Alice Neel’s parents c.1907
January 28: Alice Hartley Neel is born in Merion Square, Pennsylvania, to Alice Concross Hartley, a descendant of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and George Washington Neel, an accountant in the per diem department of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Her father’s family is variously described as owners of a steamship company and as a family of opera singers.
Neel is the fourth of five children (Hartley, Albert, Lillian, Alice, and George Washington, Jr.), the eldest of whom will die of diphtheria at age eight. In mid-1900 when Neel is about three months old, her family moves to Colwyn, Pennsylvania, a small town outside Philadelphia in Darby Township. The U.S. Census of 1900 records their address as 106 Third Street; two years later they are listed as residing at 110 South Third Street.
Alice Neel, 1905, age 5
Neel attends Darby High School, at which time the family is listed at 408 Colwyn Avenue, Colwyn, Pennsylvania.
June 28: Graduates from Darby High School, afterwards taking a business course including typing and stenography. Upon completing the course, she takes the civil service exam.
Holds a secretarial job with the Army Air Corps, working for Lieutenant Theodore Sizer, who will later become an art historian at Yale University. She takes evening art classes at the School of Industrial Art, a division of the Pennsylvania (later Philadelphia) Museum of Art.
After leaving her job with the air force, turns down a secretarial position at Swarthmore College.
Neel c.1917
Spends the summer with her sister, Lilly, in Pittsburgh, where she works in a bank.
November 1: Enrolls in the fine art program at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art and Design), although she is listed as a student in illustration for a brief period during the 1922-23 school year. She uses her savings to pay the first year’s tuition but receives Senatorial (state-funded) scholarships for the next three years, according to school records. Among her instructors are Paula Balano who teaches drawing and anatomy and designs stained glass; Henry Snell, who teaches landscape painting; and Rae Sloan Bredin, her teacher for life class and portraiture. Harriet Sartain, later described by Neel as ‘a very conventional lady’, is Dean of the school (‘Interview with Alice Neel’ by Karl E. Fortress, September 12 1975, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.).
Neel and her sister Lilly c.1921
Neel and Enríquez at Chester Springs 1924
Receives honorable mention, Francisca Naiade Balano Prize, in her portrait class.
Again wins honorable mention, Francisca Naiade Balano Prize. Attends the Chester Springs summer school of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, which offers an outdoor portrait class and landscape drawing and painting classes. Here she meets the Cuban artist Carlos Enríquez (1900-1957), son of a prominent family in Havana.
July 24: She and Enríquez leave the Chester Springs program. ‘When they expelled him for doing not much more than taking walks with me in the evening, I left also’ (Patricia Hills, Alice Neel, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1983, p. 17).
October 15: Enríquez, back in Havana, writes in a letter to Neel in Colwyn: ‘How wonderful would it be if you were a lost princess in the woods and of course as the legend always says, I riding a horse will find you crying ... “Weep no more my fair lady,” I’ll say ... for I have a kingdom in my heart for you.’
Enríquez in Cuba c.1924
Neel wins the Kern Dodge Prize for best painting in life class at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women.
Spring: Graduates from the Philadelphia School of Design for Women.
June 1: Marries Enríquez in Colwyn, Pennsylvania, but anxieties prevent her from traveling to Havana with him. Enríquez eventually leaves for Havana, where he takes a job with the Independent Coal Company and participates in his first exhibition, the Salón de Bellas Artes 1925, with Eduardo Abela, Victor Manuel, Marcelo Pogolotti, and Amelia Peláez. This group of young artists, along with Enríquez, will be among the leaders of the Cuban vanguardia movement.
Enríquez returns to Colwyn in February to convince Neel to join him in Cuba. She travels with him to Havana and they stop in Palm Beach and Key West.
They meet up with Enríquez’s friend Marcelo Pogolotti in Palm Beach, where they sketch the resort and are photographed for a newsreel, according to an unidentified newspaper article (courtesy Juan Martinez):
Helping to spread the fame of Palm Beach, a trio of artists, Miss Alice Neel of Philadelphia, Don Carlos Enríquez and Marcelo Pogoloti of Havana, Cuba, are daily sketching many of the show places of the famous winter resort.
Señor Enríquez is a staff artist for a Havana magazine while Señor Pogoloti is sketching scenes to be incorporated in a book showing various scenes around the world in a tour he is making.
The trio are clever craftsmen, transferring their thoughts to the sketch pad with fountain pens. Each stroke of the pen must be correct because there is no chance for erasures. Friday the trio was photographed for a motion picture news reel. Their presence on the Lake Trail drew much attention and a great deal of curiosity.
Enríquez in Cuba c.1924
In Cuba, the couple lives with Enríquez’s parents in their house in El Vedado, later moving into their own apartment on the waterfront and then to a rented house in the neighborhood of La Víbora.
Neel’s parents visit in the later summer, according to the memoirs of Marcelo Pogolotti (Del barro y las voces, Havana, 1982, p. 227):
The hurricane of ’26 has passed into history as one of the most devastating that Havana has suffered. Carlos Enríquez’s in-laws, who had just come the day before from the United States, after hearing the strange and haunting sounds of cement ornaments that fell to the ground, and the snapping of tree branches, asked, ‘Does it always rain this way here?’ (translated from Spanish).
Neel has her first solo exhibition, in Havana, according to her later remarks (dates and location unconfirmed).
December 26: Gives birth to a daughter, Santillana del Mar Enríquez.
Neel holding her daughter, Santillana c.1927
March-April: Exhibits with Enríquez in the XII Salón de Bellas Artes, which is reviewed by Martí Casanovas in the Pequena Gaceta (date unknown):
There is an evident parallelism o tendency and an almost simultaneous advance in the work of this extraordinary couple ... Alice Neel and Carlos Enríquez set the tone of the Salon, and we could almost say the Salon has been made for them.
Perhaps, thanks to their contributions, it is saved from a total and thundering condemnation. A revelation of this caliber every year would be enough not to accuse it of being sterile and utterly useless (translated from Spanish).
April: Two paintings by Neel from 1926-27, Retrato (‘Portrait’) and Enríquez, are reproduced in Revista de Avance (April 15), a new publication for which Enríquez becomes a regular illustrator. In the April 30 issue these paintings as well as two of her untitled drawings are illustrated.
Neel and Fanya Foss c.1927
May 7-31: Exhibits with Enríquez in Exposicion de Arte Nuevo, a show sponsored by Revista de Avance. Two of Enríquez’s nudes are removed from the exhibition for being ‘too exaggerated.’
May: Neel returns to Colwyn, Pennsylvania, with Santillana.
Fall: Enríquez arrives in Colwyn. The family moves to an apartment on West 81st Street in New York City. Neel finds a job at a Greenwich Village bookstore run by Fanya Foss whom she will paint in a formal portrait, Fanya and in the satirical watercolor The Intellectual.
Meets Nadya Olyanova, a graphologist, who will become one of her closest friends and a frequent subject in her work of the late 1920s and early 1930s. It is possible that she met Nadya on the recommendation of Pogolotti who attended the Art Students League with Olyanova in 1923.
Winter: Neel moves with Enríquez and their daughter to 1725 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx.
December: Santillana dies of diphtheria and is buried on December 9 in the Neel family plot at Arlington cemetery in Pennsylvania.
While pregnant with her second child, Neel works at the National City Bank in New York. Enríquez continues to contribute illustrations to Revista de Avance in Havana.
November 24: Gives birth to Isabella Lillian Enríquez (called Isabetta) in New York City.
Photograph of Neel titled Alice Enríquez 1929
Neel and Isabetta 1928
May 1: Enríquez leaves for Cuba with Isabetta. He plans to leave Isabetta with his family and travel with Neel to Paris. Neel sublets her apartment in New York and goes to her parents’ house in Colwyn. She travels every day to Philadelphia to work at the Washington Square studio of art school friends, Ethel Ashton and Rhoda Meyers.
July: Enríquez, with not enough money for two to travel, goes on to Paris without Neel. Neel spends a summer of exhaustingly intense painting.
August 15: Neel returns to Colwyn after painting at Meyers and Ashton’s studio and suffers a nervous breakdown. She recalls experiencing a ‘chill that lasted at least eight hours’ (Hills, Alice Neel, p. 32). She is cared for at home by her mother. In an undated handwritten text (Neel Archives) she writes: ‘Carlos went away. The nights were horrible at first ... I dreamed Isabetta died and we buried her right beside Santillana.’
October: Neel is hospitalized at Orthopedic Hospital in Philadelphia.
Isabetta in Cuba with Carlos’s family, Adolfina, Tio and Adoris c.1930
Alice Neel: Suicidal Ward, Philadelphia General Hospital, 1931, pencil on paper, 17 x 22 in.
January: Enríquez returns to the United States. He visits Neel a few times in the hospital and takes her home to her family in Colwyn. Shortly after Neel is back home, she attempts suicide by turning on the gas oven in her parents’ kitchen. She is hospitalized at Wilmington Hospital in Delaware. After a few days she is returned to Orthopedic Hospital in Philadelphia, where she smashes a glass with the intention of swallowing the shards; attendants are able to prevent her from harming herself. She is sent to the suicidal ward at Philadelphia General Hospital the following day until after Easter. Enríquez returns to Paris.
Late Spring: Neel is transfer to the suicidal ward of Gladwyne Colony, a private sanatorium in Gladwyne, Philadelphia, directed by Dr. Seymour DeWitt Ludlum of the Neuropsychiatric Department at Philadelphia General Hospital. She is encouraged to continue drawing and painting, in contrast with current conventional treatment which stopped all professional life activities.
Nadya Olyanova and Egil Hoye c.1931
Neel and Doolittle c.1932
John Rothschild c.1940
Summer: Enríquez travels from Paris to Spain. In letters to Neel at Gladwyne Colony he expresses concern for her and says that Fanya Foss sent news of her.
September: Neel is discharged from Ludlum’s sanatorium and returns to Colwyn. She visits Nadya Olyanova and her Norwegian husband, Egil Hoye, a sailor in the merchant marine in Stockton, New Jersey. There she meets Kenneth Doolittle, also an able-bodied seaman and a close friend of the couple.
Early in the year, moves with Kenneth Doolittle to 33(?) Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village.
May 28-June 5: Participates in the First Washington Square Outdoor Art Exhibit, showing several paintings. She is forced to withdraw Degenerate Madonna following Catholic Church protests. There she meets John Rothschild (1900-1975), a Harvard graduate from a wealthy family who runs a travel business. Their friendship will last throughout their lives.
June 5: The New York Times Magazine, in an article titled ‘Open-Air Art Shows Gaining Favor’, reports:
New York has just had its first open-air art show, staged in Washington Square by the artists of Greenwich Village. New to us, these outdoor exhibits are familiar sights in several European cities, and in Philadelphia. Hard times have hit the artists of the Village; the outdoor sale was held to help them market their wares and perhaps to gain recognition for their talents.
November 12-20: Participates in the Second Washington Square Outdoor Art Exhibit, which includes the work of about three hundred artists. Juliana Force, who endorsed the exhibits, calls a meeting on November 20 with the artists: ‘Mrs. Juliana Force, Director of The Whitney Museum of American Art, invites you to tea at The Jumble Shop, 11 Waverly Place, on Sunday, ... for a round table discussion concerning the problems of the winter’ (Washington Square Outdoor Exhibition records, 1932-1957, Archives of American Art).
January: Participates with Joseph Solman in an exhibition at the International Book and Art Shop on West Eighth Street. Solman will be a founding member of the abstract art group The Ten and will include Neel in a number of group shows over the years.
March 16-April 4: Exhibits in Living Art: American, French, German, Italian, Mexican, and Russian Artists at the Mellon Galleries in Philadelphia, organized by J. B. Neumann. Two of her paintings are mentioned in the review in the Philadelphia Inquirer (March 19): ‘Among the Americans there is a one-time Philadelphian, Alice Neel, whose “Red Houses” and “Snow” reveal the possession of interpretive gifts out of the ordinary. There is nothing “pretty” about these pictures, but they have substance and honesty.’
March and October: Participates in two exhibitions and art sales for needy New York artists organized by the Artists’ Aid Committee, which is headed by Vernon C. Porter, chairman of the Washington Square Outdoor Art Exhibits.
December 26: Enrolls in the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), a government-funded program run under the auspices of the Whitney Museum of American Art and its director Juliana Force, aided by Vernon C. Porter. She later recalls (New York City WPA Art: Then and Now, New York: NYC WPA Artists, 1977, p. 66):
The first I heard of the W.P.A. was when in 1933 I received a letter from the Whitney Museum asking me to come and see them. I was interviewed by a young man who asked me ‘How would you like to paint for $30 a week?’ This was fabulous as most of the artists had nothing in those days and in fact there were free lunches for artists in the Village ... All the artists were on the project. If there had been no such cultural projects there might well have been a revolution.
Paints Joe Gould, a well-known Greenwich Village bohemian who claims to be writing ‘An Oral History of Our Time’.
Painting c.1933 by Alice Neel of the kind submitted to the WPA
January: Enríquez returns to Cuba from Spain following the death of his mother. He writes to Neel expressing a desire to get back together. She, however, is entangled with Kenneth Doolittle, and being pursued by John Rothschild. It is too much for her. Although she and Carlos never obtain a divorce or annulment, they never meet again.
April 17: Neel is separated from the PWAP payroll. According to an internal memo, on February 12 she had delivered a painting ‘of good artistic merit but so inappropriate that it was considered useless.’ She was given a new assignment to paint a picture showing ‘one of the phases of New York City life.’ On April 15 she was asked to bring the picture to the office and appeared the following day without it, saying her original painting had turned out so badly that she had scraped it off the canvas and had begun again.
Isabetta on boardwalk in New Jersey 1934
Neel and Doolittle with the painting of Isabetta 1934
She delivered this painting on April 17, and ‘the opinion of those who viewed it was that it had been painted the night before on a brand new canvas and that it did not represent more than one day’s work, although she claimed to have been working on this picture two months.’
Summer: Rents a house with her mother on the New Jersey shore, in Belmar, New Jersey. Her mother and father come to spend the summer with her. Isabetta, now almost six years old, comes from Cuba to visit her.
It is here that she paints a nude portrait of Isabetta.
September 30: Neel is entered on the payroll of the Works Progress Administration (WPA; later the Work Projects Administration), which replaced PWAP, at $103.40 per month, in its easel division.
Neel’s original painting of Isabetta 1934, subsequently destroyed
December: Kenneth Doolittle, in a rage, burns more than three hundred of Neel’s drawings and watercolors and slashes more than fifty oil paintings. Neel’s painting of Isabetta is slashed beyond repair but later repainted.
Neel moves out and stays with John Rothschild, first at a hotel on West 42nd Street and then at 14 East 60th Street. With help from Rothschild and her parents, Neel buys a modest cottage in Spring Lake, New Jersey, at 506 Monmouth Avenue. Although she will later sell this house and buy a larger one, Spring Lake will be where she spends part of each summer for the rest of her life.
Rothschild has decided to leave his wife and children, the subject of a number of Neel’s paintings. He wants to live with Neel, but she is ambivalent about it. She gets an apartment for herself at 347 1/2 West 17th Street.
About this time, she meets Jose Santiago Negron, a nightclub singer. Negron leaves his wife and infant child, Sheila, and moves in with Neel. Sheila is the subject of at least three paintings.
Neel’s parents in front of the cottage in Spring Lake, N.J. c.1934
Jose Santiago Negron far left with his Salsa Band c.1935
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.
Negron with Neel’s parents and his daughter Sheila at Spring Lake, N.J. railroad station 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.
Isabetta standing with Negron’s guitar 1939
Neel sitting with her mother in Spring Lake, holding Negron’s guitar 1939
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.
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.
Isabetta in Spring Lake with Neel’s parents and Neel, pregnant with her third child, Richard 1939 (photo presumed taken by Negron)
Neel and Sam Brody c.1940
February 28: Neel is terminated once again from the WPA.
March 19: Reassigned to WPA.
September 3: Birth of Neel’s and Brody’s son, Hartley Stockton Neel.
Fall: Moves to 10 East 107 Street in Spanish Harlem.
October 14: A letter from the Federal Works Agency, a branch of the WPA, notifies Neel that an appointment has been made for her with Miss Grace Gosselin, Director of the East Side House, explaining that there is ‘a solution for the older youngster to be placed at Winifred Wheeler Day Nursery, where you will teach’ (Neel Archives). Neel will teach painting at the school for two years.
