 My name is Rebecca Taffel. I work directly with Elizabeth Sackler at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation, and she's unable to be here today, but I know she's with us in spirit. Welcome to the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. The center, which opened in 2007, is an exhibition and education facility dedicated to the past, the present, and the future of feminist art. Specifically, the center strives to raise awareness of feminism's cultural contributions to educate new generations about the meaning of feminist art, to maintain a dynamic learning facility and to present feminism in an approachable and relevant way. The Feminist Gallery, which is featuring the Lorna Simpson exhibition right now, is only just a piece of what the center has to offer. As Dr. Sackler formulated this place, she wanted it just to be more than just a space to show art, but a space for discourse and discussion and the exchange of ideas. I recently moved into the position of director of programs at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation, and as such, I've been given the unique opportunity to work hand in hand with the fantastic education department here at the museum as well as the center's staff, the curator, Catherine Morris, and the other people involved directly with the center. And with them, we've been able to develop lectures and panels that support the center's mission and the exhibition schedule. And I think today's program with Phoebe is an ideal fit. I learned of Phoebe's upcoming biography, Alice Neal, the art of not sitting pretty last October. And I was thrilled when I finally received it in December. I began reading and as early as page two, I was convinced that Phoebe needed to come speak at the center and I'm delighted that she accepted our invitation to do so. She writes on page two, although she herself probably would have rejected such labels. She was America's first feminist multiculturalist artist a popular painter for the ages. And I thought, what a bold start, and I was hooked. I read the entire book very quickly. And throughout the book, which is here and available for purchase afterwards, and Phoebe has agreed to stick around and sign copies for those of you who purchase a copy. I was struck by her accounts of the Bohemian and unconventional Alice Neal and the details of her life as a strong woman, certainly not without her faults, but who continued to paint, even though her painting was wholly unfashionable at the time and not very lucrative, the directness. And some may even say the brutality of Alice Neal's artistic style and personal relationships make her somewhat of a problematic character, but a true individual and an intriguing artist. Since the publication of Alice Neal, The Art of Not Sitting Pretty, it has been named one of the 10 best books of 2010 by The Village Voice and was included in O Magazine's 15 books to watch for 2011. In November of 2010, The New York Times art critic Ken Johnson wrote that of American art books, this should be the biography of the year. It was also an editor's choice in the Sunday Times New York Book Review on January 2nd. Phoebe Hoban has written widely about culture and the arts from investigative features to major profiles. New York-based arts journalist, she began her career at Newsweek International and in 1984 began a technology column for the New York Magazine. In 1985, Phoebe began writing investigative articles about cultural controversies at New York Magazine among such diverse topics as JD Salinger, Woody Allen, and Kathleen Battle. Since 1985, she has covered culture and the arts for a number of publications, including The New York Times, The New York Magazine, The New York Observer. She's also written for Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, GQ, Vanity Fair, L, and TV Guide with pieces from investigative stories to celebrity profiles. Her biography on Jean-Michel Basquiat is now a Penguin paperback and was a national bestseller as well as a New York Times Notable book of the year. As I mentioned previously, I read Alice Neal with great interest and anticipating the opportunity to hear Phoebe discuss this compelling work. I am delighted she is here today and I would ask that you help me welcome her to the podium. Take your copy. Well, thank you for such a gracious welcome and thank you all for coming out on a spectacularly beautiful Sunday afternoon and sitting inside at the wonderful Brooklyn Museum. I just wanna say that I had, I thought about tailoring this particular lecture. It's really more of a reading to the fact that this is in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center with its feminist mission. And I chose not to do that, partly because I wasn't sure how many of you were really familiar with Alice Neal's the sort of broad scope of her life which really covered the century. And partly because Alice Neal herself was such an ambivalent feminist even though her work itself is practically de facto feminist. But I'm more than happy to answer questions about Alice Neal's relationship with feminism after I finished reading because she did have a very tough and tense relationship with feminism and with feminists and I'd be happy to discuss it. Just to tell you what this is, this is actually the cover of the book and since a couple of people in the audience were asking if that was me. No, that's Alice Neal at age 44. She actually had a youth before she became a sort of cranky old lady going around to galleries. And the picture was taken by her then lover, Sam Brody, the father of her younger son, Hartley, and is very typical of Alice Neal's surrounding. She didn't sell much of her work and there was always work everywhere around her and that's in her studio which was part of her apartment. Her paint brushes and glasses still rest by the easel in the Upper West Side apartment where Alice Neal spent the last 22 years of her life. The living room overlooking Broadway in 107th Street, which also served as her studio, is filled with 1950s furniture. The surfaces are strewn with artifacts. On top of a drawer is a faded snapshot of Jose Santiago Negrón, the father of her oldest son, Richard, a handsome Puerto Rican musician who later became a priest. There are paintings everywhere, on the walls stacked in the hall. Everything has been left just as it was when Neal lived in Moorkeetier covering hundreds of canvases with ruthlessly honest portraits of the people who intrigued her from neighborhood children to Andy Warhol. Like the Pollock-Krasner House in the Springs where Jackson Pollock's half-filled gallons of paint and cans of brushes remain in suspended animation, Neal's place has been frozen in time since her death in 1984. But unlike Pollock's studio, which has been carefully preserved as a temple to its former resident genius, no effort has been made to sanctify the Neal home. Like the artist who lived there, it remains strikingly uncontrived. All that's missing is the powerful presence of Neal herself. Alice Neal liked to say that she was a century and in many ways she was. She was born into a proper Victorian family and came of age during suffrage. The quintessential Bohemian, she spent more than half a century from her early days as a WPA artist through her Whitney retrospective in 1974 until her