we become who we are? And how have we changed? Visit the Xavier Hufkens website.
Zrimer
Alice Neel:
The Early Years
David Zwirner
New York
September 9 –
October 16, 2021
Elenka
Zwerner details
Neel at David Zwirner, New York
David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Alice Neel (1900–1984) from the first decades of the artist’s influential career. On view at the gallery’s 537 West 20th Street location, the focused presentation centers around works from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, and includes interiors, memory paintings, New York City streetscapes, and intimate portraits of family and others close to Neel.
Zwerner NY Times quote
The New York Times
September 30, 2021
‘Art Gallery Shows to See Right Now.’ By Will Heinrich
The canvases in “Alice Neel: The Early Years”, at David Zwirner, curated by Ginny Neel, the artist’s daughter-in-law, with Bellatrix Hubert … are arranged, very loosely, in order of size and weight as well as chronology, as if to guide viewers toward a transcendent encounter with the artist’s grown sons. Captured, with Neel’s singular magic … are pulsing, slippery and alive, at once present and opaque. Read here
Fondation Beyeler
Close-Up
Fondation Beyeler
Switzerland
September 19 –
January 2, 2022
Elenka
Fondation Beyeler details
Close-Up at Fondation Beyeler
Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Lotte Laserstein, Frida Kahlo, Alice Neel, Marlene Dumas, Cindy Sherman, Elizabeth Peyton. The exhibition shows works by women artists occupying prominent positions within the history of modern art from 1870 to the present day. The work by Alice Neel that will be featured is a wonderful painting seldom loaned: Richard at Age Five, 1945.
Fondation Beyeler essay
Close-Up Catalogue
It’s clear that, as with all Neel’s portraits, the proximate and intimate encounter staged in Pregnant Woman is that between the artist and her model... There is nothing abstracted or distant about the encounter. This is a confrontation with the human as a physical and psychological presence.
Portraiture and Proximity Meditations in a Time of Social Distancing. Essay by Tamar Garb. Buy the book
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All Shows
Xavier Hufkens
Seeing who we are next arrow
David Zwirner
The Early Years next arrow
Fondation Beyeler
Close-Up next arrow

Xavier
Alice Neel:
Seeing who we are
Xavier Hufkens
Brussels
January 27 –
March 5, 2022
Slide
PlayPlay
Xavier details
Neel at Xavier Hufkins, Brussels
Pairing portraits of youth with the elderly, we are led to reflect on life’s most meaningful questions: when do we become who we are? And how have we changed? Visit the Xavier Hufkens website.
Zwirmer
Alice Neel:
The Early Years
David Zwirner
New York
September 9 –
October 16, 2021
Elenka
Zwerner details
Neel at David Zwirner, New York
David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Alice Neel (1900–1984) from the first decades of the artist’s influential career. On view at the gallery’s 537 West 20th Street location, the focused presentation centers around works from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, and includes interiors, New York City streetscapes, and intimate portraits.
Zwerner NY Times quote
The New York Times
September 10, 2021
‘Art Gallery Shows to See Right Now.’
By Will Heinrich
“Alice Neel: The Early Years”, at David Zwirner, curated by Ginny Neel, the artist’s daughter-in-law, with Bellatrix Hubert … are arranged, very loosely, in order of size and weight as well as chronology, as if to guide viewers toward a transcendent encounter with the artist’s grown sons. Read here
Fondation Beyeler
Close-Up
Fondation Beyeler
Switzerland
September 19 –
January 2, 2022
Elenka
Fondation Beyeler details
Close-Up at Fondation Beyeler
Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Lotte Laserstein, Frida Kahlo, Alice Neel, Marlene Dumas, Cindy Sherman, Elizabeth Peyton. The exhibition shows works by women artists occupying prominent positions within the history of modern art from 1870 to the present day. Neel's work that will be featured is a wonderful painting seldom loaned: Richard at Age Five, 1945.
Fondation Beyeler essay
Close-Up Catalogue
It’s clear that, as with all Neel’s portraits, the proximate and intimate encounter staged in Pregnant Woman is that between the artist and her model... There is nothing abstracted or distant about the encounter. This is a confrontation with the human as a physical and psychological presence.
Portraiture and Proximity Meditations in a Time of Social Distancing. Essay by Tamar Garb. Buy the book
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