Neel c.1943
Neel with her son, Hartley c.1942
November: Moves with Richard and Hartley to a third-floor apartment at 21 East 108 Street, between Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue in Spanish Harlem, where she will live and work for the next twenty years. The apartment features a large living room with two windows that face south and look out onto the street; this is where Neel will do most of her painting.
The WPA is terminated by Congress, and Neel begins to collect public assistance, which she will continue to do until the mid-1950s.
March 6-22: Exhibits twenty-four paintings in a solo exhibition at Rose Fried’s New York gallery, Pinacotheca. A review in ArtNews reports:
Neel’s paintings at Pinacotheca have a kind of deliberate hideousness which make them hard to take even for persons who admire her creative independence ... Nor does the intentional gaucherie of her figures lend them added expression. However, this is plainly serious, thoughtful work and in the one instance of The Walk, it comes off extremely well.
April 17: Life magazine, in an article titled ‘End of WPA Art’, reports that Henry C. Roberts, a bric-a-brac dealer, bought WPA paintings from a Long Island junk dealer who had obtained them for four cents a pound. Neel’s painting New York Factory Buildings is illustrated. She is able to buy back a few of her paintings from Roberts.
May 3: Neel’s father dies at the age eighty‑two.
Fall: Participates in the art fair of the Rudolf Steiner School, where both her sons are enrolled on full scholarships, by offering her services as portrait painter to the winner of a raffle. Neel will participate in this annual fund-raising fair until 1959, according to school newsletters.
May: Illustrates Phillip Bonosky’s short story ‘The Wishing Well’, published in the journal Masses and Mainstream, whose contributing editors include Mike Gold, Phillip Bonosky, Paul Robeson, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Neel had met Bonosky, a reporter for the Daily Worker, the previous year.
December: ‘The Martyr: A Courtroom Sketch by Alice Neel’ is published in Masses and Mainstream.
Neel with her two young sons, Richard, left, and Hartley, 1946
March: Neel’s mother comes to live with her in Spanish Harlem.
March 27: Delivers a slide lecture about her work at Jefferson School of Social Science in New York, showing two hundred slides of her paintings. Mike Gold introduces her, and Joseph Solman provides her critical commentary.
Fall: Richard Neel enters High Mowing School in Wilton, New Hampshire, which he attends on a full scholarship until his graduation in 1957. High Mowing is affiliated with the Rudolf Steiner School.
March 1: Neel’s mother dies at the age of eighty-six from complications brought on by a broken hip.
August 30-September 11: Exhibits eighteen paintings in Two One-Man Exhibitions: Capt. Hugh N. Mulzac, Alice Neel, at the A.C.A. Gallery. This is Neel’s last show until 1960.
Neel’s mother c.1953
Fall: Hartley Neel enters High Mowing School, which he will attend on a full scholarship until his graduation in 1959.
October 11 and 17: Neel is interviewed by FBI agents, whose files show that she has been under investigation as early as 1951 owing to her periodic involvement with the Communist party. The files describe her as a ‘romantic Bohemian type Communist.’ According to her sons, Neel asked the agents to sit for portraits. They declined.
Spring: Richard Neel graduates from High Mowing School. In the fall he enters Columbia College, New York, on a full scholarship.
June: ‘Four Drawings by Alice Neel’ is published in Mainstream (formerly Masses and Mainstream).
Brody, who, for many years, has lived on and off with Neel and her two boys, moves out of Neel’s apartment permanently, but will remain a friend until her death.
Neel begins counseling sessions with Dr. Anthony Sterrett.
Appears along with Gregory Corso, Mary Frank, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouak, and Peter Orlovsky in Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie’s Beat file Pull My Daisy, which is funded by Walter Gutman’s G-String Productions.
Spring: Hartley Neel graduates from High Mowing School and in the fall begins Columbia College on a full scholarship.
Neel buys a larger house in Spring Lake, New Jersey.
Neel, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso on the set of Pull My Daisy, 1959 (courtesy Deborah Bell, New York)
Neel painting on the lawn of her second house in Spring Lake, N.J. c.1959
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.’
Hub Crehan sitting by his portrait c.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.
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.
The hallway of Neel’s apartment at 300 West 107th Street after 1965
Neel (left) and Hartley (far right) with guest at the opening of her show at the Maxwell Galleries 1967
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.
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.
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.
Hartley graduates from medical school and begins his internship at the University of California in San Francisco.
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.
Neel with Hartley (left) and Richard (back to camera) at the opening of her solo exhibition at the Graham Gallery c.1968
Neel with Raphael Soyer at her 1968 Graham gallery exhibition
August 15: Hartley Neel and Virginia (Ginny) Taylor are married at Ginny’s home in Sherman, Connecticut. Guests at the wedding include friends of Ginny’s family, former head of the NEA, Henry Allen Moe, and writer, Malcolm Cowley, both of whom, coincidentally, had written about Neel’s work in the 1930’s. Hartley and Ginny move to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Hartley begins his three-year medical residency at Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital.
John Rothschild moves into the guest room in Neel’s apartment, where he will live until his death in 1975.
August 31: Neel’s portrait of Kate Millett appears on the cover of Time magazine in an issue dedicated to ‘The Politics of Sex’. Rosemary Frank, the art editor of Time, periodically asks Neel to paint portraits of public figures (including Ted Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt) for possible inclusion in the magazine.
October: Paints Andy Warhol. Brigid Berlin photographs the sitting.
October 13-November 7: Has a solo exhibition at the Graham Gallery. Lawrence Campbell, in ArtNews (vol. 69), observes that ‘Miss Neel seems to detect a hidden weakness in her sitters which she drags out, yelping, into the clear glare of day.’
Andy Warhol sitting for Neel’s portrait. Photo by Brigid Berlin 1970
Neel with Rita Redd (left) and Jackie Curtis (center) at the opening of Neel’s solo exhibition at Moore College 1971
January 15-February 19: Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, formerly the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, Neel’s alma mater, gives her a solo exhibition. Jackie Curtis and Ritta Redd, whose double portrait is included in the show, accompany her to the opening.
January 29: Participates in a panel of nineteen women who had taken over the floor to demand their own session at one of the weekly meetings of the Alliance of Figurative Artists in New York, which had a long tradition of having only male speakers.
February 25-March 21: Participates in the National Academy of Design’s 146th Annual Exhibition and receives the Benjamin Altman Figure Prize for $2,500.
February 28: Twin daughters, Alexandra and Antonia, are born to Richard and Nancy.
May: Joins a demonstration against the Whitney Museum of American Art’s exhibition Contemporary Black Artists in America. The exhibition is widely criticized by artists as being hastily organized and ill-conceived.
June 1: Receives an honorary doctorate in fine arts from Moore College of Art and Design.
September: Participates in a protest against the Museum of Modern Art organized by the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition and Artists and Writers Protest Against the War in Vietnam. The protestors oppose Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s handling of the Attica prison riot and the museum bookstore’s refusal to sell their Attica Book (1971).
Winter: Neel’s doctoral address from Moore College is published in the journal Women and Art. The same issue announces the circulation of two petitions, one by the Alliance of Figurative Artists (initiated by Noah Baen) and the other by Women in the Arts (initiated by Cindy Nemser), demanding the inclusion of Neel’s work in the Whitney’s upcoming annual exhibition.
January 25-March 19: Neel’s painting The Family (John Gruen, Jane Wilson, and Julia), 1970 is included in the Whitney’s annual exhibition.
April 20-22: Participates in the Conference of Women in the Visual Arts at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C. At a panel discussion, Neel takes the opportunity to present a series of slides of her work. The format of the slide show would be repeated in the frequent lectures she will deliver over the course of the next decade.
June: Travels to Greece and Africa with Hartley and John Rothschild. In Nairobi they attend an exhibition of Neel’s work at the Paa Ya Paa Art Gallery and Studio, which was arranged by an African business associate of John Rothschild, Peter N. Kinuthia, whom Neel will paint the following year. While in Kenya, on June 19, Neel appears on the talk show MAMBO-LEO on national television.
Late Summer: Spends a week at the Skowhegan School in Maine as a visiting artist.
February 15-March 13: John Perreault, art critic and instructor, organizes the exhibition The Male Nude at the School of Visual Arts Gallery in New York. Joe Gould, 1933, is included, as is John Perreault, 1972, which was painted for the exhibition.
