"Throughout her long career Neel had held these modes - the documentary and the subjective, the photographic and the painterly - in delicate suspension. Without using the camera, she conveyed its effects on painting... she intuitively recognized that portraits are documents created out of the immediacy of experience, that their effect changes with the passage of time and thereby records time."
Susan Rosenberg (Ann Temkin, ed., Alice Neel, exh. cat. Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art, 2000)