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s with Alice Neel’s most poignant paintings, Blue House from 1963 captures an unexpected window into the artist’s intimate memories, in this case her time spent summering outside of Manhattan. The painting invites the viewer to step beyond the confines of the picture plane and into Neel’s deeply personal world. In the present work, the artist exchanges the bustling sidewalks, towering architecture and compressed urban spaces of Manhattan for brilliant skies, brightly painted wooden houses and sunlight dappled with dancing afternoon shadows. It is through this change in scenery that Neel continues to push herself to capture the spirit of place or genius loci with the same vivaciousness displayed in her psychological portrait paintings. Blue House imbues the physicality of exterior space with an invitation into the complexities of Neel’s inner world. It offers insight into place, nostalgia for summers past, and the artist herself.
Born in 1900, Neel grew up in the small, sleepy town of Colwyn, Pennsylvania, on Philadelphia’s Main Line. She attended the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, now called the Moore College of Art, and when taking a summer art course at the Pennsylvania Academy she met another artist, Carlos Enriquez, an upper class Cuban, whom she married at the age of 25. The couple spent the next two years in Cuba before moving to New York City in 1927—just two years before the Great Depression began. In New York, which became her home, Neel developed an expansive and diverse social circle, which she memorialized through her expressive, often fierce brushwork. These paintings possess a timeless vitality, exuding a directness and energy that is as potent today as when she sat before her easel. Neel spent the majority of her life in New York painting people of all social classes—the revolutionary thinkers, the bohemian intelligentsia of New York’s counter culture, artists and critics, workers, mothers and children. In Roberta Smith’s New York Times review of Neel’s “gloriously relentless” recent retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smith describes Neel as “an early feminist, inborn bohemian, erstwhile Social Realist, lifelong activist and staunchly representational painter who bravely persisted, depicting the people and world around her” (Roberta Smith, "It’s Time to Put Alice Neel in Her Rightful Place in the Pantheon," The New York Times, April 2021). Blue House was prominently displayed in the exhibition People Come First — as one of the artist’s standout landscape paintings.
In 1935, Neel bought a cottage in Spring Lake, New Jersey—only 60 miles from Manhattan— and went on to spend nearly every summer there as a reprieve from city life. Blue House beautifully captures the contrast between Neel’s urban and suburban lifestyles—as with her portraits, there is far more than first meets the eye. The composition of Blue House pulls you inward and remains dramatically focused on the large blue house perched atop the hill, with a water tower behind it. The house is tucked amongst the energetic brushstrokes of the old oak tree’s late August foliage and a stretch of white picket fence peaks out amongst the hills. The dramatic sweep of the curving street and the twisting sidewalks give the work a sense of dynamism that recalls the compositions of Edvard Munch. Neel employs her brush to harness fleeting moments in time such that the viewer yearns to know more about what is under the surface, while feeling transported to this warm summer day.
Blue House was prominently exhibited in the artist’s recent traveling retrospective, Alice Neel: People Come First, the most comprehensive exhibition ever of the artist’s work. The exhibition, which was organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and traveled to the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain, and the De Young Museum in San Francisco, immediately received public and critical acclaim. Neel was celebrated as “the radical realist painter of all things human” for her “endless demonstrations of oil paint’s malleability” following decades spent painting on the margins of the New York art scene (Roberta Smith, "It’s Time to Put Alice Neel in Her Rightful Place in the Pantheon," The New York Times, April 2021). Blue House has remained in the private collection of Jonathan and Monika Brand, who acquired the work in 1970. The couple met Neel through Jonathan’s father, novelist and poet Millen Brand. Brand and Neel met in Greenwich Village in the 1930s and Brand crafted characters based on Neel in his novels, including The Outward Room, 1937, and Some Love, Some Hunger, 1957. The Brands have been lifelong champions of the artist and have generously loaned their works, including Blue House, to many of Neel’s most pivotal exhibitions.
Blue House demonstrates Neel's remarkable ability to depict the world around her with brilliance, compassion and an arresting personal perspective.
