The Pompidou Center presents the exhibition «Alice Neel, un regard engagé» (“A Committed Gaze”) by the visionary artist Alice Neel. In this series of 75 paintings and drawings the American portrays two distinct struggles.
The Pompidou Center presents the exhibition «Alice Neel, un regard engagé» (“A Committed Gaze”) by the visionary artist Alice Neel. In this series of 75 paintings and drawings the American portrays two distinct struggles: class and gender, and thus divides the exhibition. The sample was actually scheduled to run from June 10 to August 20, 2020, but could not be shown until now because of the pandemic.
Alice Neel once said "In politics and in life I have always liked the losers, the outsiders"
Alice Neel once said "In politics and in life I have always liked the losers, the outsiders" and there is no better way to understand her commitment to them than knowing her work. The exhibition begins with the first paintings she made in the late 1920s with a style bordering on naïf, and already having in mind the political and social struggle when drawing railway workers. It should be noted that the Pompidou Center leaves a space for the artist to express herself, in addition to the pictorial medium, through the written word, appreciating messages on the lower part of the wall such as: "as I was very busy with my little girl I represented myself with an extra arm to embrace her and a leg to run after her."
The artist conveys her anti-racist, feminist, progressive vision, whether painting Andy Warhol and his operated and scarred body, or a young Puerto Rican man in bed who has had several ribs removed. Under the role of 'free and independent woman' , the artist went against the tide of the avant-garde of the time and with her figurative painting went through the periods of triumphant abstraction, pop art, minimalism and conceptual art. The Museum explains that Neel "painted many women, especially female nudes - far from the traditional representations of women as objects of the male gaze. As a resident of multiethnic working-class neighborhoods - first Greenwich Village and then Spanish Harlem - Alice Neel, a single mother living on welfare, felt close to her models, with whom she tried to identify. Her commitment was never abstract, but based on real experiences. She was not interested in painting a story without the filter of close intimacy."
Her commitment was never abstract, but based on real experiences.
The exhibition will be on view at the Pompidou Center in Paris from October 5, 2022 to January 16, 2023.