death 10 years later, painting often in near obscurity an extraordinarily diverse population from young black sisters in Harlem to the elderly Jewish twin artists Raphael and Moses Sawyer to Linus Pauling creating an indelible portrait of 20th century America. Neal's hundreds of portraits portray a universe of powerful personalities and document in age. Neal painted through the depression, McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution of the 60s, feminism and the feverish 80s. Fiercely democratic in her subject she portrayed her lovers, her children, her Spanish Harlem neighbors, pregnant nudes, crazy people and famous art world figures, all in a searing psychological style uniquely her own. From villas Judge in Joe Gould with multiple penises to Frank O'Hara as a young poet from porn star Annie Sprinkle gussied up in leather to her own nude pregnant daughter-in-law Neal's portraits are as arrestingly executed as they are relentlessly honest. Neal's life and career was full of sturm and rang as a century she powerfully captured in paint. Neal managed to transcend her often tragic circumstances surviving the death of her infant daughter, Santiana, her first child by the renowned Cuban painter, Carlos Enriquez, the breakup of her marriage, a nervous breakdown resulting in several suicide attempts for which she was institutionalized and the terrible separation from her second child, Isabetta. Although Neal suffered enormously she never became a victim. Unlike Frida Kahlo whose work brilliantly fetishized her personal pain, Neal transformed her deepest wounds into her most humanistic work. And unlike Mary Cassatt who beautifully chronicled family life in the 19th century but never married or had children, Neal painted from firsthand experience of the vicissitudes and rewards of marriage and motherhood. In every aspect of her life, Neal dictated her own terms from defiantly painting figurative pieces at the height of abstract expressionism convincing her subjects to disrobe which many of them did including Andy Warhol to becoming a single mother to two sons. No wonder she became the de facto artist of the feminist movement. Very much in touch with her time Neal was also always ahead of it. Although she herself would probably have rejected such labels, she was America's first feminist multicultural artist, a populist painter for the ages. I painted the neurotic, the mad and the miserable. I painted the others including some squares. Like Chichacov, I'm a collector of souls, she liked to say. Alice Neal was born into a tiny town outside Philadelphia at the turn of the century during the Victorian age when women were permitted to do little else but marry and bear children. I don't know what you expect to do in the world, Alice. You're only a girl, Neal's mother warned her. She might as well have waved a red flag at a bull. Neal later said the comment made her ambitious. Neal was conventionally pretty but from an early age her quirks were apparent. I would have a convulsion if a fly lit on me, she said. The tale of Christ nailed to the cross would send me into violent weeping. But despite her psychological and emotional insecurity, Neal always knew she wanted to be an artist. I don't know where it came from but when I was five or six, my most important Christmas present would be the coloring book. Neal found Colwin to be completely stifling. In the spring it was beautiful but there was no artist to paint it and once a man exposed himself in a window but there was no writer to write it. There was no culture there, I just despised it. Her life and career were a violent rebellion against the values of her drab hometown with its numbing normalcy and rigid constraints. Although she frequently returned home seeking comfort from her mother between recurrent crises, she was hell bent on escaping it. Neal would lead a life that was wild even by Bohemian standards and created a deeply original body of work. That's Neal's parents probably at the time she was about 30. Neal would create a deeply original body of work. It would be shaped by three potent forces, her relentless and transcendent desire to paint, her ongoing struggle with the hardships of poverty and her adamant refusal to conform. Neal was uncompromising in her absolute drive. In the end it is that which enabled her to survive and to leave an enduring mark. Neal went to one of America's first women's art schools, the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, now Moore College. She specifically chose the school over the more famous Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for several reasons. I was very beautiful then and all the boys chased me. I chose a woman's school so there wouldn't be anyone to distract me. Even more importantly she said, I didn't want to be taught impressionism. I didn't see life as picnic on the grass. I wasn't happy like Renoir. By the time Neal graduated from the Philadelphia School of Design she would prove that she had the two qualities she deemed essential for the life of an artist. You know what it takes to be an artist? Hypersensitivity and the will of the devil to never give up. The summer she turned 24, Neal spent three weeks at the Chester Springs Country Art School located in a picturesque corner of Pennsylvania. Although she completed only half the course her stay there would radically transform her life and her work. It was at Chester Springs that she met Carlos Enriquez with whom she felt passionately in love and whom she would marry the following years. There are no records documenting the initial meeting between Alice Neal and Carlos Enriquez de Gomez who arrived at Chester Springs after attending business school in Philadelphia. Carlos, like Alice, was intent on becoming a serious artist and came across as an exotic Bohemian. But in fact he was one of the wealthiest families in Havana where his father, a major sugar cane plantation owner, was later physician to Cuba's president. Even years later Alice enthusiastically described him as gorgeous and Carlos was in fact tall, dark and handsome. In high school he had been nicknamed the mosquito as much for his high strong energy as his high pitch voice. He was thin and wiry with wavy hair and a trim mustache. In old black and white photographs his physical intensity and dashing nonchalance are striking. A picture of him and Alice's sweethearts at Chester Springs sitting on their favorite bench under a tree shows him sporting a dapper bow tie. Carlos was an infusion of vivid color into the muted palette of Alice's life. That was the first time I really fell in love, she said. But if it was nearly instantaneous the first phase of the romance was also short-lived. Like Alice Carlos didn't get along well with authority figures. Although Alice said he'd been expelled from the school for doing nothing much more than taking walks with her in the evening, he was at loggerheads with the director of the school. And Carlos and Alice had already attracted notice by their brazen behavior. They cut classes, strolled hand in hand through the woods, arranged private evening rendezvous, and taking advantage of a costume trunk that was also used for sketch classes, even showed up at the school's masquerade party in drag. Neil dresses a man in Enriquez as a glamorous flapper. Neil often talked