Alice Neel

Estate of the artist

Robert Miller Gallery, New York

Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Philadelphia, Locks Gallery, Alice Neel: Paintings and Drawings, March - April 2005

Little Rock, The Arkansas Arts Center, 2007 Collector's Show, November - December 2007

New York, Davis & Langdale Company, Inc., Autumn Exhibition, October - December 2017

"I am a solipsist record, to capture life and Zeitgeist. I want to get a reaction to life and events."

(Henry R Hope, “Alice Neel: Portraits of an Era.” Art Journal, vol. 38, no. 4, 1979, pp. 273–81. 

Alice Neel’s deeply penetrating portraits uniquely depict the internal character and psychology of her subjects, exploring issues of identity, social and racial inequality, gender and trauma.

Neel’s perspective on businessmen is reflected in Walter Gutman’s portrait in 1965. 

Gutman, who had funded a movie in which Neel had a role, is bare-headed and wearing an open, upturned-collar black topcoat with a crumpled hat in hand. The striped shirt and white tie proclaim Broadway. The expression of fatigue and disappointment is evident in his aging features.  

Through the body’s idiosyncrasies and vulnerabilities she revealed, with searing honesty, the psyche and soul of her sitters, their suffering, endurance, courage and insecurities hidden behind carefully constructed facades. In a form of ‘internal portraiture’, Neel captured the inner texture of their lives. 'Every person,’ she said, ‘is a new universe, unique with its own laws emphasizing some belief, a phase of life immersed in time and rapidly passing by.’6

(Hope, Henry R. “Alice Neel: Portraits of an Era.” Art Journal, vol. 38, no. 4, 1979, pp. 273–81. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/776378. Accessed 9 June 2023.)