Alice Neel was one of the great American painters of the twentieth century and a pioneer among women artists. A painter of people, landscape and still life, Neel was never fashionable or in step with avant-garde movements. Sympathetic to the expressionists of Europe and Scandinavia and to the darker arts of Spanish painting, Alice Neel's style and approach was distinctively her own.

Throughout her career, she painted with unwavering social conscience, capturing everyone from left-wing activists in 1930s Greenwich Village to art world luminaries like Andy Warhol. Never bound by artistic fashion or social convention, Neel's work celebrated human dignity and championed social justice causes decades before they gained mainstream acceptance.

Her fearless portraits revealed the psychology of her subjects with remarkable honesty and empathy. Today she is recognized as a master of 20th-century American painting, whose work anticipated many contemporary conversations about identity, equality, and representation.