about the awful dichotomy she felt towards motherhood. She stalled for over six months after marrying Carlos Enriquez before he finally persuaded her to travel with him to Havana. It's difficult to imagine the intensity of Neil's first impression of Havana. Nothing could have prepared her for the sheer exoticness of the tropical port from its flora and fauna to the rich resonance of its language. The city had a lush lyrical quality in keeping with its lilting omnipresent music and it was drenched in light and color. Neil must have been equally overwhelmed by the extravagant luxury of the Enriquez household. Having grown up in dark, cramped, low ceiling rooms in a working class town, Neil suddenly found herself not only in a glamorous cosmopolitan city, but living in a marble floored mansion with gracious rooms, wide hallways, and huge arched windows. Alice referred to it as a palace. There was even a charming balcony off the bedroom that she shared with Carlos overlooking a small garden where peacocks strutted. Within walking distance of the house was the magical Malacan, the curving seaside balustrade that was a favorite promenade for upper class Cubans. At six each day, the hour of the promenade, Neil, Carlos, and her in-laws would tool along the Malacan in the Enriquez's chauffeured Rolls Royce. It would be Neil's first and last encounter with such material wealth. Years later, she still marveled at the Enriquez lifestyle. Carlos' father was the most famous doctor in Havana, Dr. Carlos Enriquez de Gomez. You can't imagine how they lived, Neil recalled, on the grand scale, you know. The family had seven servants. One was a cook who just cooked all day. His mother as a girl was dressed by slaves and they lived in this white palace in El Vedado with peacocks walking in the garden. I had a room like Romeo and Juliet's with marble floors and a balcony. My God, it was fantastic. Alice and Carlos lived with his parents for about eight months. As an American, Alice was certainly not expected to conform to the strict turn of the century etiquette that until recently had been required of Cuban upper class women who were not allowed to roam the city freely but were either driven to the shops and restaurants or confined to their homes or to private clubs. Still, Neil's behavior must have been a constant affront to her affluent old-fashioned in-laws. Alice consorted with the servants. She would spend time in the kitchen with the cook, practicing her Spanish. I wasn't made to sit in the patio and do embroidery, she said. In the evening, she would go out to join Carlos and not return until the wee hours. And there was a much more profound tension. In April, just two months after her move to Havana, Neil discovered she was pregnant with her first child. I should have had some birth control thing because I was then simply an ambitious artist. But anyway, when I got pregnant in Cuba, that was it. Of course, Carlos' father was 100% against abortion. But Neil was intent on not letting her pregnancy prevent her from painting. This is a painting Neil did of her husband Carlos during this time, and it's very typical of her palette and her rather academic style at the time. She and Carlos liked nothing better than to take a bus from Elvedad or to the poor sections of town, Alice colorfully dressed in the native garb, equipped with their paint boxes like, as she put it, Van Gogh. They would stroll the streets and paint the street people. All we did was paint day and night, she said. The scenes in these outlying neighborhoods were in vivid contrast to the elegant streets of Carlos' home. As Neil described it, there the Afro Cubans would be dancing. They'd dance like mad and run into the bushes, you know for what. They'd use this strange language, part African and part Spanish, and what dancers, wild, you know. Neil was particularly taken with the bearing of these Cuban women. They have more self than American women. They're highly sophisticated. The American woman was weak compared with the womanliness of the Cuban woman. But for Neil, the real revelation was the community of artists of which she and Carlos quickly became a part. This was a heady time, not just for Neil, but for Cuban culture itself. We completely lived, V. Bohemian, she said. It was more civilized there. The writers and poets and artists all got together. This is a picture of Alice and Carlos who you can barely see and their novelist painter friend, Marcello Pagolotti. On December 26th, 1926, Neil gave birth to a daughter. Her description of childbirth is unsparing. So I had this baby. They're more animal than we are in Havana. And for them to have a child is the most normal thing in the world. For me, it was a major event. They don't give Anna Siza there and for me to have a baby without Anna Siza was frightful. In the end, it had been eight hours of agony. About five months later, she and Carlos were a sensation at the Art Nuevo Show where the Vanguardia Movement, of which Carlos was an important part, made its debut. Neil showed some of her portraits of local people, including one of a mother and child. But if the show marked her arrival as a successful professional artist, it also marked her abrupt departure from Havana. Neil left for America with Santiana where eventually Carlos joined her. They moved into a one-room apartment in Manhattan's Upper West Side where their lives as starving artists began in earnest. Nothing could have prepared Alice and Carlos for the tragedy that occurred that winter when Santiana, who up until then had been a very beautiful, healthy child, got diphtheria, then prevalent. Although, as Neil bitterly recalled, only a year later the vaccine became available. Alice must have been terrified when Santiana became ill with symptoms that could have included nausea, chills, high fever, and neck swelling. Neil tried everything in her power to take care of her sick daughter. She tried to break Santiana's fever by burning a spiritous lamp. Neil took the baby, then 10 months old, home to Colwin enlisting the aid of her mother. But Santiana died just shy of her first birthday. The same minister who married her and Carlos performed the funeral rites for their first child. Neil clearly remained full of guilt and remorse. In the autobiographical piece she wrote at the time called Money, Neil hauntingly laments the circumstances that may have led to Santiana's death. Do you know how much an oil stove costs? About five dollars. But you see, if I'd had the money, the green lovely dollars, the shining quarters to buy a coat with, maybe I wouldn't have caught laryngitis so badly. If we hadn't had to live in one little room, maybe the baby wouldn't have caught it like she did. And then if I could have paid a doctor, I wouldn't have been so slow to call one. And then it was so cold, oh, so cold, if only I'd had an oil stove to keep the room warm at night. Oh my God, a black oil stove haunts me. Well, she died mostly from the goddamn discomfort. How do you expect one to feel about money? After that his family sent him some, but I didn't like to eat because I knew the baby dying had earned those meals for us. Santiana was buried in the family plot in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania. There are no tombstones marking any of the nail family graves, perhaps because