Among her many supporters, Alice Neel (1900–1984) is revered as a
bohemian and a proto-feminist who, like Louise Bourgeois, achieved fame
and distinction late in life after many years spent working in
obscurity. It seems to me, then, a poignant irony that the Neel most
likely to survive in the art historical imagination is not the
chronicler of bohemianism, the Neel who early on painted Joe Gould with
three penises and who in her eighties painted herself in the nude, but
the painter of “suits,” the Neel who painted the Fuller Brush Man
(1965) and Walter Gutman (1965). Indeed, the painting of Neel’s that
strikes me most forcefully is Richard in the Era of the Corporation
(1979), a shockingly titled portrait of the artist’s son in suit and
tie, sitting with legs crossed in a vaguely modernist chair set in front
of a mirror. Richard’s face appears twice: once in three-quarter
profile, facing the viewer with an air of wariness, and again reflected
in the mirror in side profile with a stern, almost angry expression.
That Neel could use her son as the subject of such an accurate, and
richly complicated, satire that evinces both harsh familial
judgment and an attentive motherly eye, is astonishing.
Richard in the Era of the Corporation is not, however, included in
“Alice Neel,” the large traveling exhibit on view at the Whitney Museum of
American Art through September 17. One could have seen the painting two
years ago at the Cheim