Spring: Hartley finishes his residency and opens a private practice in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. Hartley and Ginny move to Stowe, Vermont, where Neel will spend several weeks a year for the rest of her life.
Neel is awarded a $7,500 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Between 1973 and 1975 Neel will participate in at least eight exhibitions devoted to the work of women artists, organized by the Women’s Interart Center and Women in the Arts, among others.
Neel in Greece 1972
Neel at Hartley’s house in Vermont after 1973
Neel at Whitney opening, 1974
Neel in her studio in Vermont after 1975
February 7-March 17: The Whitney Museum of American Art presents the first retrospective exhibition of Neel’s work, Alice Neel, curated by Elke Solomon. Fifty-eight paintings are included, and an eight-page brochure accompanies the exhibition. Although Neel’s admirers consider it an inadequate tribute, Neel herself views it as a triumph.
April 17: A daughter, Victoria, is born to Richard and Nancy in New York.
January 23: A daughter, Elizabeth, is born to Hartley and Ginny in Stowe, Vermont.
Summer: Neel helps Hartley and Ginny renovate space on their property in rural Vermont to serve as Neel’s studio during her visits.
September 7-October 19: The Georgia Museum of Art in Athens, Georgia, presents Alice Neel: The Woman and Her Work, which includes eighty-three paintings and is accompanied by a catalogue. Neel has six other solo exhibitions this year and participates in sixteen group exhibitions.
An interview with Neel is included in Cindy Nemser’s book Art Talk: Conversations with 12 Women Artists (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975).
November 2: Participates in a panel discussion at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York ‘Women Artists, Seventy Plus.’
Neel is inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters, New York (now the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters).
February 26: Receives the International Women’s Year Award (1975-76) ‘in recognition of outstanding cultural contributions and dedication to women and art.’
December: Neel’s T. B. Harlem, 1940, is included in the groundbreaking exhibition Women Artists, 1550-1950, organized by Linda Nochlin and Ann Sutherland Harris, first presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Panelists at Brooklyn Museum for Curators, Critics and the Economics of the Woman Artist and Women Artists, Seventy Plus. Pictured left to right, top row: Lilly Brody, Susan Martin, Isabel Bishop, Alice Neel, Lil Picard, Judith Von Baron, Lois Mailou Jones, Janet Schneider, Sari Dienes. Bottom row: Patricia Mainardi, June Blum. Photo by Maurice C. Blum
Working with master printmaker Judith Solodkin, who is teaching at Rutgers University, Neel creates her first prints, a lithograph and an etching. The prints are published by 724 Prints, a company run by Dorothy Pearlstein and Nancy Melzer. She will produce four more lithographs with Solodkin over the next two years.
Among many other exhibitions this year, Neel participates in two shows focusing on WPA artists of the 1930s, one at the Parsons School of Design, New York, and the other a traveling exhibition organized by the Gallery Association of New York.
Neel painting Stephen Shepherd in the front room of her apartment at 300 West 107th Street 1978
May 18: A son, Andrew, is born to Hartley and Ginny in Stowe, Vermont.
November 1-25: Graham Gallery organizes Alice Neel: A Retrospective Exhibition of Watercolors and Drawings, the first show dedicated to her works on paper.
January 30: Receives the National Women’s Caucus for Art award for outstanding achievement in the visual arts, along with Isabel Bishop, Louise Nevelson, and Georgia O’Keeffe. President Jimmy Carter presents the award.
An interview with Neel is included in Eleanor Munro’s book Originals: American Women Artists (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979).
Neel, Selma Burke and Isabel Bishop with President Jimmy Carter at the first National Women’s Caucus for Art award in 1979
Neel and Louise Nevelson at the awards ceremony for the above award, January 30, 1979. Photo by Gina Shamus
October 14: Self-Portrait, 1980, is exhibited for the first time in Selected 20th Century American Self-Portraits at the Harold Reed Gallery, a benefit for the Third Street Music School Settlement.
After several incidents where she loses consciousness, and on the insistence of her sons, Richard and Hartley, Neel undergoes tests at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. It is discovered that she has sick sinus syndrome leading to episodes of bradycardia. A pacemaker is immediately inserted to regulate her heart rate.
Neel pictured with her Self-Portrait 1980
February 5-March 1: Alice Neel ’81: A Retrospective, 1926-1981 is held at the C. Grimaldis Gallery in Baltimore.
July: Travels to the Soviet Union with her sons and daughters-in-law and several grandchildren for a solo exhibition of her work at the Artists’ Union in Moscow. It is organized by Phillip Bonosky, who is the Daily Worker correspondent in Moscow.
March 29: New York City Mayor Ed Koch hosts a dinner at Gracie Mansion in honor of Neel, showcasing the portrait of him she has recently completed and showing a few of her other paintings. The Guarneri String Quartet performs. Many of Neel’s sitters are in attendance, including David Soyer, the cellist with the Guarneri; the Mayor; Henry Geldzahler; Michel Auder; Duane Hanson; Annie Sprinkle; and Andy Warhol. Auder and Warhol record the event in video and photography respectively.
Signs on with the Robert Miller Gallery, New York. Her first exhibition there is Alice Neel Non-Figurative Works (May 4-June 5).
Receives a commendation from the City of Philadelphia, presented by Richard Doran, City Representative and Director of Commerce.
Neel with New York Mayor, Ed Koch, at Gracie Mansion 1982
March 17-April 17: Participates in the National Academy of Design’s 158th Annual Exhibition and receives the Benjamin Altman Figure Prize for $3,000.
Receives a $25,000 artist fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Patricia Hill’s book Alice Neel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1983), the first fully illustrated monograph on Neel’s work, is published. It features Neel’s own account of her life, gathered through interviews with Hills.
Alice Neel on the Johnny Carson show, 1984
February: Has a solo exhibition at the Robert Miller Gallery, exhibiting forty paintings representing her work from the 1930s to the present.
February 21: Appears on Johnny Carson’s ‘The Tonight Show’ and proves herself a skilled entertainer.
On a routine visit to the Massachusetts General Hospital to have her pacemaker checked, X-rays indicate that she has advanced colon cancer which already spread to her liver. She immediately undergoes surgery and afterwards returns to Vermont to stay with Hartley and Ginny and their children while she recuperates. While there, she is interviewed by Judith Higgins of Artnews for a cover story.
Spring--summer: Despite her poor health, in April, she returns to New York and Spring Lake. With the help of Richard and Nancy, she continues her busy schedule. Among her many commitments, interviews for the ArtNews article continue, and, on June 19, she makes a second appearance on ‘The Tonight Show’ during which she insists that Johnny Carson visit her in New York to sit for a portrait.
July: She returns to Vermont to spend time with Hartley and his family and to lecture at the Vermont Studio Center.
Receives chemotherapy treatment for her cancer. Much debilitated, she spends the end of the summer in Spring Lake with Richard and his family. Despite her weakened condition, she continues to paint.
Early fall: She returns to her apartment in New York.
October: Appears on the cover of the ArtNews issue that features the article by Judith Higgens, ‘Alice Neel and the Human Comedy’. Robert Mapplethorpe visits early in October to photograph Neel. Plans to return to Vermont to visit Hartley and his family and to attend a lecture in her honor at the Fleming Museum in Burlington, Vermont. However, she is too weak to travel, and on October 13, she dies, with her family at her side, at her apartment in New York.
In a private ceremony, surrounded by her sons, their wives and her grandchildren, she is buried, according to her wishes, near her studio in Vermont.
Neel, in wheel chair, with her two sons, Hartley (left) and Richard, at the Vermont Studio Center. Also pictured is Ginny, Hartley’s wife, and Richard’s first wife, Nancy (left) 1984
Neel in Spring Lake with her sons Richard, left, and Hartley, 1984
Obituaries recount her courageous life, her dedication to art, and her struggles against the tide of the art world. William G. Blair of the New York Times calls her (October 14) ‘the quintessential bohemian ... [whose] unconventional and intense representational portraits, many painted in her early years, were neglected, even resented, in official art world circles’ and notes that ‘in the last decades of her life, the honors that had been denied her came her way.’ Stephan Salisbury of the Philadelphia Inquirer writes (October 16): ‘Steadfast in the pursuit of her own vision and amused by her ability to shock both the art world and the arbiters of American taste, Miss Neel lived a singular life devoted to painting and to the laughing, suffering world around her.’