they couldn't afford them. In the beginning I didn't want children, I just got them. But when she died, it was frightful, Neal said. The coming year would produce several memorable watercolors as Neal attempted to process her intense grief. But the painting that most powerfully expresses her despair is the clay-colored futility of effort based on an early sketch Neal made when Santiana died. Painted a full two years later, the picture expresses the primal feeling of failure that overwhelms any parent whose child, defying the natural order of things dies first, rendering for naught all the care and nurturing it has been given. Neal here conflates her subconscious guilt with a newspaper account of a child strangled to death between two bed posts. In Neal's rendition it looks like the child has died in its own crib. There's the vaguest outline of an adult heedless outside the door and the window as a black hole in space. As much a reminder of the vaginal opening through which a child enters the world as the void following death. As Neal later said, even Picasso only used gray and white when he did the Guernica. Color is just too cheerful and happy for this sort of situation. I had that child in Havana and she died in New York just before she was a year old of Diphtheria. There's a picture I made three years later that's a distillation of that and so much else, the futility of effort. Into it went the amount of effort you put into having a child, pregnancy, all the rest. Then the tragedy of losing it, everything, everything. As she wrote in a poem around that time, oh I was full of theories of grand experiments to live a normal woman's life, to have children to be the painting and the painter. I've lost my child, my love, my life and all the goddamn business that makes life worth living. It's not surprising that Neal got pregnant with her second child almost immediately by late February 1928, just three months after Santiana's incomprehensible death. After Santiana's death I was just frantic. All I could do was get pregnant again, she said, calling her situation at the time a trap. Neal gave birth to Isabella Lillian-Unrique as a November 24th, 1928. She and Carlos called their daughter Isabetta. According to her birth certificate issued on December 3rd, Isabetta was born at Fifth Avenue Hospital to Alice Hartley-Neal aged 27, housewife, and Carlos Enriquez, age 28, artist. But when Isabetta was about two and a half years old, Neal's life took another traumatic turn. The plan, or so Alice thought, was for Carlos to take Isabetta to Havana to visit his parents, who had never met her. Neal was to join them there and then the family would travel to Paris. It seems, though, that Carlos had something else entirely in mind. He left Isabetta with his two sisters moving to Paris alone. I realized that was just the end of everything. I was left with the apartment, the furniture, a whole life, and it was finished because he was very weak and I was abandoned, Neal said. She had lost not only her husband, but for the second time in two and a half years, a daughter. She would only see Isabetta, who was brought up by Carlos' sisters, Julia and Sylvie several more times during her lifetime. In the first weeks after Carlos left, Neal, who seemed to be in complete denial, initially reveled in her freedom to paint whenever she pleased, that her life with Carlos and Isabetta was over was too terrible to comprehend. You see, I had always had this awful dichotomy. I loved Isabetta, of course I did, but I wanted to paint, she bluntly said. The double loss of both Carlos and Isabetta soon triggered a complete nervous breakdown. Neal was hospitalized and tried to commit suicide several times, once by sticking her head in a gas oven and once by swallowing shards of glass. She then spent a year in a private institution. She would not see Isabetta again until she was nearly six years old. Still, when she did see her daughter, her response was more that of an artist than a mother. She immediately painted her. It's a truly remarkable artistic gesture as if Neal were laying claim to the very essence of the girl who at this time was her only child, forging her bond to Isabetta by rendering her in paint. And what must it have been like for Isabetta who had had no contact with her mother in four years, a long time in such a young life, to have stood there naked and vulnerable as Neal focused her full attention on her daughter in order to paint her. Perhaps that explains the strong, if not defiant, look on her face. It was clearly an important picture for Neal since she made sure it was photographed. Not knowing it would later be destroyed by her lover Kenneth Doolittle and a jealous rage over her relationship with another man. And after its destruction, she repainted an almost exact replica of the original, if anything strengthening her daughter's thrusting pose. The notorious painting has an uneasy haunted resonance. Neal later remarked that at first, galleries refused to show it because it was indecent and later they knowingly referred to it as Lolita. Neal would never again paint Isabetta whom she would only see two more times during either of their lifetimes. And it is perhaps fitting that the nude portrait she made of her daughter stands out as one of the most striking images of her career. Soon after Neal was released from the sanatorium, she fell in love with a Marxist sailor named Kenneth Doolittle. They moved to Greenwich Village in 1934. At the time the village was Bohemia Central, almost every artist and writer of any importance lived there, however briefly, including Jack Lundy, Norman Mailer, Edgar Allen Poe, and Alan Ginsberg and such artists as Winslow Homer, Arshile Gorky, and Diego Rivera. Through Kenneth Alice met a circle of Bohemians and communist labor organizers, many of whom she painted. Although Doolittle was not himself an artist per se, he knew everyone in the neighborhood which was virtually crawling with painters, poets, and eccentric characters, including Kenneth Fearing and Joe Gould, of whom Neal made one of her most famous portraits, branding for all time the tiny self-described author of the oral history of the world as a man with multiple organs. Gould later called the nude painting an underground masterpiece, predicting that someday it would hang in the Whitney, where in fact it hung during Neal's 2000 retrospective. In it, Gould, with a devilish sparkle in his eyes, sits on a stool, his three prominent penises like so many Russian onion-shaped domes, his name and the date of the painting emblazoned between his legs. On either side of the nude oral historian, his body from the waist down is repeated as a framing motif. He's clearly uncircumcised in both of these half-nudes. Neal later said it was an advertisement against circumcision. In one hand, he's clutching a cigarette holder, also, of course, phallic. Neal sometimes humorously referred to the painting as variations on an old theme or the source of Russian architecture, since she said his testicles looked like St. Basil's upside down. Essentially homeless, Gould depended on his friends and the kindness of strangers, constantly begging alms to support himself in his supposed historical opus. Neal helped him by altering some of his hand-me-down clothes in feeding him spinach and