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“One of the reasons I painted was to catch life as it goes by, right hot off the griddle … painting specific people and painting all the happenings. After all, I represent the 20th Century—I was born in 1900, and I’ve tried to capture the zeitgeist.”

Alice Neel

A s with all of her greatest works, Alice Neel’s poignant double portrait, Henry and Sally Hope, captures the deeply personal and individual idiosyncrasies that underpin the inner truths of her sitters from all walks of life. The present work was painted in 1977, just 3 years after the artist’s first major retrospective, curated by Elke Solomon, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and features the internationally acclaimed art critic and historian Dr. Henry Hope and his wife Sally. Neel’s psychological portrait paintings are a collaboration, a pouring in of energy from both sides—the sitters and the artist—her portraits embody a universal truth that is as relevant today as when she signed each work in her instantly recognizable, curling scrawl. The recently opened Metropolitan Museum of Art’s retrospective, Alice Neel: People Come First, is the most comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s work, which has rightfully championed Neel 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). Henry and Sally Hope is a testament to Neel’s insatiable desire to use her brush as a tool to memorialize people of all social classes—the revolutionary thinkers, the bohemian intelligentsia of New York’s counter culture, artists and critics, mother and children. For Neel, people truly come first.

1931

1931

In 1925, Hope began his studies at Columbia University but left to work as a Vice President for a cosmetic firm in New York. In 1931, he traveled to Switzerland with his first wife, Dorothy (Dotty) Weil, to recuperate from tuberculosis. While in Europe,the couple visited museums and galleries, which led to Hope’s decision to change the course of his career. He went on to study at both the highly respected École du Louvre and the Sorbonne University in Paris.

1938

Following his studies in Paris, Hope returned to the United States to earn both his M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History from Harvard University under the tutelage of Paul Sachs, director of the Fogg Art Museum, despite never having completed his undergraduate degree at Columbia University years before. Following graduation, Hope would teach art history at his alma mater, Harvard.

The Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts, Indiana University

1941

Hope was recruited and hired by Indiana University to head the school’s then two member art department, which was the beginning of his tenured career. Hope helped to develop and expand the school’s art program and served as Chairman of the School of Fine Arts for 27 years from 1941 to 1968. During his tenure, he received the Brown Derby award, which is given annually to the most popular professor at Indiana University.

1949

Alfred H. Barr Jr., the first director of the Museum of Modern Art, invited Hope to curate the largest retrospective of Georges Braques work. To this day, Hope’s exhibition catalogue published alongside the exhibition remains amongst the leading scholarship on the artist.

Sally and Henry Hope in Venice, Italy. The couple would travel annualy to London and Venice to see the arts.

1951

Hope was appointed by the U.S. Department of State as a delegate on art activities for UNESCO and served as an advisor on cultural affairs until 1963. Through this appointment, Hope would travel extensively.

1954

Following the success of the 1949 Braque retrospective, Hope curates his second exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. The Sculptures of Jacques Lipchitz is open from May to August 1954 and is accompanied by a leading publication on the artist written by Hope.

Pablo Picasso
*The Studio,* 1934
Henry and Sally Hope purchased the work in July 1944 and gifted the work to the IU Art Museum in 1969.

1961

Together with then President Herman B. Wells, Hope achieved his dream of establishing the IU Art Museum in 1961 (now the Eskenazi Museum of Art). Henry served as the Museum Director from 1961 until his retirement in 1971. Henry and Sally would go on to donate many major works of art from their personal collections to the museum including Pablo Picasso’s 1934 The Studio.

1974

Alice Neel is featured in her first major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Famed art critic, Hilton Kramer wrote, “To see the entire floor of a museum devoted to them is something else.”

Sally Hope sitting for Neel, right, in the process of painting the present work.

1977

Henry and Sally Hope visit Neel’s Upper West Side apartment and studio to sit for the present work over the course of five days. During these sittings, Neel would complement Sally’s purple suit and engage in lively conversation with the couple about the history of art and her contemporaries.

