1960

Spring: Paints Frank O’Hara, poet, critic, and curator at the Museum of Modern Art, over the course of five sittings, producing two portraits. They at meetings of the Abstract Artists’ Club in the 50s.

September 4-17: Has a solo exhibition at Old Mill Gallery, Tinton Falls, New Jersey.

December: Participates in a four-person show at the A.C.A. Gallery, Alice Neel, Jonah Kinigstein, Anthony Toney, Giacomo Porzano. Lawrence Campbell reproduces Frank O’Hara, No. 2 in his review of the exhibition in ArtNews, the first time Neel’s work is illustrated in this magazine: ‘Miss Neel has made the strongest impression. She has been painting for years but for some unknown reason is rarely seen in exhibitions.’

1961

February: Neel’s drawing of W. E. B. Du Bois is published with Du Bois’s article ‘The Color of England’ in Mainstream.

August: Neel’s portrait Kenneth Fearing, 1935, is reproduced on the cover of Mainstream in a special issue dedicated to Fearing.

Fall: Richard Neel begins law school at Columbia University, having graduated from Columbia College in the spring.

1962

January 21-February 3: Hubert Crehan, an artist and art critic, organizes an exhibition of fifteen of Neel’s paintings at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. To avoid controversy Joe Gould is set aside in a janitor’s closet.

Spring: Thomas Hess and Harold Rosenberg visit Neel to consider her for the Longview Foundation Purchase Award from Dillard University, New Orleans, which is given to under-recognised artists. Later this year Neel receives the award.

May 21-June 15: Exhibits three paintings in the group show Figures at the Kornblee Gallery, New York, organized in response to the Museum of Modern Art’s show Recent Painting USA: The Figure (May 23-September 4). The Kornblee’s roster of figure painters ignored by the Modern includes, among others, Milton Avery, Alex Katz, Philip Pearlstein, Fairfield Porter and George Segal.

1963

Spring: Hartley Neel graduates from Columbia College and in the fall begins a teaching fellowship and master’s program in chemistry at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

October 1-26: Neel has her first exhibition at Graham Gallery, New York, which will represent her work until 1982.

In ArtNews Kim Levin writes: ‘Miss Neel’s work falls somewhere in the realm where sensibility is so acute that it defies definition; her portraits are not only people, they are art.’

December 21: Richard Neel and Nancy Greene, Richard’s first wife, are married. They will live with Neel for two years.

1964

Spring: Richard graduates from Columbia Law School.

Neel begins receiving a yearly stipend of $6,000 from a benefactor, the psychiatrist Dr. Muriel Gardiner, whom she had met through John Rothschild. The stipend will continue until Neel’s death. (Dr. Gardiner is the woman who lies behind the character Julia in Lillian Hellman’s book Pentimento: A Book of Portraits. She was the editor of The Wolf-Man by the Wolf-Man, a book relating to Freud’s celebrated History of Infantile Neurosis).

1965

January 12-28: Hartley arranges an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Neel at the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth College.

February 5-21: Exhibits Max White, 1935 in the Exhibition of Paintings Eligible for Purchase under the Childe Hassam Fund at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York. This fund places works of art in public collections. Neel will participate in four of these exhibitions through 1975.

Summer: Travels to Europe with Hartley. Their visit includes Paris, Rome, Florence, and Madrid.

Fall: Hartley begins medical school at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.

1966

January: Has her second solo exhibition at Graham Gallery, which is reviewed in the New York Post (January 16) and the Herald Tribune (January 9), as well as in Newsweek (January 31) and the March issue of Arts Magazine.

1967

February 11: A daughter, Olivia, is born to Richard and Nancy in New York.

June 9-30: Neel is given a show at the Maxwell Galleries in San Francisco.

1968

January 6-February 3: Graham Gallery presents a solo exhibition of Neel’s paintings.

Participates in the protest decrying the absence of women and African American artists in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s exhibition The 1930’s: Painting and Sculpture in America.

1969

Hartley graduates from medical school and begins his internship at the University of California in San Francisco.

Neel with Raphael Soyer at her 1968 Graham gallery exhibition

January 16: Participates in demonstrations against the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition Harlem on My Mind. The protest is organized by the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, of which Benny Andrews, Neel’s close friend and fellow artist, is a co-chair and organizer. Raphael Soyer, John Dobbs and Mel Roman are the only other white artists in attendance.

April: Travels to the Soviet Union with John Rothschild.

May 21: Receives a $3,000 Award in Art from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, New York.

Summer: Travels to Mexico with Richard and Nancy. While there, they visit Richard’s father, José Santiago Negron, now an Episcopal minister, as well as Marcelo Pogolotti, and the Mexican mural painter David Alfaro Siqueiros.

From Mexico, Neel travels to San Francisco to stay with Hartley and Ginny, Hartley’s future wife. While there, Neel paints over ten paintings. Her friend from the 1930’s, Katharine Hogle, arranges a visit to meet the Nobel Laureate, Linus Pauling, at his home in Big Sur. Neel paints three paintings there, one of Linus Pauling as well as one of his wife, Ava Helen Pauling, and a portrait of them together.

November-December: Travels to Denmark, Norway, and Spain with Richard and his family. In November she visits Jonathan Brand and his wife, Monika, Pennsylvanian collectors of her work who are living in Copenhagen. Brand’s father, the novelist Millen Brand, had been a close friend of Neel’s in the 1930s.

1960-1969