vinegar. Gould's usual diet was a depression special, tomato soup, made by pouring ketchup into hot water, a habit which did not endear him to the local eateries. Neal quoted Gould as being fond of saying, in the summer, I'm a nudist, and in the winter, I'm a Buddhist. Gould's story would later be memorialized by the writer Joseph Mitchell and two famous New Yorker pieces, Professor Siegel and Joe Gould's secret. Although Gould was notorious in the village as the author was perpetually in progress oral history of the world, Mitchell ultimately came to the conclusion that the book was apocryphal. All Gould ever wrote or a small number of essays about his own life, from his father's death to his own time at Harvard. A few of these pieces were, in fact, published in literary magazines of the time, but Gould's major activity was constantly and compulsively revising them, leaving numerous iterations scattered at the homes of his friends. Neal's portrait is thus a canny though unconscious metaphor for Gould's obsessively repetitive endeavors. Wrote Mitchell of the portrait, which he saw many years later. Anatomically, the painting was fanciful and grotesque, but not particularly shocking, except the plethora of sexual organs. It was a strict and sober study of an undernourished middle-aged man. It was the expression on Gould's face that was shocking, a leering, gleeful, mockishly abandoned expression, half satanic and half silly. Miss Neal had caught this expression. As Neal told Mitchell at the time, I call it Joe Gould, but I probably should call it a portrait of an exhibitionist. I don't mean to say that Joe was an exhibitionist. I'm sure he wasn't, technically. Still, to be perfectly honest, years ago, watching him in parties, I used to have the feeling that there was an old exhibitionist shut up inside him and trying to get out like a spider shut up in a bottle, a frightful old exhibitionist, the kind you see on the subway, and he didn't necessarily know it. That's why I painted him that way. Joe Gould's tale was also told in the movie Joe Gould's Secret, in which Susan Sarandon plays Neal. Kenneth Fearing was at the time a well-known poet who is now mostly known for his noir novel, The Big Clock, which became a movie in which there was an over-the-top artist named Louise Patterson based on Neal, replete with a vermin-infested loft and four loved children fathered by different partners, just like Neal. Neal was quite fond of Fearing. Her remarkable portrait with its symbolist iconography and a bleeding skeleton in place of a heart is reminiscent of Frida Kahlo's work. Neal has portrayed a tiny infant by his elbow. His wife had borne him a son the night before and put characters from his poems in the foreground with a nearby L train in the background. When Fearing saw the painting, he told Neal to, quote, take that font loroy out of my heart. The reason I put it there, Neal later explained, was that even though he wrote ironic poetry, I thought his heart bled for the grief of the world. Both the Fearing and Gold paintings were done during the Depression, which was at its peak in the winter of 1932, just before Franklin Delano Roosevelt entered the White House. Neal had been in the village almost a year. The unemployment record was estimated as close to 25%, some 15 million people. It was common to see entire families evicted from their homes. By early 1933, 10,000 artists were out of work. Audrey McMahon, whom Neal called arsenic an old face, became the regional director of the New York Department of the WPA. Neal was first on the Public Works of Art Project, or PWAP, which she signed up for the day after Christmas, 1933. In its intention and operation, the PWAP was the precursor to one of the greatest creations of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project, which began in August of 1935 and ended in 1943. The WPA was key to the survival of a whole generation of artists, and like its famous murals, had an epic sweep. It's almost impossible to overestimate the wide-ranging effect of this unprecedented national patronage system on the lives and works of the artists involved and on the cities in which they lived. A phenomenal amount of art was produced by some 5,000 artists, 2,500 murals, over 17,000 paintings, sculptures, 108,000 paintings, 200,000 prints, and 2 million silk screen posters. In New York City alone, artists painted 200 murals in public buildings and produced more than 12,000 paintings, 2,000 sculptures, and some 75,000 graphics works. Neal was on the WPA's EASIL program, EASIL Project. According to her employment record, she was on the project from September 1935 through August 1942, making her one of the first artists on the WPA and one of the very last to get off it. Neal's years in the village were thus literally framed by the far-reaching political and social consequences of Roosevelt's revolutionary New Deal. Although she often compared her humanism to that of Balzac, to a great extent Neal was in spirit, sense, and sensibility, what one might call a Roosevelt painter. Her worldview was shaped by that era and she practiced nearly from the inception of her New York art career, the genre which came to be known and was ultimately marginalized as social realism, a politically conscious movement characterized by its unsparing representation of social injustice and its hero worship of the poor and working class. This is Pat Whalen, he was head of the Waterfront Workers Union. Major artists of the movement at the time included Ben Sean, Moses Sawyer, Reginald Marsh, Philip Evergood, William Groper, and Isabel Bishop. Unlike many of its proponents, however, Neal went on to evolve her own transcendent style. Still, there are certain constants in her work that date back to the WPA period. She never veered from the brutally penetrating gaze she had developed during these depression years and her subjects were deliberately diverse and democratic mix, including many fellow travelers in the labor and civil rights movements. The era's influence on Neal's work extends past content to form. Neal took a page from WPA photographers like Walker Evans and Darothea Lange and focused on seringly honest portraits of common people. Typically, Neal ran afoul of authorities on several occasions, including breaking the rule against painting nudes and according to one supervisor using too much blood in a fish market scene. Some years later when Neal discovered her WPA work being sold for canvas, she bought back that painting, a scene reenacted by Elsa Lancaster in the movie of Fearing's The Big Clock and Restored the Blood. Neal's relationship with Kenneth Doolittle ended due to her involvement with a man named John Rothschild. This is, of course, John Rothschild, but although Neal remained lifelong friends and sometimes lovers with Rothschild, he was not one of her major romantic partners. Her next partner, whom she actually met while out on the town with John in late 1935, was Jose Santiago Negron, who had fathered her son, Richard. In Jose, she found an irresistible combination of the working class and the elegant, the sexual and the spiritual. She lost no time finding her way back to the nightclub where they had seen him perform. Slim hip does a matador and turned out in a fancy ruffled shirt. Jose played the guitar and sang quaint Spanish