Artist's Date #1: Alice Neel - People Come First

@ The de Young through July 10th, 2022

For the record, this image was NOT at the museum: I CAN’T IMAGINE WHY! Also THIS IS ANNIE SPRINKLE PEOPLE! Please, internet, she deserves her name.

It was so fun to see the thin blue lines of Alice Neel’s portrait work in person at the de Young last Sunday. Her attention to color, fabric, furniture and figure stood out in all the 40 or so paintings in this retrospective of her work. It was striking to see how she sought to capture the power of the unrest of her times within the personal space of the body. It was a beautiful reminder of how art can contain us and sustain us through the most difficult of days.

“I felt that the best record of life and everything else was the figure,” she said in a TV interview with Johnny Carson, “So I went against the grain. And you get punished for that. But finally…” and then I can’t understand what exactly she says at the end of this sentence. “Finally you get them down”? Are they up? Do you want them to be down? If life is a challenge to defeat an unidentified “them,” then I think I want out of this one. Bring me another, oh god of reincarnation, I’d like to return as a cat for all eternity.

Thanks to Lena for sharing her love of Neel’s early work: the moody architectural NY paintings, for which she should probably be famous for instead. And also for using one of her rationed — because PAYWALL! — Atlantic views to tell me about this new book about mothering and creativity, called The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby. I no longer have a baby, I have a six year old. But still, every day, I think of having a baby, the baby I had, the baby I was, the baby I might still have were I not still struggling with both of the aforementioned babies. Did I mention this was an experimental newsletter? Thank you for your patience.

Technical note: See that image above, the one I didn’t caption? There is no way, in substack, to align this on the left side of a paragraph. Why? Do you WANT me to go back to wordpress? To squarespace? To tiny letter? This big change is hard enough for me as it is without a newspaper like feature being left out of the formatting. I am just really having a hard time accepting this. “Currently, you cannot change the alignment of text, headings, or subheadings in the Substack post editor.” Was this article helpful? Yes, or no.

There is a darker side of her life, that is really only mentioned in the exhibit notes, by way of describing how some of her paintings had to be restored, after her lover slashed them in anger. Of this relationships, A.N. says “it was a case of homicidal meets suicidal,” and I found that strangely comforting, if not because just getting to this show was firm proof of my own will to live. To be fair, I had a little help: my friend’s friend had an IG post about how she was in SF on her own, and she was headed to the de Young and how first she was going to have a little coffee before she went on her way. It was like a little synchronistic — see I MADE IT TO A POINT — moment made for me, something I could hang my hat on, a person who also had a calling to visit a museum, by herself, on a regular Sunday with no reason other than fun.

And this concludes the first and maybe last installment of an Artist’s Date, unless of course I make it to any one of these amazing looking events from ODC for the State of Play Festival, that begins tomorrow and runs for a week.

xo,
Emily,