Alice Neel.

 

Alice Neel. Born in January 1900

Ballet Dancer, 1950. Hall Collection. © The Estate of Alice Neel. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London and Victoria Miro, London

I am coming to the end of January artists' birthdays but there are a couple more really important ones to write about, especially Alice Neel (January 28, 1900 - October 13, 1984). Alice Neel was one of the great American painters of the twentieth century, a pioneer about all artists and especially among women artists who have often been constrained by social norms to painting "the nice and the pretty." 

Mother and Child, 1967

Neel was never fashionable or in step with avant-garde movements. Sympathetic to the expressionist spirit of northern Europe and Scandinavia and to the darker arts of Spanish painting, she painted in a style and with an approach distinctively her own. 

Neel was born near Philadelphia in 1900 and trained at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, against her middle class parent's wished (naturally.) She became a painter with a strong social conscience and equally strong left-wing beliefs. In the 1930s she lived in Greenwich Village, New York and enrolled as a member of the Works Progress Administration for which she painted urban scenes. Her portraits of the 1930s embraced left wing writers, artists and trade unionists.

Neel left Greenwich Village for Spanish Harlem in 1938 to get away from the rarefied atmosphere of an art colony. There she painted the Puerto Rican community, casual acquaintances, neighbors and people she encountered on the street. Lovers came and went, leaving chaos and heartbreak in their wake; one was a Puerto Rican musician who left Neel months after she gave birth to his son. Another was a junkie who destroyed all of Neel's work that he could get his hands on. It was as if she was drawn to that which created pain and suffering in her life which she then used as material for her work. 

Alice Neel in her studio in New York, 1960 Photo: GETTY

In the 1960s she moved to the Upper West Side and made a determined effort to reintegrate with the art world. This led to a series of dynamic portraits of artists, curators and gallery owners, among them Frank O'Hara, Andy Warhol and the young Robert Smithson. She also maintained her practice of painting political personalities, including black activists and supporters of the women's movement.

  

Black Spanish Family, 1950, Estate of Alice Neel

Living most of her life in poverty, it would be wrong to believe that she didn't resent her artistic outsider status. When she moved to Spanish Harlem in the 1940's, she resorted to shoplifting and had to life on welfare to survive. Yet she was compelled to follow her own artistic muse, painting all that she encountered - whether her fellow citizens of Harlem, prostitutes, fellow artists, her family, her lovers, street workers and sex workers. Her neo-realism was deeply unfashionable in the heydey of Abstract Expressionism and seemed old fashioned. But what seemed old fashioned then, is now seen as emotionally astute and an often disturbing look into her subject's inner lives. "I don't do realism," Neel once said, going on to declare that a room, a chair, a table and a person were all the same to her – except that a person is human and therefore essentially psychological.

Her life was marked by extreme and painful episodes. She lost her first baby to diphtheria in 1927. Three years later, her second daughter was kidnapped by her estranged husband who took the child to live with him in Cuba. Neel never regained custody of her daughter and was only able to reconnect with her in 1934. Neel had a complete breakdown, tried to commit suicide, and ended up in the hospital for a long time. 

Andy Warhol

By the 60's, when the grip of Abstract Expressionism loosed on the art world, Neel began to achieve a belated fame. She was taken up by many of the fashionable and famous, including Andy Warhol. From the review in the tTs his torso, the result of gunshot wounds he had sustained when a member of the Factor shot him, two years earlier. The pop artist's middle -aged breasts sag ...Although Neel has barely sketched in the background, she has produced an extraordinarily rich psychological account of a man reduced from a cultural icon to a collection of greenish skin and bone."  She was called "one of the greatest portrait artists of the 20th century" by Barry Walker, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which organized a retrospective of her work in 2010. 

Alice Neel. Portrait in Old Age

Her late found fame and fortune meant little to Neel except that she could now buy all the art materials she wanted. Her son Hartley explained, “ultimately what success meant to Alice was the ability to paint without worrying about how to pay for canvas and materials”. His wife Ginny agrees. “When she died she left a couple of dresses and painting smocks and that was about it.” As long as Alice Neel was able to paint the people in her world the way she wanted, nothing else mattered.  She even looked at herself in the same analytical, probing way that she looked at all her subject. At 80, a few years before her death in 1948, she painted herself naked except for her glasses, a brush in one hand, a rag in another. Seated in a stripped chair, which shows up many times in her work, she does not fudge on on the signs of age on her body but is self appraising and yet funny but also, dignified. Her vision people in her portraits shows the soul that makes us uniquely human and for that, we return time and time again, seeing, as her daughter in law Ginny said, "Alice loved a wretch. She loved the wretch in the hero and the hero in the wretch. She saw that in all of us, I think."