January 28: Alice Hartley Neel is born in Merion Square, Pennsylvania, to Alice Concross Hartley, a descendant of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and George Washington Neel, an accountant in the per diem department of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Her father’s family is variously described as owners of a steamship company and as a family of opera singers.
Alice Neel, 1905, age 5
Neel is the fourth of five children (Hartley, Albert, Lillian, Alice, and George Washington, Jr.), the eldest of whom will die of diphtheria at age eight. In mid-1900 when Neel is about three months old, her family moves to Colwyn, Pennsylvania, a small town outside Philadelphia in Darby Township. The U.S. Census of 1900 records their address as 106 Third Street; two years later they are listed as residing at 110 South Third Street.
Alice Neel’s parents c.1907
Neel attends Darby High School, at which time the family is listed at 408 Colwyn Avenue, Colwyn, Pennsylvania.
June 28: Graduates from Darby High School, afterwards taking a business course including typing and stenography. Upon completing the course, she takes the civil service exam.
Holds a secretarial job with the Army Air Corps, working for Lieutenant Theodore Sizer, who will later become an art historian at Yale University. She takes evening art classes at the School of Industrial Art, a division of the Pennsylvania (later Philadelphia) Museum of Art.
After leaving her job with the air force, turns down a secretarial position at Swarthmore College.
Neel c.1917
Spends the summer with her sister, Lilly, in Pittsburgh, where she works in a bank.
November 1: Enrolls in the fine art program at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art and Design), although she is listed as a student in illustration for a brief period during the 1922-23 school year. She uses her savings to pay the first year’s tuition but receives Senatorial (state-funded) scholarships for the next three years, according to school records. Among her instructors are Paula Balano who teaches drawing and anatomy and designs stained glass; Henry Snell, who teaches landscape painting; and Rae Sloan Bredin, her teacher for life class and portraiture. Harriet Sartain, later described by Neel as ‘a very conventional lady’, is Dean of the school (‘Interview with Alice Neel’ by Karl E. Fortress, September 12 1975, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.).
Neel and her sister Lilly c.1921
Neel and Enríquez at Chester Springs 1924
Neel wins the Kern Dodge Prize for best painting in life class at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women.
Spring: Graduates from the Philadelphia School of Design for Women.
June 1: Marries Enríquez in Colwyn, Pennsylvania, but anxieties prevent her from traveling to Havana with him. Enríquez eventually leaves for Havana, where he takes a job with the Independent Coal Company and participates in his first exhibition, the Salón de Bellas Artes 1925, with Eduardo Abela, Victor Manuel, Marcelo Pogolotti, and Amelia Peláez. This group of young artists, along with Enríquez, will be among the leaders of the Cuban vanguardia movement.
Enríquez returns to Colwyn in February to convince Neel to join him in Cuba. She travels with him to Havana and they stop in Palm Beach and Key West.
Enríquez in Cuba c.1924
They meet up with Enríquez’s friend Marcelo Pogolotti in Palm Beach, where they sketch the resort and are photographed for a newsreel, according to an unidentified newspaper article (courtesy Juan Martinez):
Helping to spread the fame of Palm Beach, a trio of artists, Miss Alice Neel of Philadelphia, Don Carlos Enríquez and Marcelo Pogoloti of Havana, Cuba, are daily sketching many of the show places of the famous winter resort.
Señor Enríquez is a staff artist for a Havana magazine while Señor Pogoloti is sketching scenes to be incorporated in a book showing various scenes around the world in a tour he is making.
The trio are clever craftsmen, transferring their thoughts to the sketch pad with fountain pens. Each stroke of the pen must be correct because there is no chance for erasures. Friday the trio was photographed for a motion picture news reel. Their presence on the Lake Trail drew much attention and a great deal of curiosity.
Enríquez in Cuba c.1924
In Cuba, the couple lives with Enríquez’s parents in their house in El Vedado, later moving into their own apartment on the waterfront and then to a rented house in the neighborhood of La Víbora.
Neel’s parents visit in the later summer, according to the memoirs of Marcelo Pogolotti (Del barro y las voces, Havana, 1982, p. 227):
The hurricane of ’26 has passed into history as one of the most devastating that Havana has suffered. Carlos Enríquez’s in-laws, who had just come the day before from the United States, after hearing the strange and haunting sounds of cement ornaments that fell to the ground, and the snapping of tree branches, asked, ‘Does it always rain this way here?’ (translated from Spanish).
Neel has her first solo exhibition, in Havana, according to her later remarks (dates and location unconfirmed).
December 26: Gives birth to a daughter, Santillana del Mar Enríquez.
Neel holding her daughter, Santillana c.1927
March-April: Exhibits with Enríquez in the XII Salón de Bellas Artes, which is reviewed by Martí Casanovas in the Pequena Gaceta (date unknown):
There is an evident parallelism o tendency and an almost simultaneous advance in the work of this extraordinary couple ... Alice Neel and Carlos Enríquez set the tone of the Salon, and we could almost say the Salon has been made for them.
Perhaps, thanks to their contributions, it is saved from a total and thundering condemnation. A revelation of this caliber every year would be enough not to accuse it of being sterile and utterly useless (translated from Spanish).
April: Two paintings by Neel from 1926-27, Retrato (‘Portrait’) and Enríquez, are reproduced in Revista de Avance (April 15), a new publication for which Enríquez becomes a regular illustrator. In the April 30 issue these paintings as well as two of her untitled drawings are illustrated.
Neel and Fanya Foss c.1927
Winter: Neel moves with Enríquez and their daughter to 1725 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx.
December: Santillana dies of diphtheria and is buried on December 9 in the Neel family plot at Arlington cemetery in Pennsylvania.
While pregnant with her second child, Neel works at the National City Bank in New York. Enríquez continues to contribute illustrations to Revista de Avance in Havana.
November 24: Gives birth to Isabella Lillian Enríquez (called Isabetta) in New York City.
Photograph of Neel titled Alice Enríquez 1929
May 1: Enríquez leaves for Cuba with Isabetta. He plans to leave Isabetta with his family and travel with Neel to Paris. Neel sublets her apartment in New York and goes to her parents’ house in Colwyn. She travels every day to Philadelphia to work at the Washington Square studio of art school friends, Ethel Ashton and Rhoda Meyers.
July: Enríquez, with not enough money for two to travel, goes on to Paris without Neel. Neel spends a summer of exhaustingly intense painting.
August 15: Neel returns to Colwyn after painting at Meyers and Ashton’s studio and suffers a nervous breakdown. She recalls experiencing a ‘chill that lasted at least eight hours’ (Hills, Alice Neel, p. 32). She is cared for at home by her mother. In an undated handwritten text (Neel Archives) she writes: ‘Carlos went away. The nights were horrible at first ... I dreamed Isabetta died and we buried her right beside Santillana.’
October: Neel is hospitalized at Orthopedic Hospital in Philadelphia.
Isabetta in Cuba with Carlos’s family, Adolfina, Tio and Adoris c.1930
Alice Neel: Suicidal Ward, Philadelphia General Hospital, 1931, pencil on paper, 17 x 22 in.
Summer: Enríquez travels from Paris to Spain. In letters to Neel at Gladwyne Colony he expresses concern for her and says that Fanya Foss sent news of her.
September: Neel is discharged from Ludlum’s sanatorium and returns to Colwyn. She visits Nadya Olyanova and her Norwegian husband, Egil Hoye, a sailor in the merchant marine in Stockton, New Jersey. There she meets Kenneth Doolittle, also an able-bodied seaman and a close friend of the couple.
Early in the year, moves with Kenneth Doolittle to 33(?) Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village.
May 28-June 5: Participates in the First Washington Square Outdoor Art Exhibit, showing several paintings. She is forced to withdraw Degenerate Madonna following Catholic Church protests. There she meets John Rothschild (1900-1975), a Harvard graduate from a wealthy family who runs a travel business. Their friendship will last throughout their lives.
Nadya Olyanova and Egil Hoye c.1931
Neel and Doolittle c.1932
June 5: The New York Times Magazine, in an article titled ‘Open-Air Art Shows Gaining Favor’, reports:
New York has just had its first open-air art show, staged in Washington Square by the artists of Greenwich Village. New to us, these outdoor exhibits are familiar sights in several European cities, and in Philadelphia. Hard times have hit the artists of the Village; the outdoor sale was held to help them market their wares and perhaps to gain recognition for their talents.