folk songs at a place called La Casita. He was 10 years Neal's junior and rolled apart from the relatively staid John with his bald, paid and habitual pipe. The seductively handsome musician was the stereotype of an inappropriate choice for a mate, but Neal couldn't restrain herself. Physically at least, the slender, dark, exotic Jose reminded Neal of Carlos, her first great love. You know what he was? He was a substitute for my Cuban husband, although they were completely different, she said. And years later, she still took credit for making the first move. I went to the nightclub with John and I had on a silver lame dress that was beautiful, she said, and Jose was charmed by all this wealth and elegance. The dress, of course, had been bought for Neal by John. Toward Jose, I made my one aggressive action. I went down there one night to that nightclub and I knew Jose was going to want to come home with me and he did. Neal was soon spending the wee hours at La Casita, mesmerized by Jose and the other acts of the club. I wish I had a record of his playing. I was in the nightclub every night when he played. I did the tango, the rumba, all those dances. Richard is the product of nightclub, she later joked. Not long after Alice met Jose, he moved into her apartment on West 17th Street. In just a few months, Jose had achieved what John Rothschild hadn't in several year courtship. I guess he captured Alice's heart with his bohemian singing and whatnot, says Jose's nephew. By the end of 1938, Neal was pregnant again, perhaps anticipating the birth of her child or because, as she had lamented, the village had become too honky-tonk. Neal abandoned downtown and Bohemia to take up residence in Spanish Harlem, where she would remain for 24 years. Jose would leave Neal when Richard was only four months old but she remained close to his family, including his brothers, Carlos. Neal's haunting TB Harlem, which is this painting, shows Carlos after his lung was removed and it's one of the most powerful paintings in her long and extraordinarily fruitful Spanish Harlem period. For the next two dozen years, many of Neal's subjects would be those who lived immediately around her, from family members to neighbors to people she saw on the street. As Neal explained about her move to Spanish Harlem, you know what I thought I would find there? More truth. There was more truth in Spanish Harlem. Neal had a great affinity for both the people and the place. Her Spanish Harlem paintings are uniformly strong, although often brooding. Her recording of her multicultural milieu brings to the fore her social conscience, her empathy for the underdog and her love of Latin culture, starting from her earliest days with Carlos in Cuba. Whether they are of neighborhood children or her own extended family, such as Jose's sister Margarita, with her three young children, Neal's images from her 22 years in neighborhood rank among her best work. Neal's personal life like her art owed a debt to the WPA. Neal met Sam Brody at a WPA meeting in January 1940, scarcely a month after Jose had left. Brody would father her next child and be her partner for the next two decades. There was, Neal recalled, an immediate attraction. Just a few weeks after meeting Neal, Brody moved into the apartment at 10 East 106 Street. Sam and Brody was, in many ways, Neal's ideal match in terms of intellect and interests. His sophisticated discourse was a welcome relief from what Neal called the poor intellectual fare of Spanish Harlem, but he had a deeply destructive side that would take a terrible toll on both Neal and her sons. There was something else, and Sam, that Neal must have recognized instantly, an infallible radar for sensing someone's vulnerabilities. But while Neal confined her most stringent analysis of people which sometimes bordered on crucifixion to the canvas, Brody resorted to a full frontal verbal assault. Few people could tolerate it. He was so smart when he'd pick on people, he'd know exactly the bad spot in them, Neal said. There was something uncanny in his capacity to tear people down. Sam was also known for going after people physically. On more than one occasion, he violently chased would-be collectors of Alice's work out of the house. Brody's temper and jealousy expressed itself in other ways than brandishing knives at visitors. He took a violent dislike to Richard. And as time went on, he abused Richard Neal, said. In Andrew Neal's 2007 documentary, Alice Neal, Richard spoke for the first time publicly about being the victim of Sam's physical, not sexual abuse, which had started when he was an infant and continued it until he left home for boarding school at 16. He used to kick me under the table all the time. He kicked me under the table and one time I screwed up enough courage to say, stop it. Well, Alice had to go out that evening and Sam beat me up. He really did. It was intermittent, but it was physical violence and it was directed at Alice and it was certainly directed at me. But Richard didn't need to put this abuse on the record. Neal herself had already done so from the very beginning and several drawings and paintings done in 1940. Her first year with Brody. In the disturbing painting, The Minotaur, a crazed looking horn Brody with a bristling black heart and a clenched fist anchors the canvas. Over his right shoulder, effectively blocked from rescue by Sam's body, a terrified Richard screams and cries. When Brody later discovered this painting, he tried to destroy it, but Neal patched it back together again. Still in January 1941, about a year after meeting him, Alice was pregnant with Brody's child. On September 3rd, Neal gave birth to Hartley Stockton Neal. Shortly afterwards, the family moved to East 107th Street in Spanish Harlem. The birth of Hartley did nothing to ameliorate Sam's feelings towards Richard. Sam's attitude toward Hartley was entirely different from his attitude toward Richard and this created a very difficult situation, said Neal in an uncharacteristic understatement. It was a threat of physical injury that terrorized me, Richard says now. I mean, he could say filthy Puerto Rican and make fun of Spanish people and stuff like that. It's you're small and he's big and you're helpless. When I was a kid, Alice told me there's a society for the protection of children. She said it dozens of times and I said I want to go there. She had the police up once, Richard recalls, at one point, according to family legend, Sam even broke Richard's collarbone. It would be story time and instead of hearing little bear, I would hear about how my collarbone was broken or how whenever Sam came into the house, I threw up, Richard says. If Neal was so miserable, but even to more to the point, if she saw Sam physically hurting her son, Richard, why did she remain in such a destructive situation? Part of me is very inert, Neal said. I had the two children, I had the house, I had the basis of living. I wasn't going to leave that or give it up or change it. Do you understand? Hartley frequently came to Richard's rescue. Sam discriminated against Richard in many ways, Hartley says. You know, Richard and I stuck together very much, but at times it was a situation that was just awful. That's all I can say. In the documentary, Richard states it bluntly. The fact is she tolerated this