Radical Portraiture

ALICE NEEL PAINTED some of the 20th century’s most evocative portraits. Over the course of her seven-decade-long career, she rendered stirring representations of friends, lovers, colleagues, and the diverse groups of people who populated her longtime home of New York. “Alice Neel: People Come First,” an exhibition on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through August 1, positions Neel not simply as a singular voice in figurative painting but as a radical figure herself. Examining her work through the lens of her prolonged engagement with civil rights, social justice, and leftist politics, the show considers her commitment to figural representation as a bold, humanistic declaration.

The exhibition spans the length of Neel’s career, from her start in Cuba in the 1920s, when she was briefly is in the show) to her involvement with the WPA in the 1930s, her adherence to figuration during New York’s obsession with abstraction in the 1940s and ’50s, her increased prominence during the rise of the Women’s Movement in the 1960s and ’70s, and her late period in the 1980s up until her death in 1984. The show doesn’t limit itself to portraits—there are still lifes, landscapes, and cityscapes, as well as ephemera and personal effects—but the images that depict sitters, including Neel’s self-portraits, are its backbone.