Month: March 2024

In honor of Woman’s History Month, the Luther W. Brady Art Gallery shines on a spotlight on artist Alice Neel. This post was originally published on the former Luther W. Brady Art Gallery “Found in Collection” Blog in May 2016.

Life & Career

Alice Neel (1900-1984) was one of the most prolific American portrait painters of the twentieth century. Although abstraction was popular during the 1940s and 50s, she continued to paint in a style that depicted real people from celebrities of the art world like Andy Warhol to her neighbors in Spanish Harlem. Her gift was being able to reveal something of her sitters’ inner selves through depictions of their outer appearance.[1]

Neel was born in Merion Square, Pennsylvania and began her art education at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now known as Moore College of Art and Design), enrolling from 1921-25. Her early life was turbulent and her marriage to the artist Carlos Enriquez took her from Pennsylvania to Cuba to New York. With the death of a child and a disintegrating marriage, she suffered from anxiety and depression, which led to several suicide attempts. By 1932 she had returned to painting and to New York, where she participated in the First Washington Square Outdoor Art Exhibit that year. Like many artists living in New York during the 1930s, Neel joined the Public Works of Art Project (which would later become the Works Progress Administration, WPA), a government-funded program run under the Whitney Museum of American Art; she worked with the program on and off again until its termination in 1943.[2]

While she was included in a number group shows and small exhibitions during the 1940s and 50s, Neel only began to see increased recognition in the 1960s. By 1974 the Whitney Museum of American Art was holding a retrospective of her work, which many considered to be ‘too little, too late’ although she considered it a triumph. In 1984, the year of her death, she appeared twice on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson, offering to paint his portrait.[3]

Activism

Neel was an activist throughout her life. She was investigated in 1955 by the FBI who had been looking into her activities with the Communist Party since 1951. Their file described her as a “romantic Bohemian type communist.” [4] In 1959, she appeared in the Beat film Pull My Daisy with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, among others. In 1968 she participated in a protest of the Whitney Museum of American Art over the exhibition 1930s Painting and Sculpture in America, because of its lack of women and African American artists, and again over the exhibition, Contemporary Black Artists in America, which was accused of being hastily organized by its curator, Robert Doty. 

She participated in a demonstration against the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition, Harlem on My Mind, in 1969; she, Raphael Soyer, John Dobbs, and Mel Roman were the only white artists to attend the demonstration, organized by the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition. She also stood with the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition and Artists and Writers Protest Against the War in Vietnam opposing Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s handling of the Attica prison riot in 1971. Her portrait of Kate Millet appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1970 in an issue dedicated to the “Politics of Sex.” Between 1973 and 1975 she participated in at least eight exhibitions exclusively devoted to the work of women artists.

Connections

As a major figure in the art world during the last decades of her life, she had connections to a number of other artists exhibited in The Other 90 Percent. In 1970 she painted a portrait of Andy Warhol, and Warhol attended and photographed a dinner held in honor of Neel by NYC Mayor Ed Koch at Gracie Mansion in 1982. [5] She protested with Raphael Soyer, and also painted a portrait of the artist and his twin brother, the artist Moses Soyer, in 1973. In 1972 she participated in the “Conference of Women in the Visual Arts,” held at the Corcoran School of Art, in Washington, D.C., taking the opportunity to present slides of her work.

Artistic Style

Although, she had numerous illustrations printed in the magazine Masses and Mainstream during the forties and fifties, Neel did not begin making prints, like the one shown here, until later in her career. She worked with Judith Solodkin at Rutgers University in 1977 to produce Nancy, a lithograph, and an etching, Young Man. [6] The lithograph in the GW Collection, Family (1982), is representative of her style of portraiture: strong outlines, bold brushstrokes, and tilted perspectives create a flatness against the picture plane and often suggests the uneasiness and personal struggles of many of her sitters.