person she knew was abusing me for years and years. Still as adults, both Hartley and Richard have nothing but praise for their mother whom they adore and revere. If she had been satisfied with the paradigm of what women were supposed to be in her era, says Hartley, she would have been nothing, okay, nothing. She might have been the greatest housewife and mother and all that. This was the other side of the coin. Richard even goes so far as to say that despite the suffering he experiences as a child, having Alice as a mother was a worthwhile trade-off. She was a good mother. She was a very good friend to me and the fact that she might not have been able to give me the protection I might have gotten somewhere else, that's a fact. But suppose I got the protection and I didn't get something else. It was a gift to have her as a mother, certainly. There's no question about it. Neal's final WPA assignment in the summer of 1943 was to scrape armbands worn by guards in case of a German raid. I joined the WPA to paint masterpieces, not scrape armbands, she said. And instead she spent all day chatting with fellow artists turning in an already corrected bundle at the end of the day. Neal immediately went onto public welfare which she would continue to receive through the 1950s. It was the end of an era. Neal had several shows in the early 1940s and 50s before she was plunged into complete oblivion. The post-war politics and advent of abstract expressionism wiped social realism off the map. But Neal never stopped painting, accumulating hundreds of portraits in her apartment. It was a difficult time for figure paintings but Neal never gave up her commitment not just to figure painting but to portraiture. She was, she always said, first and foremost, a humanist. It wasn't until the early 60s when figurative painting, including pop art, resurfaced that Neal began what would ultimately become her triumphant comeback. Her technique had continued to evolve. And by the 1960s she was painting portraits that even today look modern and contemporary. By the mid-60s Neal had established her mature style. Creating a series of canvases that are among her best known, this painting of Hartley, done in 1966 when he was a medical student at Tufts, is indicative of the light palette and fluid lines Neal now incorporated into her work. This portrait of Richard was done in the 1970s. Neal would finally find her place in the public spotlight thanks to the feminist movement of the early 1970s which fully embraced her as a feminist icon. Although Neal had conflicted feelings about the movement itself, she said she'd been a feminist long before the movement arose and ridiculed Judy Chicago for doing nothing but, quote, painting her pussy. She took full advantage of the prominent pedestal feminism provided, painting many of its movers and shakers from her 1970 Time Magazine cover of Kate Millette to her portraits of Bella Abzug and the influential feminist art critic Linda Knocklin and her daughter Daisy. Her portrait of her daughter-in-law Nancy Neal painted in 1971 is a signature painting of this period. Note the shadow of Richard hovering in the background. Neal was adept at capturing the anxieties of motherhood and her pregnant nudes, both genre-bending and taboo, are among her greatest works. The pregnant nude provided her with a unique and powerful image, literally a physically embodiment of women's basic conflicts. Just as she had chronicled the beats and bohemians of the village in the 1930s, Neal spent much of the 1960s and 70s painting members of the art world, including the artist who perhaps epitomized the second half of the 20th century. That's Frank O'Hara, who she painted in 1960, who at the time was not just a poet but a very influential art critic, and she really hoped he would help get her into the Museum of Modern Art, and he didn't. And that's Red Rooms in Mimi Gross, least 10 years before they got divorced, although as you can see, they're not getting along too well here. Neal was famous for being able to capture some of the uneasiness between couples. So now we're gonna get to the artist who epitomized the second half of the 20th century, Andy Warhol. It's an astonishing portrait on every level and one of Neal's personal favorites. Warhol offered a strip to the waist, revealing the scars from the assassination attempt by Valerie Solanas two years earlier, as well as the surgical corset he was now forced to wear. Neal exaggerated these disturbing details to indelible effect. She also painted one of the most voyeuristic and perceptive artists of the 20th century with his eyes tightly closed. She gives the androgynous Warhol an almost feminine form with small dripping breasts and wide hips, and perhaps alluding to Warhol's own beginnings as a commercial illustrator who did shoe advertisements for I. Miller, she renders his shoes in beautiful, shiny detail. The portrait is memorable for Neal's nervy perspicacity in depicting Warhol's vulnerability as a perpetual outsider like herself, and as a literal victim of his own celebrity. But Warhol's input is also key. His courageous self-exposure is in itself an artistic act. Of all Neal's paintings, this portrait comes the closest to collaboration. In 1974, Neal got the Whitney retrospective many thought she had long deserved, and that the feminists had aggressively lobbied for. And by the 1980s, she was justifiably famous, painting such public figures as Mayor Koch, and having the ultimate celebrity experience appearing on Johnny Carson twice, not long before her death. Neal does some of her strongest and most provocative work in her final decade or so. Her painting of Annie Sprinkle in full fetish gear and with Pierce Latia was done in 1982. She never stopped painting prolifically right up to the time of her death. In fact, her final portrait is that of her attending physician. I'm going to close with a paragraph or two that I'm gonna read straight from the book that takes place very close to the end of her life. When Neal was actually, unlike most artists, at the peak of her powers, and I think this passage describes one of her best paintings ever, done in 1980, but also sort of sums up her extraordinary creative drive. One of the last paintings Neal made was one of her rare self-portraits. At 80, Neal castes relentless in eye on herself as on the hundreds of subjects of her long career. Perched on a chair, the artist known for her scathing nude portraits is stripped down to her quintessence. Naked but for her glasses, a paintbrush and a rag, she bravely renders herself with neither clothing nor props. Her aging body, equipped just with the tools of her craft, her vision and her deftly wielded implements as if to make the definitive statement of self-expression, I paint, therefore I am. The flesh may sag, may, as Neal put it, be dropping off the bone, but the artist and her ability to paint remain forcefully intact. It's a radical departure from the standard artist's self-portrait, and in its stark veracity, beautifully illustrates Neal's original and enduring American vision. The road that I pursued, and the road that I think keeps you an artist, is that no matter what happens to you, you still keep on painting, she once said. Thank you. I guess there's time for some questions if anybody has any, and then I also