The exhibition catalogue for Alice Neel at the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, February 1978

1979

The present work is included in an exhibition of Alice Neel’s work at the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art. Hope wrote the introduction to the catalogue, which was published in Art Journal. Dr. Hope writes, “It is fair to guess that future generations will value that quality in the portraits of Alice Neel." That moment is certainly now!

“Oh, I like your purple suit, it’s beautiful! Yes, sit right there, draw up your knees with your hands. Are you comfortable, Miss Sally, sitting like that?” “Now, sit beside Miss Sally by the window. Oh! I like that! Keep your leg crossed, and keep your hand on the arm of the sofa. No! Put your fingers back the way they were. Raise your head. Look just beyond me at the wall. Now move your eyes more to the left. Not your head!”

Alice Neel

Sally Hope seen sitting for the present double portrait, with Neel's canvas at the left.

One of Neel’s subjects famously said, “So you’re going to be painted by Alice Neel? Well, don’t expect to be flattered!” (Henry R. Hope, "Alice Neel: Portraits of an Era," Art Journal, Summer 1979, p. 273). It is due to this unerring sense of truth and her ability to observe well beyond the placid façades of her sitters and their surroundings that Neel has set herself apart as one of the greatest ‘essayists’ of the canvas. Throughout her decades-long career, Neel’s milieu was dominated by intellectual, compassionate, creative and socially active people from all walks of life. Born in 1900, Alice Neel grew up in a small, sleepy town in Pennsylvania and spent her formative years in Cuba before moving to New York City in 1927—just two years before the precipice of the Great Depression. Neel developed an expansive and diverse social circle, which she memorialized through her expressive, sometimes fierce brushwork. These portraits possess a timeless vitality, exuding a directness and energy that is as potent today as when her sitters sat patiently before her easel. In Roberta Smith’s New York Times review of Neel’s “gloriously relentless” retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art she describes Neel as “an early feminist, inborn bohemian, erstewhile 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). The retrospective sheds light on Neel’s oeuvre—one can only imagine the conversations that took place in her studio as she carefully distilled the essence of each sitter’s innermost ethos through her archetypal approach of the centuries long genre of portraiture.

Henry and Sally Hope with Pablo Picasso's *The Studio*, 1934. They purchased the work in July 1944 and gifted the work to the IU Art Museum in 1969.

Together, Dr. Henry Radford Hope and his wife Sally were lifelong champions of the arts and possessed a fervent appreciation for collecting works of art that piqued their interest and enhanced their daily lives. Whether it be a 1934 Pablo Picasso painting, now in the collection of the Eskenazi Museum of Art, an unsigned still life painting of cherries or even carved wooden figureheads rescued from the bow of ships—their eye for great works of art was forward thinking and globally inclusive. The Hopes first discovered Neel’s portraits in the 1960s and considered her work to be a revelation during a time when the genre of portraiture had been nearly abandoned by artists on very different spectrums— including the Abstract Expressionists, Minimalists and Pop artists.

In his 1979 article, Alice Neel: Portraits of an Era, Dr. Hope recalls the experience of sitting for the present work alongside his wife, Sally, in the artist’s sun drenched Upper West Side studio. Dr. Hope wrote, “The white canvas was on a low easel in the middle of the room. Light flowed in from both north windows. We were seated on her Empire sofa, backed against the side wall and at right angles to the canvas. About three feet away, Alice sat, her back to the light” (Henry R. Hope, "Alice Neel: Portraits of an Era," Art Journal, Summer 1979, p. 277). Once pleased with their pose, Neel silently studied the couple through squared fingers before dipping a brush into her signature diluted blue paint to create the underlying outline that underpins many of her works. The present work, created over the course of five days, roughly four hours at a time, captures the couples’ penchant for the intellectual spark that great works of art provide whether you are a collector, a historian or more vulnerably as the sitter before Neel’s scrutinizing eye. Held in private hands since it was painted in 1977, Henry and Sally Hope, embodies Neel’s unparalleled ability to seek truth through an unnerving interest in humanity and a deep sense of empathy for people from all walks of life.