Pregnant Maria. Neel defied the conventions of the nude in Western art, portraying women as strong, defiant, and honest yet vulnerable.  

Wikipedia here

Alice Neel and the Faces of New York here

Holocaust Memorial Day. Least we forget

 

Holocaust Memorial Day

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day, a time to reflect on the mechanisms that enabled the genocide against Jews & Rom, & not only remember what those mechanisms wrought but that they are still in motion and have grown even larger and louder: fear, xenophobia, demagoguery, dehumanization of marginalized groups.

#OnThisDay 75 years ago, Soviet soldiers liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau. They found several thousand emaciated survivors and the smouldering remains of the gas chambers. Approximately 1.1 million men, women and children had been murdered there. Learn more: https://hmd.org.uk/resource/27-january-1945-liberation-of-auschwitz-birkenau/

They were not numbers, triangles or symbols.And we will not let their names be forgotten. (Photo: Czeslawa Kwoka, Vinzent Daniel, Maria Schenker, Walter Degen)

9 January 1940 | Hungarian Jewish girl Sarolta Grünwald (in the picture on the left) was born in Csongrad. In June 1944 she was deported to #Auschwitz and murdered in a gas chamber. She was 4. Her 2-years-older brother Sandor died with her. (Photo: @yadvashem

18 January 1943 | French Jew Claude Alexander was born in Lyon. In 1944 he was deported to #Auschwitz and murdered in a gas chamber. He was 1 year old. https://www.hmd.org.uk/
https://www.ushmm.org/remember/days-of-remembrance/resources/calendar

Manet, Born on this day in 1832.

 

Manet, Born on this day in 1832. 

Hats off to Édouard Manet for creating such beautiful work. He was born #onthisday in Paris.  At The Milliner's' | 1881

Edouard Manet (1832-1883), dubbed in his day the Father of Impressionism, was nothing of the kind. He bought paintings by Impressionists but he exhibited in none of their exhibitions (1874-1886).

He preferred the path of long academic training, his ambition to exhibit at the Salon, the Parisian equivalent of the Royal Academy; this he achieved but not without the sour adversity of powerful established members of the Salon and the mocking hostility of influential critics, the insiders objecting to his alla prima technique (that is painting directly on the canvas without preliminary studies, the composition adjusted and edited in progress, the brushwork free and fluent and perspective left to chance), the outsiders bemused and angrily disturbed by subjects in which Manet broke all the technical rules and ignored the traditional hierarchies that made, for example, a history painting superior to a still life.

Manet knew these rules, and others too, for he came from a social background of civil service, diplomacy and the aristocratic reserve of the high bourgeoisie. Intended for the Navy, he failed, and at 18 in 1850 enrolled for six years as a student of Thomas Couture who, at the Salon three years earlier, had sprung to fame (and notoriety) with his enormous and much debated history painting, The Romans of the Decadence. Under Couture he learned the ancestral techniques of his trade (though he was swiftly to abandon them) and copied the painters of Renaissance Venice and 17th-century Spain and Holland who were to be both profound influences and the subjects of respectful subversion in his work. He wanted Couture’s popular success, critical acclaim and commissions but when, in 1859, he made his first submission to the Salon, he was rejected. In 1861 (the Salon was biennial) he tried again and two paintings were accepted, but in 1863 he was again rejected — indeed, so many other painters were rejected that Napoleon III commanded the immediate institution of the Salon des Refusés (the first hint that a Salon jury might be fallible), at which Manet’s now celebrated Déjeuner sur l’Herbe caused one of the great brouhahas in the history of art criticism. The absolute power of a Salon jury in Manet’s day may seem extraordinary and outrageous but it is matched today by the similarly arbitrary power of the Arts Council and of Serota and his Tates. Until his death 20 years on, the Salon maintained its ambivalence towards his work, but Manet remained convinced that it was the proper place for him to exhibit and be judged, though he was contemptuous of jurors whom he damned as “an ill-mannered lot” for whom he “wouldn’t give a f-”. Conservative in temperament and wealthy enough to go his own way, he could afford to offend the Salonards while wishing to be one of them.