can sign books if anybody wants to buy them, or if you've brought your own with you, that's also fine. Does anybody have a question? Yeah. To destroy her cooking, the first one that, that her lover in the college party. Only one, only one actually. Oh well, yeah, true, Sam did destroy one painting. Yeah. Well, it certainly shows Neal's extraordinary tolerance level for abuse, which goes a little way towards explaining the fact that she allowed Sam to abuse Richard, but it's not unheard of. I have, I can't give you an exact example, but I have read in literature, not just of artists, but of writers destroying each other's work or their own work. It does happen. It is, of course, a crime, and a creative crime as well, and her family has never, ever forgiven Kenneth Doolittle for that. And in fact, I went out of my way in the book to do a whole chapter, or portion of the chapter on Kenneth Doolittle, because Neal spent most of the rest of her life just saying how he was this crazy guy who destroyed all her work, whereas in fact, he was a Spanish war hero, and was one of the organizers of the 1199 Hospital Workers Union. And after his relationship with Neal led a very admirable life, he was a great husband, he was a great father, he was a communist and was blacklisted. But he, I think that she just pushed his buttons. I mean, she was extremely promiscuous. She was flagrantly cheating on him. And I think at the time, she might also have been pregnant and aborted as child. There were a lot of things that were going on. And, you know, yeah, it's unforgivable, but she not only later forgave him many years later, but she gave him John Rothschild's clothes after John Rothschild died. John Rothschild being the guy she was cheating on him with. So Neal was a very complicated woman to put it mildly. Well, that's a kind of barbed question. I mean, not really. She, I mean, Mae Stevens, who was a feminist and is still a wonderful painter living in New Mexico, said of Alice Neal, you know, she wasn't a feminist, she was an Alice Nealist. And one of her most famous feminist acts was in 1972, there was the first conference for women in the visual arts at the Corcoran. And Neal, it was one of Neal's first opportunities to show her work to a willing and ready audience. And she had to be dragged off the stage. She completely hogged the stage. She showed 40 years of work. They had to pull her off the stage. And then she peed in the hall of the Corcoran publicly. And, you know, which is still sort of notorious lore in feminist literature. And the feminist writer, Mary Gerard, said, turned this into kind of like a badge of courage, and said that Neal did this, you know, because she was like Jackson Pollock. And she showed that a woman artist really could be like a male artist, totally free of constraint. But no, she, I mean, she, I think she understood that she was benefiting from feminism, but she always went out of her way to say that she was a feminist before anybody else was, and that this was just stupid to only look at your private parts, and you should look at the third world. And she had done that. And, you know, critics were stupid to think, so no, she didn't really give feminism the credit it should have gotten, because without feminism, Neal would not have gotten back into the limelight. That's what brought her back in, apart from figurative painting. Anybody else? Yeah? No, not enough. Absolutely. John Curran, Lisa Sikovic, Eric Fischel, Elizabeth Payton. Well, she will. I mean, in my book, The Epilogue, which I hope those of you who buy the book read, because it sort of, I guess, gives a summary of her place in art history, I give her full credit for that, and I say that she influenced a whole generation of artists, including Eric Fischel and John Curran, and Elizabeth Payton in particular, and you can decide who's the better portrait painter. But I think that it took so long for Neal to get into the literature at all, even as a major 20th century artist, that it's just gonna take a while longer for people to refine it, and add nuance to what her place is. But I think she certainly, one of the ways I became interested in her was that all of my friends who were painters idolized her, and I wouldn't say she influenced Fluent Solution Freud, but certainly they are connected, and she's connected with Francis Bacon, as far as I'm concerned too. I mean, there's lots of overlaps in treatment of the figure. Any other questions? Okay, you first, and then you. I think, how did that sort of come in? Well, as Rebecca said in her introduction, I mean, she was the first multicultural painter, and part of that had to do with it, she considered herself a humanist, and she was interested in the human condition in whatever form it took. Also, I think the things that informed her sensibility and her work were Latin culture, which she was introduced to very young in Havana, at a really incredible moment in Cuban culture, which I have a whole chapter on. What came out of Cuban culture at that time was extraordinary, and Carlos went on to be one of the most famous 20th century painters in Cuban history. But so Latin culture sort of radicalized her, as did the Depression. I think having a complete breakdown in being in a hospital, in the suicidal ward, and then being in a private institution, kind of sensitized her to other people's psychic wounds, and I think poverty too. I mean, she was poor her entire life, and she was very, very aware of what the people around her went through, including, you know, her Spanish Harlem neighbors. So, I mean, that was what interested in her. She always said, I wanna paint the zeitgeist, I use people as the evidence of my time. So she was a people collector, that's what she did. She was a collector of souls, which is what she was famously called by Jack Kroll in Newsweek in the 60s. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Right, totally. I have a funny anecdote that Paul Resnicka told me that's in the book where Alice Neal used to go down, not to the Abstract Artist Club, but to another group that's escaping my memory at the moment down in the village in the 60s, and hang out with everybody and talk, and, you know, she prided herself on talking like a sailor and always shocked everybody, because here was this grandmotherly woman using these curse words and being extraordinarily vulgar. And so one day she was leaving the club along with Isabelle Bishop, and she almost like knocked Isabelle Bishop over to get in the cab with her because she really wanted to be considered in the same light as Isabelle Bishop, who was considered a great lady and a great painter. And, you know, he just couldn't get over that. He called Alice, Paul Resnicka did, Alice Neal, the squeaking wheel, because whenever anything good happened to her or she got any kind of fame or notoriety, she would call him up and say, did you hear that? You know, Time Magazine. So she practically knocked Isabelle Bishop over, and she did do a portrait of Isabelle Bishop, which Isabelle Bishop hated, because she said she made her look like she had mosquito legs. Anybody else? No, but my parents were both, my mom, my parents were both artists who then became writers, and so I grew up around the smell of paints and easels. Anyone else? Oh, okay, well, thanks again. Thank you.