November 12-20: Participates in the Second Washington Square Outdoor Art Exhibit, which includes the work of about three hundred artists. Juliana Force, who endorsed the exhibits, calls a meeting on November 20 with the artists: ‘Mrs. Juliana Force, Director of The Whitney Museum of American Art, invites you to tea at The Jumble Shop, 11 Waverly Place, on Sunday, ... for a round table discussion concerning the problems of the winter’ (Washington Square Outdoor Exhibition records, 1932-1957, Archives of American Art).
John Rothschild c.1940
January: Participates with Joseph Solman in an exhibition at the International Book and Art Shop on West Eighth Street. Solman will be a founding member of the abstract art group The Ten and will include Neel in a number of group shows over the years.
March 16-April 4: Exhibits in Living Art: American, French, German, Italian, Mexican, and Russian Artists at the Mellon Galleries in Philadelphia, organized by J. B. Neumann. Two of her paintings are mentioned in the review in the Philadelphia Inquirer (March 19): ‘Among the Americans there is a one-time Philadelphian, Alice Neel, whose “Red Houses” and “Snow” reveal the possession of interpretive gifts out of the ordinary. There is nothing “pretty” about these pictures, but they have substance and honesty.’
March and October: Participates in two exhibitions and art sales for needy New York artists organized by the Artists’ Aid Committee, which is headed by Vernon C. Porter, chairman of the Washington Square Outdoor Art Exhibits.
Painting c.1933 by Alice Neel of the kind submitted to the WPA
December 26: Enrolls in the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), a government-funded program run under the auspices of the Whitney Museum of American Art and its director Juliana Force, aided by Vernon C. Porter. She later recalls (New York City WPA Art: Then and Now, New York: NYC WPA Artists, 1977, p. 66):
The first I heard of the W.P.A. was when in 1933 I received a letter from the Whitney Museum asking me to come and see them. I was interviewed by a young man who asked me ‘How would you like to paint for $30 a week?’ This was fabulous as most of the artists had nothing in those days and in fact there were free lunches for artists in the Village ... All the artists were on the project. If there had been no such cultural projects there might well have been a revolution.
Paints Joe Gould, a well-known Greenwich Village bohemian who claims to be writing ‘An Oral History of Our Time’.
Isabetta on boardwalk in New Jersey 1934
January: Enríquez returns to Cuba from Spain following the death of his mother. He writes to Neel expressing a desire to get back together. She, however, is entangled with Kenneth Doolittle, and being pursued by John Rothschild. It is too much for her. Although she and Carlos never obtain a divorce or annulment, they never meet again.
April 17: Neel is separated from the PWAP payroll. According to an internal memo, on February 12 she had delivered a painting ‘of good artistic merit but so inappropriate that it was considered useless.’ She was given a new assignment to paint a picture showing ‘one of the phases of New York City life.’ On April 15 she was asked to bring the picture to the office and appeared the following day without it, saying her original painting had turned out so badly that she had scraped it off the canvas and had begun again.
Neel and Doolittle with the painting of Isabetta 1934
She delivered this painting on April 17, and ‘the opinion of those who viewed it was that it had been painted the night before on a brand new canvas and that it did not represent more than one day’s work, although she claimed to have been working on this picture two months.’
Summer: Rents a house with her mother on the New Jersey shore, in Belmar, New Jersey. Her mother and father come to spend the summer with her. Isabetta, now almost six years old, comes from Cuba to visit her.
It is here that she paints a nude portrait of Isabetta.
September 30: Neel is entered on the payroll of the Works Progress Administration (WPA; later the Work Projects Administration), which replaced PWAP, at $103.40 per month, in its easel division.
Neel’s original painting of Isabetta 1934, subsequently destroyed
December: Kenneth Doolittle, in a rage, burns more than three hundred of Neel’s drawings and watercolors and slashes more than fifty oil paintings. Neel’s painting of Isabetta is slashed beyond repair but later repainted.
Neel moves out and stays with John Rothschild, first at a hotel on West 42nd Street and then at 14 East 60th Street. With help from Rothschild and her parents, Neel buys a modest cottage in Spring Lake, New Jersey, at 506 Monmouth Avenue. Although she will later sell this house and buy a larger one, Spring Lake will be where she spends part of each summer for the rest of her life.
Rothschild has decided to leave his wife and children, the subject of a number of Neel’s paintings. He wants to live with Neel, but she is ambivalent about it. She gets an apartment for herself at 347 1/2 West 17th Street.
About this time, she meets Jose Santiago Negron, a nightclub singer. Negron leaves his wife and infant child, Sheila, and moves in with Neel. Sheila is the subject of at least three paintings.
Neel’s parents in front of the cottage in Spring Lake, N.J. c.1934
Jose Santiago Negron far left with his Salsa Band c.1935
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.
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).
Negron with Neel’s parents and his daughter Sheila at Spring Lake, N.J. railroad station 1939
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.
Isabetta standing with Negron’s guitar 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.
Neel sitting with her mother in Spring Lake, holding Negron’s guitar 1939
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.
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.
Isabetta in Spring Lake with Neel’s parents and Neel, pregnant with her third child, Richard 1939 (photo presumed taken by Negron)
Neel and Sam Brody c.1940
February 28: Neel is terminated once again from the WPA.
March 19: Reassigned to WPA.
September 3: Birth of Neel’s and Brody’s son, Hartley Stockton Neel.
Fall: Moves to 10 East 107 Street in Spanish Harlem.
October 14: A letter from the Federal Works Agency, a branch of the WPA, notifies Neel that an appointment has been made for her with Miss Grace Gosselin, Director of the East Side House, explaining that there is ‘a solution for the older youngster to be placed at Winifred Wheeler Day Nursery, where you will teach’ (Neel Archives). Neel will teach painting at the school for two years.
Neel c.1943
March 6-22: Exhibits twenty-four paintings in a solo exhibition at Rose Fried’s New York gallery, Pinacotheca. A review in ArtNews reports:
Neel’s paintings at Pinacotheca have a kind of deliberate hideousness which make them hard to take even for persons who admire her creative independence ... Nor does the intentional gaucherie of her figures lend them added expression. However, this is plainly serious, thoughtful work and in the one instance of The Walk, it comes off extremely well.
April 17: Life magazine, in an article titled ‘End of WPA Art’, reports that Henry C. Roberts, a bric-a-brac dealer, bought WPA paintings from a Long Island junk dealer who had obtained them for four cents a pound. Neel’s painting New York Factory Buildings is illustrated. She is able to buy back a few of her paintings from Roberts.
Neel with her son, Hartley c.1942
May 3: Neel’s father dies at the age eighty-two.
Fall: Participates in the art fair of the Rudolf Steiner School, where both her sons are enrolled on full scholarships, by offering her services as portrait painter to the winner of a raffle. Neel will participate in this annual fund-raising fair until 1959, according to school newsletters.
May: Illustrates Phillip Bonosky’s short story ‘The Wishing Well’, published in the journal Masses and Mainstream, whose contributing editors include Mike Gold, Phillip Bonosky, Paul Robeson, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Neel had met Bonosky, a reporter for the Daily Worker, the previous year.
December: ‘The Martyr: A Courtroom Sketch by Alice Neel’ is published in Masses and Mainstream.
Neel with her two young sons, Richard, left, and Hartley, 1946
April: ‘Relief Cut by Alice Neel’ is published in Masses and Mainstream.
December 26-January 13, 1951: Has her first solo exhibition in six years, showing seventeen paintings at the A.C.A. Gallery. Joseph Solman writes in the brochure:
Alice Neel is primarily a painter of people. Waifs and poets, friends and Puerto Rican neighbors come in to sit for her - and she probes one without sermon or sentimentality. At times, an element of foreboding, akin to that in the work of Munch, creeps into her work; and there are portraits that are almost vivisections. But always her communication is so irresistibly direct that a great intensity infuses her work.
