The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue of the same name, published in 2020, when the exhibition was originally scheduled but postponed due to COVID-19. The exhibition will be presented at the Barbican Centre in London from Februto May 21, 2023. A selection of unpublished documents is also included in the show. In all, some sixty-five paintings and drawings are on view, along with two extracts from a film about the artist made by French artist Michel Auder in the late 1970s, in addition to other film productions.

Each section is presented as a thematic retrospective, starting with her earliest works in the late 1920s, which were painted in Cuba, and finishing with the final paintings made shortly before her death in 1984. The exhibition is divided into two parts loosely conceived, around notions of class struggle and the fight for gender equality. Through more than sixty-five paintings and drawings, the show, curated by Angela Lampe, emphasizes Neel’s political and social activism. Organized in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, Paris, this exhibition brings together over 70 of Neel’s most vibrant paintings, shown alongside archival photography and film, bringing to life what she called ’the swirl of the era’.Īn Engaged Eye, at the Centre Pompidou, is the first solo exhibition in Paris dedicated to Alice Neel. In recent years, the politics of her work has given her cult status among a younger generation of artists.

A member of the US Communist Party, Neel and her radical portraits caught the attention of the FBI. Crowned the ‘court painter of the underground,' her canvases celebrate those who were too often marginalized in society: labor leaders, Black and Puerto Rican children, pregnant women, Greenwich Village eccentrics, civil rights activists and queer performers. This is the largest exhibition to date in the UK of American artist Alice Neel whose vivid portraits capture the shifting social and political context of the American twentieth century.ĭescribing herself as ‘a collector of souls’, Neel worked in New York during a period in which figurative painting was deeply unfashionable.

The Art of Alice by Dave Marshall