For the last five years of his life Manet found it increasingly difficult to stand at his easel, the reason syphilis, either contracted in 1848-49 when on a preparatory training voyage to Brazil for the Naval College, a boy of 16 or 17 being made a man by his mates in one of Rio de Janeiro’s brothels, or inherited from his father, for his later life was one of uxorious devotion and discretion. After many attempted cures gangrene set in and in April 1883 his left leg was amputated. He did not recover.  (taken from an old essay by Brian Sewell).

Manet’s paintings met with a critical resistance that did not abate until near the end of his career. Although the success of his memorial exhibition and the eventual critical acceptance of the Impressionists—with whom he was loosely affiliated—raised his profile by the end of the 19th century, it was not until the 20th century that his reputation was secured by art historians and critics. Manet’s disregard for traditional modeling and perspective made a critical break with academic painting’s historical emphasis on illusionism. This flaunting of tradition and the official art establishment paved the way for the revolutionary work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. Manet also influenced the path of much 19th- and 20th-century art through his choice of subject matter. His focus on modern, urban subjects—which he presented in a straightforward, almost detached manner—distinguished him still more from the standards of the Salon, which generally favored narrative and avoided the gritty realities of everyday life. Manet’s daring, unflinching approach to his painting and to the art world assured both him and his work a pivotal place in the history of modern art.

Today I celebrate Martin Luther King

 

John Singer Sargent. Painter of the world of late 19th century Europe

 John Singer Sargent was born in Florence on January 12, 1856, the eldest surviving child of American parents, Dr. Fitzwilliam Sargent and his wife Mary Newbold Singer. His father was a doctor who had practiced in Philadelphia, but the Sargents had traveled to Europe in 1854 and embarked on an expatriate existence, returning to America only for visits. Sargent’s father had hoped that his only son might follow a career in the navy, but it soon became clear that he wanted to train as an artist.

He studied briefly at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Florence, but in May 1874, when he was 18, went to Paris, where the best art education was to be had. He entered the independent atelier of the fashionable portrait painter Carolus-Duran and enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts to study drawing from casts and from life.  Like Manet, Carolus-Duran had traveled to Spain and fallen under the aesthetic spell of Velázquez, an enthusiasm that Sargent absorbed and that informed much of his work. He made the journey to Spain himself in 1879 to copy works by Velázquez in the Prado and, the following year, he traveled to Holland, as many contemporary artists had done, going to Haarlem so that he could see firsthand the expressive brushwork and inflected surfaces of paintings by Frans Hals.

Sargent exhibited at the Salon in 1877, sending a careful balance of portraits and subject pictures and achieving critical attention and success quite remarkable for a young foreign painter. By 1833 he had moved into his own studio and had established himself in Paris.   From then on, he went from success to success. His portrait of Madame X was a scandal and after than, Sargent moved to London where again, he was very successful. The 1890s were dominated by portraiture and the murals. He became, in effect, the portraitist of an international elite.

 

In the early 1900s a pattern developed whereby he spent the summer and autumn of each year painting landscapes in Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. He would spend August in the Alps, before moving down to Italy or Spain. In the Alps he was usually accompanied by the family of his sister, Violet Ormond, by Mrs. Barnard and her daughters, Polly and Dorothy (who as children had posed in white dresses in Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose), and by a group of close friends, who frequently acted as his models. 

Around 1907, he attempted to give up both formal portraiture and the fashionable society that generated it. He shifted his emphasis to landscape and produced huge numbers of works in oil and watercolor: a series of Alpine figure studies, architectural paintings of parks and gardens, fountains and statues, scenes of local life, boats and animals, streams and waterfalls, rocks and boulders—with only a few of them ever exhibited or sold. He returned to Venice, the city he loved above all others, year after year, painting canals, palace facades and campos from different angles and under varying conditions of light. He was committed to his mural decorations and landscapes, but the claims of portraiture never entirely evaporated. He compromised by drawing charcoal portraits—he did between twenty and thirty a year—in the space of a sitting or two; and he painted portraits of close friends like Sybil Sassoon and Henry James.