Mike Gold, a prominent left-wing journalist and Neel’s close friend, reviews the show in the Daily Worker (December 27), where he quotes her: ‘There isn’t much good portrait painting being done today, and I think it is because with all this war, commercialism and fascism, human beings have been steadily marked down in value, despised, rejected and degraded.’ The New York Times writes (December 31):
Emotional values predominate in Alice Neel’s paintings of people at the ACA Gallery. Her approach is frankly expressionistic; she uses a great deal of black, accentuating profile lines, and catches figures in strongly individual poses. And its dramatic intensity succeeds because of unmistakable artistic sincerity.
January: Illustrates Phillip Bonosky’s story ‘I Live on the Bowery’ in Masses and Mainstream.
April 23-May 23: Exhibits twenty-four paintings in a solo show at the New Playwrights Theatre, New York. The exhibition, organized by Mike Gold, is a tribute to Neel by fellow artists. Gold states in the brochure for the exhibition: ‘Alice Neel is a pioneer of socialist-realism in American painting. For this reason, the New Playwrights Theatre, dedicated to the same cause, presents her paintings to its audiences, who will know how to understand, appreciate and encourage one of their own.’
March: Neel’s mother comes to live with her in Spanish Harlem.
March 27: Delivers a slide lecture about her work at Jefferson School of Social Science in New York, showing two hundred slides of her paintings. Mike Gold introduces her, and Joseph Solman provides her critical commentary.
Fall: Richard Neel enters High Mowing School in Wilton, New Hampshire, which he attends on a full scholarship until his graduation in 1957. High Mowing is affiliated with the Rudolf Steiner School.
March 1: Neel’s mother dies at the age of eighty-six from complications brought on by a broken hip.
August 30-September 11: Exhibits eighteen paintings in Two One-Man Exhibitions: Capt. Hugh N. Mulzac, Alice Neel, at the A.C.A. Gallery. This is Neel’s last show until 1960.
Neel’s mother c.1953
Fall: Hartley Neel enters High Mowing School, which he will attend on a full scholarship until his graduation in 1959.
October 11 and 17: Neel is interviewed by FBI agents, whose files show that she has been under investigation as early as 1951 owing to her periodic involvement with the Communist party. The files describe her as a ‘romantic Bohemian type Communist.’ According to her sons, Neel asked the agents to sit for portraits. They declined.
Spring: Richard Neel graduates from High Mowing School. In the fall he enters Columbia College, New York, on a full scholarship.
Neel, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso on the set of Pull My Daisy, 1959 (courtesy Deborah Bell, New York)
June: ‘Four Drawings by Alice Neel’ is published in Mainstream (formerly Masses and Mainstream).
Brody, who, for many years, has lived on and off with Neel and her two boys, moves out of Neel’s apartment permanently, but will remain a friend until her death.
Neel begins counseling sessions with Dr. Anthony Sterrett.
Appears along with Gregory Corso, Mary Frank, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouak, and Peter Orlovsky in Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie’s Beat file Pull My Daisy, which is funded by Walter Gutman’s G-String Productions.
Spring: Hartley Neel graduates from High Mowing School and in the fall begins Columbia College on a full scholarship.
Neel buys a larger house in Spring Lake, New Jersey.
Neel painting on the lawn of her second house in Spring Lake, N.J. c.1959
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.’
Hub Crehan sitting by his portrait c.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.
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. Neel receives the award later this year.
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.
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.
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).
The hallway of Neel’s apartment at 300 West 107th Street after 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.
Neel (left) and Hartley (far right) with guest at the opening of her show at the Maxwell Galleries 1967
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.
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.
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.
Neel with Hartley (left) and Richard (back to camera) at the opening of her solo exhibition at the Graham Gallery c.1968
Neel with Raphael Soyer at her 1968 Graham gallery exhibition
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.
Andy Warhol sitting for Neel’s portrait. Photo by Brigid Berlin 1970
August 15: Hartley Neel and Virginia (Ginny) Taylor are married at Ginny’s home in Sherman, Connecticut. Guests at the wedding include friends of Ginny’s family, former head of the NEA, Henry Allen Moe, and writer, Malcolm Cowley, both of whom, coincidentally, had written about Neel’s work in the 1930’s. Hartley and Ginny move to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Hartley begins his three-year medical residency at Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital.
John Rothschild moves into the guest room in Neel’s apartment, where he will live until his death in 1975.
August 31: Neel’s portrait of Kate Millett appears on the cover of Time magazine in an issue dedicated to ‘The Politics of Sex’. Rosemary Frank, the art editor of Time, periodically asks Neel to paint portraits of public figures (including Ted Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt) for possible inclusion in the magazine.
October: Paints Andy Warhol. Brigid Berlin photographs the sitting.
October 13-November 7: Has a solo exhibition at the Graham Gallery. Lawrence Campbell, in ArtNews (vol. 69), observes that ‘Miss Neel seems to detect a hidden weakness in her sitters which she drags out, yelping, into the clear glare of day.’
Neel with Rita Redd (left) and Jackie Curtis (center) at the opening of Neel’s solo exhibition at Moore College 1971
January 15-February 19: Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, formerly the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, Neel’s alma mater, gives her a solo exhibition. Jackie Curtis and Ritta Redd, whose double portrait is included in the show, accompany her to the opening.
January 29: Participates in a panel of nineteen women who had taken over the floor to demand their own session at one of the weekly meetings of the Alliance of Figurative Artists in New York, which had a long tradition of having only male speakers.
February 25-March 21: Participates in the National Academy of Design’s 146th Annual Exhibition and receives the Benjamin Altman Figure Prize for $2,500.
February 28: Twin daughters, Alexandra and Antonia, are born to Richard and Nancy.
May: Joins a demonstration against the Whitney Museum of American Art’s exhibition Contemporary Black Artists in America. The exhibition is widely criticized by artists as being hastily organized and ill-conceived.
June 1: Receives an honorary doctorate in fine arts from Moore College of Art and Design.
September: Participates in a protest against the Museum of Modern Art organized by the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition and Artists and Writers Protest Against the War in Vietnam. The protestors oppose Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s handling of the Attica prison riot and the museum bookstore’s refusal to sell their Attica Book (1971).
Winter: Neel’s doctoral address from Moore College is published in the journal Women and Art. The same issue announces the circulation of two petitions, one by the Alliance of Figurative Artists (initiated by Noah Baen) and the other by Women in the Arts (initiated by Cindy Nemser), demanding the inclusion of Neel’s work in the Whitney’s upcoming annual exhibition.
Neel in Greece 1972
January 25-March 19: Neel’s painting The Family (John Gruen, Jane Wilson, and Julia), 1970 is included in the Whitney’s annual exhibition.
April 20-22: Participates in the Conference of Women in the Visual Arts at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C. At a panel discussion, Neel takes the opportunity to present a series of slides of her work. The format of the slide show would be repeated in the frequent lectures she will deliver over the course of the next decade.
June: Travels to Greece and Africa with Hartley and John Rothschild. In Nairobi they attend an exhibition of Neel’s work at the Paa Ya Paa Art Gallery and Studio, which was arranged by an African business associate of John Rothschild, Peter N. Kinuthia, whom Neel will paint the following year. While in Kenya, on June 19, Neel appears on the talk show MAMBO-LEO on national television.
Late Summer: Spends a week at the Skowhegan School in Maine as a visiting artist.
February 15-March 13: John Perreault, art critic and instructor, organizes the exhibition The Male Nude at the School of Visual Arts Gallery in New York. Joe Gould, 1933, is included, as is John Perreault, 1972, which was painted for the exhibition.
Spring: Hartley finishes his residency and opens a private practice in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. Hartley and Ginny move to Stowe, Vermont, where Neel will spend several weeks a year for the rest of her life.
Neel is awarded a $7,500 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Between 1973 and 1975 Neel will participate in at least eight exhibitions devoted to the work of women artists, organized by the Women’s Interart Center and Women in the Arts, among others.
Neel at Hartley’s house in Vermont after 1973
February 7-March 17: The Whitney Museum of American Art presents the first retrospective exhibition of Neel’s work, Alice Neel, curated by Elke Solomon. Fifty-eight paintings are included, and an eight-page brochure accompanies the exhibition. Although Neel’s admirers consider it an inadequate tribute, Neel herself views it as a triumph.
April 17: A daughter, Victoria, is born to Richard and Nancy in New York.
January 23: A daughter, Elizabeth, is born to Hartley and Ginny in Stowe, Vermont.
Summer: Neel helps Hartley and Ginny renovate space on their property in rural Vermont to serve as Neel’s studio during her visits.
