Portraits of Alice Neel arrive at the Serralves Museum

São 90 works, to which is added documentation of the artist's archive, as well as letters from Portuguese and foreign artists, contemporary, written for Alice Neel (1900–1984), an artist who has gone through almost a century and whose unique artistic talent was only recognized late in her life, as described today, on a visit dedicated to the press, the curator of the exhibition, Inês Grosso.

“The human figure is central to his painting. She was an artist who lived in the background and only after 60 years began to have some recognition. True to his work, eccentric, he had a life marked by adversity and never stopped painting. Alice looks at people without any judgment. He saw beauty in the imperfect, beauty in failure,” Inês Grosso said.

Relative from Thursday to 17 January, in Ala Álvaro Siza do Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, the architecture of the exhibition can almost be divided into two parts: the one dedicated to the family and another to activism.

Intimacy, the female body, motherhood, “matter with which it had an ambigua relationship”, the aging and life of marginalized communities, including queer activists, immigrants and their neighbors of Spanish Harlem, among other themes, are evident in this exhibition, living with various mirrors, small windows with books, clippings, postcards, images and niches of sound of which sounds, among other styles of music, classical and Latin, preferred by the artist.

“ The mirrors invite the visitor to become part of the exhibition”, said Inês Grosso, who is also chief curator of the Serralves Museum, and worked on this exhibition for about two years, a period that included trips to the United States, alone, to visit Harlem and to be with the family of the artist with whom he deprived for five days in a rural property of Vermont.

“Alice Neel: Beautifully Imperfect” begins with a self-portrait of the artist, a portrait that painted four years before dying and in which she appears naked with a cloth in one hand and the brush in the other sitting in the striped chair where many of her models sat to be portrayed by you.

“ It was a rather radical choice, but at the same time I don't think it would make sense to start the exhibition any other way. It is the only self-portrait of the entire body of the artist and a self-portrait (...). Alice Neel very punctually appears reflected, or appears in some watercolors. Even today I am intrigued by the reason that has led her to wait so long to do her own self-portrait ", described the curator.

On what he portrayed and how he portrayed, safeguarding that this is his interpretation, Inês Grosso said that Neel “appreciated and saw beauty in imperfection”.

“ Some people didn't even want to be portrayed by her. They were not flattered in the portrait (...). Many paintings have an unfinished side. He caught the look, a detail that interested him and then the rest no longer interested him so much ", said, pointing to the feet of a portrait that seems to be unfinished.

With loans from institutions such as the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C., and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Serralves brings to Portugal, for the first time, “a comprehensive overview of Neel’s career, from his early expressionist experiences to the psychologically dense and formally safe portraits of his period of maturity”.

The initiative gathers voices of contemporary artists their admirers and establishes links between different periods of their career, revealing how the artist also viewed the portrait as a political act.

Among other notes, Inês Grosso recalled that Alice Neel made some memory paintings, recruited people on the street to paint them and came to be investigated by a possible connection to communism in the 1950s, during the ‘mccarthysm’, the hardest period of the Cold War in the USA.

Between the 1960s and 1970s, Alice Neel also painted many pregnant women, not because of the idea of pregnancy, but because she was interested in volumetry, the deformation of the body, reminded Inês Grosso, stressing that “this exhibition has a didactic and absolutely intentional character”.

In the text distributed to the press, Serralves highlights that among the artists, writers, musicians and other contemporary voices, Portuguese and foreign, invited to write to Alice Neel, are Alexandre Farto ‘aka’ Vhils, Allora & Calzadilla, André Romão, André Tecedeiro, Annie Sprinkle, Carminho, Celia Paul, Chantal Joffe, Fernanda Fragateiro, Hilda de Paulo, Joey Skaggs, Jordan Casteel, Juan Araujo, Katy Hessel, Minês Castanheira, Panmela Castro, Tiago Baptista and Vasco Araújo, among others.