My introduction to the painter Alice Neel was a screen print that hung on the living room wall of my grandparents’ home in Woodstock, N.Y. — a provocative portrait of Neel’s pouting granddaughter lounging on a striped chair. I discovered last weekend, when I saw Neel’s stunning retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that the same striped chair has appeared in many of her paintings. The many portraits in the exhibition, “Alice Neel: People Come First,” were of Neel’s friends and lovers, or of well-known artists, activists, critics, scholars — including many radicals my grandmother admired, among them Mike Gold, an author and activist, and Linda Nochlin, a celebrated feminist art historian. I became curious about Neel’s subjects and learned about their lives from their obituaries in The New York Times. Below is a sampling.

Source: International New York Times July 10, 2021 19:30 UTC