Neel at Whitney opening, 1974
September 7-October 19: The Georgia Museum of Art in Athens, Georgia, presents Alice Neel: The Woman and Her Work, which includes eighty-three paintings and is accompanied by a catalogue. Neel has six other solo exhibitions this year and participates in sixteen group exhibitions.
An interview with Neel is included in Cindy Nemser’s book Art Talk: Conversations with 12 Women Artists (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975).
November 2: Participates in a panel discussion at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York ‘Women Artists, Seventy Plus.’
Neel in her studio in Vermont after 1975
Neel is inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters, New York (now the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters).
February 26: Receives the International Women’s Year Award (1975-76) ‘in recognition of outstanding cultural contributions and dedication to women and art.’
December: Neel’s T. B. Harlem, 1940, is included in the groundbreaking exhibition Women Artists, 1550-1950, organized by Linda Nochlin and Ann Sutherland Harris, first presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Panelists at Brooklyn Museum for Curators, Critics and the Economics of the Woman Artist and Women Artists, Seventy Plus. Pictured left to right, top row: Lilly Brody, Susan Martin, Isabel Bishop, Alice Neel, Lil Picard, Judith Von Baron, Lois Mailou Jones, Janet Schneider, Sari Dienes. Bottom row: Patricia Mainardi, June Blum. Photo by Maurice C. Blum
Working with master printmaker Judith Solodkin, who is teaching at Rutgers University, Neel creates her first prints, a lithograph and an etching. The prints are published by 724 Prints, a company run by Dorothy Pearlstein and Nancy Melzer. She will produce four more lithographs with Solodkin over the next two years.
Among many other exhibitions this year, Neel participates in two shows focusing on WPA artists of the 1930s, one at the Parsons School of Design, New York, and the other a traveling exhibition organized by the Gallery Association of New York.
Neel painting Stephen Shepherd in the front room of her apartment at 300 West 107th Street 1978
May 18: A son, Andrew, is born to Hartley and Ginny in Stowe, Vermont.
November 1-25: Graham Gallery organizes Alice Neel: A Retrospective Exhibition of Watercolors and Drawings, the first show dedicated to her works on paper.
January 30: Receives the National Women’s Caucus for Art award for outstanding achievement in the visual arts, along with Isabel Bishop, Louise Nevelson, and Georgia O’Keeffe. President Jimmy Carter presents the award.
An interview with Neel is included in Eleanor Munro’s book Originals: American Women Artists (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979).
Neel, Selma Burke and Isabel Bishop with President Jimmy Carter at the first National Women’s Caucus for Art award in 1979
Neel and Louise Nevelson at the awards ceremony for the above award, January 30, 1979. Photo by Gina Shamus
October 14: Self-Portrait, 1980, is exhibited for the first time in Selected 20th Century American Self-Portraits at the Harold Reed Gallery, a benefit for the Third Street Music School Settlement.
After several incidents where she loses consciousness, and on the insistence of her sons, Richard and Hartley, Neel undergoes tests at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. It is discovered that she has sick sinus syndrome leading to episodes of bradycardia. A pacemaker is immediately inserted to regulate her heart rate.
Neel pictured with her Self-Portrait 1980
February 5-March 1: Alice Neel ’81: A Retrospective, 1926-1981 is held at the C. Grimaldis Gallery in Baltimore.
July: Travels to the Soviet Union with her sons and daughters-in-law and several grandchildren for a solo exhibition of her work at the Artists’ Union in Moscow. It is organized by Phillip Bonosky, who is the Daily Worker correspondent in Moscow.
March 29: New York City Mayor Ed Koch hosts a dinner at Gracie Mansion in honor of Neel, showcasing the portrait of him she has recently completed and showing a few of her other paintings. The Guarneri String Quartet performs. Many of Neel’s sitters are in attendance, including David Soyer, the cellist with the Guarneri; the Mayor; Henry Geldzahler; Michel Auder; Duane Hanson; Annie Sprinkle; and Andy Warhol. Auder and Warhol record the event in video and photography respectively.
Signs on with the Robert Miller Gallery, New York. Her first exhibition there is Alice Neel Non-Figurative Works (May 4-June 5).
Receives a commendation from the City of Philadelphia, presented by Richard Doran, City Representative and Director of Commerce.
Neel with New York Mayor, Ed Koch, at Gracie Mansion 1982
March 17-April 17: Participates in the National Academy of Design’s 158th Annual Exhibition and receives the Benjamin Altman Figure Prize for $3,000.
Receives a $25,000 artist fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Patricia Hill’s book Alice Neel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1983), the first fully illustrated monograph on Neel’s work, is published. It features Neel’s own account of her life, gathered through interviews with Hills.
February: Has a solo exhibition at the Robert Miller Gallery, exhibiting forty paintings representing her work from the 1930s to the present.
February 21: Appears on Johnny Carson’s ‘The Tonight Show’ and proves herself a skilled entertainer.
On a routine visit to the Massachusetts General Hospital to have her pacemaker checked, X-rays indicate that she has advanced colon cancer which already spread to her liver. She immediately undergoes surgery and afterwards returns to Vermont to stay with Hartley and Ginny and their children while she recuperates. While there, she is interviewed by Judith Higgins of Artnews for a cover story.
Alice Neel on the Johnny Carson show, 1984
Spring--summer: Despite her poor health, in April, she returns to New York and Spring Lake. With the help of Richard and Nancy, she continues her busy schedule. Among her many commitments, interviews for the ArtNews article continue, and, on June 19, she makes a second appearance on ‘The Tonight Show’ during which she insists that Johnny Carson visit her in New York to sit for a portrait.
July: She returns to Vermont to spend time with Hartley and his family and to lecture at the Vermont Studio Center.
Receives chemotherapy treatment for her cancer. Much debilitated, she spends the end of the summer in Spring Lake with Richard and his family. Despite her weakened condition, she continues to paint.
Neel, in wheel chair, with her two sons, Hartley (left) and Richard, at the Vermont Studio Center. Also pictured is Ginny, Hartley’s wife, and Richard’s first wife, Nancy (left) 1984
Early fall: She returns to her apartment in New York.
October: Appears on the cover of the ArtNews issue that features the article by Judith Higgens, ‘Alice Neel and the Human Comedy’. Robert Mapplethorpe visits early in October to photograph Neel. Plans to return to Vermont to visit Hartley and his family and to attend a lecture in her honor at the Fleming Museum in Burlington, Vermont. However, she is too weak to travel, and on October 13, she dies, with her family at her side, at her apartment in New York.
In a private ceremony, surrounded by her sons, their wives and her grandchildren, she is buried, according to her wishes, near her studio in Vermont.
Neel in Spring Lake with her sons Richard, left, and Hartley, 1984
Obituaries recount her courageous life, her dedication to art, and her struggles against the tide of the art world. William G. Blair of the New York Times calls her (October 14) ‘the quintessential bohemian ... [whose] unconventional and intense representational portraits, many painted in her early years, were neglected, even resented, in official art world circles’ and notes that ‘in the last decades of her life, the honors that had been denied her came her way.’ Stephan Salisbury of the Philadelphia Inquirer writes (October 16): ‘Steadfast in the pursuit of her own vision and amused by her ability to shock both the art world and the arbiters of American taste, Miss Neel lived a singular life devoted to painting and to the laughing, suffering world around her.’
February 7: A memorial service for Alice Neel is held at the Whitney Museum of American Art. David Soyer and the Guarneri String quartet perform. Thomas Armstrong, the director of the Whitney; Mayor Edward Koch; Jack Baur, the former director of the Whitney and Patricia Hills speak at the service. Allen Ginsberg gives the first public reading of his poem ‘White Shroud’.
Notes: Much of the biographical information in this chronology was compiled by the Philadelphia Museum of Art for the catalogue of the centennial exhibition in 2000.
February 7: A memorial service for Alice Neel is held at the Whitney Museum of American Art. David Soyer and the Guarneri String quartet perform. Thomas Armstrong, the director of the Whitney; Mayor Edward Koch; Jack Baur, the former director of the Whitney and Patricia Hills speak at the service. Allen Ginsberg gives the first public reading of his poem ‘White Shroud’.
Notes: Much of the biographical information in this chronology was compiled by the Philadelphia Museum of Art for the catalogue of the centennial exhibition in 2000.
