Skip to main contentSkip to navigation

Alice Neel

June 2024

  • Working-class background … two works by Lee Krasner.

    The great women's art bulletin
    One vision, 4000 artists and a country transformed: why the next British PM must copy Roosevelt

    Roosevelt’s New Deal gave artists like Alice Neel and Lee Krasner a lifeline during a time of crisis – and it changed the face of America. Whoever wins the UK election should take heed

December 2023

  • people gather around vermeer's girl with a pearl earring, alone and spotlit on a charcoal grey wall at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, February 2023.

    Observer critics' review of 2023
    Art: Laura Cumming’s 10 best shows of 2023

    Our critic’s highlights included spotlit Vermeer, mouse-fur beauty spots, Donatello saints, Alice Neel’s New Yorkers and the reopening of an underloved institution

April 2023

  • Pastel yellow for breakfast … a detail from 2nd Street View, November 2016 by Lois Dodd.

    The great women's art bulletin
    High-rise heaven: the women who painted New York – by looking out of their windows

    I have relocated to the Big Apple and am loving its epic skyline and endless bustle. No wonder Lois Dodd, Jane Freilicher and Alice Neel enjoyed painting the thrilling views from their apartments

March 2023

  • a nude painting of a pregnant woman

    The great women's art bulletin
    Conflict, exhaustion, joy and pain: how Alice Neel shattered the taboos around motherhood

    After centuries of exquisite Madonnas, the painter laid bare the complex truth about bearing and bringing up children – and inspired generations of successors

February 2023

  • ‘Alice was full of delight and wonder’ … from left, Annie Sprinkle, Mary Garrard and Gerard Malanga.

    ‘She really wanted to see my labia piercing’: what was it like to be painted by Alice Neel?

    A dominatrix in heels and feathers, a Warhol alumnus who whip-danced for the Velvet Underground, a feminist trailblazer … ahead of major Barbican show, three giant personalities relive sitting for the great American artist
  • Art and fashion ONLY USE ON ART AND FASHION ARTICLE ONE USE ONLY

    The joy of clothes on canvas: how painters celebrate fashion – and inspire it

    Art and fashion influencing each other is nothing new – but, more than ever, there seems to be a beautiful cross-pollination going on between painters and designers
  • Carmen and Judy, 1972

    ‘She created a space where people could reveal themselves’: the unique portraits of Alice Neel

    A new exhibition celebrates a 20th-century painter acclaimed late in life for capturing the unvarnished essence of friends, neighbours – and even art critics

January 2023

  • Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

    Republic of Parenthood
    I left my baby to write this. How do artists balance creativity and the ache for their child?

    Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett
    All writers and painters who are mothers must tread a heroic path. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t have to, says the Guardian columnist Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

December 2022

  • Yayoi Kusama, Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring and a gilded mummy of ancient Egypt.

    2023 culture preview
    The best art and design shows to visit in 2023

    Queer Renaissance sculptor Donatello, Marina Abramović, David Hockney and a long-delayed mega-museum in Manchester – your art-design to-do list for the year ahead

May 2017

  • Fisayo Akinade rehearsing Barber Shop Chronicles

    The ten best things to do this week
    The 10 best things to do this week: Barber Shop Chronicles and Sundance

    The role of the hairdresser in African culture is the subject of a new play, while the best new independent cinema is screened in London

April 2017

  • Detail from Alice Childress, 1950 by Alice Neel

    The people of Harlem, as painted by Alice Neel – in pictures

    The great US artist Alice Neel lived and painted in uptown New York when it was almost exclusively black and Hispanic. As a show of portraits of her neighbours and friends comes to London, its curator, Hilton Als, discusses some of his favourite images

July 2016

  • Alice Neel, Alice and José, 1938 (Pastel on paper, 29.8x22.9cm) Courtesy of the Estate of Alice Neel

    Anatomy of an artwork
    Alice Neel’s Alice And José, 1938

    Unpicking the elements of the American portraitist’s famous pastel-on-paper

July 2010

  • alice neel pregnantwoman

    Alice Neel: Painted Truths; In the Company of Alice

  • The De Vegh Twins (1975) by Alice Neel

    Weird wonderland: Alice Neel at the Whitechapel Gallery

  • Alice Neel's Pregnant Woman (1971)
Alice Neel's Pregnant Woman (1971)

    The weird world of Alice Neel

  • Button fly of an old faded pair of denim jeans

    The measure
    The Measure

May 2004

  • Heroes and wretches

    For most of her life, Alice Neel was barely known - she was a figurative artist when abstract expressionism was all the rage, and being a woman didn't help, either. But full-on, psychologically and sociologically acute portraits were her strength, and she stuck with it. Eventually, says Suzie Mackenzie, the world caught up with her.