He was in the Tyrol at the outbreak of World War I, which marked the end of his European travels. He spent two years in America (1916 - 1918), painting landscapes in Florida and the Canadian Rockies and installing murals in the Boston Public Library. He undertook a second Boston commission for the Museum of Fine Arts, and agreed to paint two famous Americans, John D. Rockefeller and President Woodrow Wilson. On his return to England, he accepted a commission to paint a major war picture, traveling to the western front as an official war artist where he conceived his late masterpiece, Gassed.

Sargent never married and had few close attachments outside his family and a close circle of friends. After his death, memorial exhibitions were held in Boston, London, and New York.

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Patron of the arts & Founder of the Whitney Museum of Modern Art

 

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Born on this day in 1875

Artists are important but so are those who supported them: Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (January 9, 1875 - April 18, 1942) was an American sculptor, art patron and collector, and founder in 1931 of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. She was a prominent social figure and hostess, who was born into the wealthy Vanderbilt family and married into the Whitney family. (January 9, 1875 - April 18, 1942) was an American sculptor, art patron and collector, and founder in 1931 of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. She was a prominent social figure and hostess, who was born into the wealthy Vanderbilt family and married into the Whitney family.

She was also a sculptor with numerous shows and commissions. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_Vanderbilt_Whitney

The iconoclastic woman who founded the whitney: 

https://www.thecut.com/2015/05/iconoclastic-woman-who-founded-the-whitney.html

Giorgio Giulio Clovio. The greatest miniaturist and manuscript illustrator of the Renaissance

 

For much of his career, Giorgio Giulio Clovio, the greatest miniaturist and manuscript illuminator of his time, was pursued by ill luck. Born in Croatia in 1498 and first working in Venice, he went to seek his fortune in the service of the King of Hungary. But unfortunately the King was defeated and killed by the Turks in the battle of Mohacz (1526), the Turks overran Hungary, and Clovio had to escape to Rome. He barely arrived there to find the city taken and sacked by the desperate Imperial Spanish and German mercenaries of Charles V (1527):

[He] was taken whilst in the house of his employer, Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio. One would have thought that a quiet and inoffensive young man of no particular distinction would have escaped unnoticed. But not so. He was beaten, starved almost to death, and rendered so completely miserable that he solemnly vowed, if he ever recovered his liberty, to devote himself to a religious life . . .

Not long afterwards it happened that Don Giulio, in transferring himself from one monastery to another, as monks or friars do, by misfortune broke a leg. Being therefore conveyed by those fathers to the monastery of Candiana, that he might be better attended, he lay there for some time without recovering, perhaps having been wrongly treated, as is common, no less by the fathers than by the physicians. Which hearing, Cardinal Grimani, who much loved him for his excellence, obtained from the Pope the power to keep him in his service and to have him cured. Whereupon Don Giulio, having thrown off the habit, and his leg being healed, went to Perugia . . .

Later on, in France, he developed a fever, but prayed and recovered. Then back in Italy, “there happened to him another unexpected and more than ordinarily severe misfortune. His health was probably permanently injured by his sufferings thirty years before in Rome. Now his left eye became so seriously diseased as to threaten loss of sight. In January, 1558, he was compelled to undergo an operation which fortunately proved successful. . . . In a letter still extant . . . he mentions this misfortune as to his sight,” saying that he knows of a certain “clever surgeon oculist” who has cured other prominent persons and that he wishes to try this, hoping that in a week he would be all right but that this “cannot be done without an operation, which somewhat frightens him . . . The next letter he tells us that this Maestro Battista, the Florentine oculist, had skillfully performed the operation which he minutely describes, and is thankful to say that his sight is quite restored.”

Despite his misfortunes, Clovio lived to a ripe old age: “although he is old and does not study or attend to anything save to seeking the salvation of his soul by good and holy works and . . . is in every way an old man, yet continues to work at something, there where he lives well attended and in perfect peace in the Palace of the Farnesi . . .” He died in 1578.

References

1.Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Artists.

2.Bradley, JW. The life and works of Giorgio Giulio Clovio, Miniaturist. London, 1891.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giulio_Clovio