[1] National Museum of Women in the Arts, “Alice Neel, 1900-1984,” <http://nmwa.org/explore/artist-profiles/alice-neel> Accessed 14 March, 2016.
[2] Sarah Powers, “Chronology,” in Alice Neel, exhibition catalog, June 29, 2000–December 30, 2001, Philadelphia Museum of Art and four other institutions, 159-176.
[3] Powers, 176.
[4] Powers, 169.
[5] Powers, 175.
[6] Powers, 174.

Last fall, Dr. Lisa Lipiniski’s students in her History of Exhibitions course, curated A Corcoran Homecoming: The Art of Carroll Sockwell, exhibiting twenty works on paper by Carroll Sockwell. The exhibition includes paintings, drawings, and collages, showing both his eccentric usage of mediums and the comfort with experimentation he utilized throughout his life. While the exhibition shows his talent in full range, cohesion still prevails in a style completely unique to Sockwell. Through March 9th, Sockwell’s works will be on display in the Luther W. Brady Gallery as the Corcoran proudly welcomes back an artist who made history in the D.C. art scene and beyond. 

In a sea of geometric forms and patterns of abstraction Sockwell picked up from his contemporaries, his work still stands independently. His exploration of abstraction spans across hard-edged and color field works to gestural and emotive pieces that are highly expressive. He exhibited this fearless exploration in 1981 with Untitled Collage (Walter Hopps). Hopps, a former director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art and renowned museum curator, took Sockwell under his wing and supported his art making throughout the 1970’s. In 1982, Hopps gifted Sockwell with an apartment across from the Washington Cathedral, all Sockwell had to do in return was paint.

This piece is composed of found imagery from magazines and branded paper that have been cut into geometric forms pasted on board. Sockwell also includes collaged pieces with gestural abstractions done in crayon. Among the most striking of the collaged pieces, Sockwell includes Man Ray’s Portrait of Pablo Picasso. As the photograph has been separated into two triangles and pasted one below the other, Picasso’s face is split in half. In doing so, Sockwell not only obscures the image, but transforms Picacco into one of his absurd cubist creations. In Sockwell’s reference, was he playing with the line between abstraction and representation using art history? 

Clark Fox, A fellow D.C. painter and friend of Sockwell’s described his work in collage, “that would be about as representational as he would get but basically it’s a framework of abstraction.” Fox describes a time when he and Sockwell were on Canal Street in New York City and were invited to Romare Bearden’s studio, Fox said Sockwell declined the invitation. Despite this, Sockwell’s Untitled Collage (Walter Hopps) brings to mind Bearden’s work in collage throughout the 1970’s, as he collaged images of jazz musicians in harmonic compositions. 

Growing up, Sockwell was first captured by music and theater before turning to painting. In a 1999 lecture on Sockwell given by fellow-artist Kevin MacDonald, the D.C.-based artist said, “Carroll himself insists he is as much motivated by music or his own emotions as he is knowledge of past works by modern masters.” While Sockwell’s work might be somewhat referential to other works of art, he still works in a style that is his own. Macdonald uses the analogy of reincarnation to describe what he terms ‘extraction’: 

Sockwell further personalized his gift for Hopps, adding collaged pieces of a brand of French cigarettes that Hopps would have been partial to and including an address in Paris where Hopps would stay. 

While it is easy to see chaos in Sockwell’s work as forms, lines and colors fight for our attention, it is just as harmonious when the viewer steps back and embraces the variety of collaged objects as one unified piece. As Sockwell used inspiration broadly from other artists, his exploration with material and process set him apart to pave his own place in history. 

By: Maximus Vogt, Art History, ’26. 

A Corcoran Homecoming: The Art of Carroll Sockwell is on view in the Luther W. Brady Art Gallery through March 9.  The gallery, located within the Corcoran Flagg Building at 500 17th Street, NW, is free and open to the public Wednesday – Saturday, 1-5 pm. Support for this exhibition is provided by the Cecile R. Hunt Fund for American Art and the Director’s Discretionary Fund.