Alice Neel: Intimate Relations

The art of Alice Neel (1900–1984) distinguished itself from that of her American contemporaries by the special intimacy of its style, in which her drawing practice was a decisive factor. Though somewhat less known than her paintings, Neel’s drawings and watercolors articulate an array of influences--German Expressionist and Neue Sachlichkeit painting, the Ashcan School, an early sojourn in Cuba--that accompanied her through her tentative beginnings in the mid-1920s through to the maturity of her art after the Second World War, when she found room to accommodate abstraction and Pop art. This volume, published for the first European exhibition of Neel’s works on paper, spans the years 1926 to 1982, and gathers color and ink-only portraits and street scenes, as well as her illustrations for an edition of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov .