Figurative painter Alice Neel broke artistic traditions in her portrayals of female nude figures. The Art world credits her for exploring onto the canvas representations of pregnant, nude figures previously avoided in Western art. Journey with me through pregnant women captured at their extremes.
Images celebrated in the podcast episode are drawn from a retrospective of Neel’s prolific works. “People Come First,” curated by Kelly C. Baum and Randall Griffey, is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
This episode summarizes traditional female nudes in Western Art: Titian’s “Venus of Urbino” and Manet’s “Olympia.” (1864)
Resources for this podcast include writers Marilyn Stokstad, Linda Nochlin, Pamela Allara, Jerry Saltz, Natasha Moura, and Denis Baur and museums Metropolitan Museum of Art, Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.
Script: Thank you for being here on another journey through works of art from the perspective of woman artists. Looking and experiencing objects of art by women has freed me from the bonds of patriarchy and self-imposed constraints. My hope is for you through our journeys into works of art by women, you will be inspired to live more creativitely and to see our visual world in new and meaningful ways. If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe or leave a review–your likes, your reviews do help bring awareness to this show.
I would like to give you a preview of some things to come. I am delighted to share my engagement with a new female contemporary artist—Her name is Amy Chaiklin. She is a figurative painter and she creates series of women, in diverse personas like Witches, Goddesses, Cultured Pearls Portraits are works of women in the visual arts, artists and curators, like Judy Chicago, Guerilla girls. Her representations of women are sensual, empowering, whimsical, they reveal aspects of the sitter through a colorful palette of vivid colors. When you contemplate a Chaiklin portrait, you feel joy. We had a phone chat, we met via Facetime, she was in her studio in New York, I was in my office–computer and books and prints. It was delightful and our connection was immediate. I am going to travel to New York later in May to meet Amy in person but to also attend her upcoming exhibition–group exhibition, “Truth to Power” at the Margalit Start Up City. I added a link to the show notes of both Amy’s website and the show—Amy will be featured in a podcast episode in the near future. Stay tuned!
I experienced the gloriousness of figurative painter Alice Neel’s prolific body of works, through a retrospective of her works organized in thought provoking themes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Alice Neel: People Come First is the “first museum retrospective in New York the American female artist in twenty years. She was born in 1900 and died in 1984.The survey positions Neel as one of the century’s most radical painters, a champion of social justice whose longstanding commitment to humanist principles inspired her life as well as her art. Images of activists demonstrating against fascism and racism appear alongside paintings of impoverished victims of the Great Depression, as well as portraits of Neel’s neighbors in Spanish Harlem, leaders from a wide range of political organizations, queer artists and performers.” This episode is focused and will dive into Alice Neel’s enthusiasm for the female nude figure, specifically the female nude pregnant figure.
Composed between 1964 and 1978, Neel painted seven portraits of pregnant women, women near the end of their pregnancies. Each is monumentally scaled—five reclining, two seated, “representations of pregnancy as experienced in widely differing ways by various acquaintances of Neel–she captures their bodies at their most extremes: two are of her daughter-in-law, one a friend of her son’s, one a friend from her neighborhood, three are artists or artists’ wives.”
The subject of a “pregnant nude” was previously avoided in Western art. When asked about the subject, Neel responded, “People out of false modesty, or being sissies, never showed it, but it’s a basic fact of life….Something the primitives did, but modern painters have shied away from because women were always done as sex objects. A pregnant woman has a claim staked out; she is not for sale.” Neel makes visible what has ordinarily been a woman’s hidden experience–she recasts pregnancy as a common condition, a human event.”
As you enter into the exhibition “People Come First,” the first work, the first painting, you see — is one of her pregnant nudes, the oil on canvas work (1978) “Margaret Evans Pregnant” — the wonderful writer and reviewer Jerry Salz said the choice to open up the show with this work just “slaps you alert.” It depicts the wife of artist John Evans–let’s journey through it. The sitter, Margaret Evans sits somewhat uncomfortably on a small green armless, chair, the bottom is skirted. She is faced towards us, the viewer, hands clutch each side of the chair, legs extend with bloated feet and ankles, on what appears to be yellow carpet. She is nude, her belly distended, resting atop her pregnant belly are her breasts, the defined nipples stare out like search lights. Behind her is a mirror that reflects a further distorted figure of the sitter. The forms of her body and face are built up through color–there is uneven tones in her skin–hues of flesh tones and greenish tones express shadows, the body is outlined with contour of blue. She stares straight at us, within her gaze there is discomfort. What Neel reveals in her sitter is what perhaps many pregnant women feel–and again to quote Jerry Saltz “ambivalence about motherhood” noting that “ambivalence was never rendered quite this way before.”
What Neel captures in the portrait of Margaret Evans, and as we will see in other works from this series of pregnant nudes, is “the transformative experience and physical demands of childbearing.” (ICA Boston) She makes visible what has ordinarily been a woman’s hidden experience. And each painting expresses that individual experience of pregnancy.
Earliest in the series of pregnant nudes is “Pregnant Maria” oil on canvas, painted in 1964. Maria’s body, small with a dark complexion is spread languidly across her white bedding sheets. She is not posed for display she has arranged herself for her own comfort. One arm rests along the contours of her voluptuous body with plumb belly and full yet somewhat sagging breasts; the other arm is bent, her closed hand rests against the side of her face. Her hair is tousled waves framing her face and neck. Her legs are crossed- Her gaze is direct, perhaps even confrontational– she unabashedly exudes this kind of confidence. There is something sensuous about Maria, but she is definitely not a sex object. What is compelling is the painting “Pregnant Maria” it is said is “Neel’s answer to Manet’s Olympia.
One of the fascinating discussions that surface in analyzing works of art within the story of Western art are these kinds of comparisons–and the ways iconic works of art can inform an artist like Alice Neel who dismantles the traditions of, for example, the nude figure then expresses it through her, a woman’s point of view. For those you are not familiar with Edouard Manet’s painting Olympia from 1864 allow me to share some historical perspective. I credit art historian Marilyn Stokstaad for her scholarship. The nude figure has long been a subject in the history of art; the tradition of depicting the nude female figure lying down or reclining was established during the Renaissance. They recall ancient Greek emphasis on the beauty and in some cases the sensuality of the human, nude form. The Venetian painter Titian composed Venus of Urbino in 1538–she is beautiful, her gestures provocative, one hand covers her pubic area, at once modest and inviting her smiles as she stretches languidly on her couch in a spacious palace, her flesh glows, her golden hair with flawless skin–she represents a bride welcoming her husband into their lavish bedroom.
The French 19th century painter Edouard Manet creates a composition, “Olympia,” in 1864 of woman reclining on white bedding; she is almost identical to Titian’s Venus of Urbino. Manet takes the classical subject and modernizes the reclining nude. How does he do this? Here the woman is naked and on display. Her body is not idealized it is more angular and flat compared to the soft curves of the Titian work. Her hand covers her pubic area, but not as provocative. She stares out at the viewer in an assertive way–she expresses a colder indifference; she is not docile and the name’s title Olympia suggests she is a prostitute. Manet in essence challenged the long academic convention of the female nude figure in this composition.
Into the 20th century, we have Neel, same basic composition, a nude woman reclining on white bedding. But here we see a nude, pregnant woman,–Neel challenges once again the traditions of female nude. Her subject Pregnant Maria is “framed within a set of references that are not familiar in this context.” She portrays a pregnant woman naked and in an erotic pose, yet absent is the sexual tension of a male gaze. ” Her confidence, her attitude, the ways she directly looks at us, the viewer, defies what we give to the portrait of eroticism.” Neel “reorients the eroticism of the female nude” (Natasha Moura)
She painted her daughter in law Nancy in the work Pregnant Woman from 1971. Reclining on a couch, Nancy, pregnant with twins and suffering from toxemia, is not alone, above her hovers the face of Neel’s son Richard. What is compelling about the portrayal of husband and wife is “Nancy is treated fully, Richard’s face and couch on which she rests are handled schematically.” sketch-like rendering of his face. Nancy is on her side, her legs pulled up, her arms drawn around her head. The skin tones shift from warm oranges and pinks to this “deathly green,” the nipples are swollen, the areolas are dark. The enormousness of her bulges outward. “Look at the painting of Nancy pregnant: it’s almost tragic the way the top part of her body is pulling the ribs,” Neel commented. (credit writer Denis Bauer)
As we can see with the portrait of Nancy and Richard, Neel’s portrayal of couples is expressed from the woman’s point of view. She is the one who is front and center. Referencing from Denis Bauer’s writings, In Pregnant Julie and Algis (1967) depicts a young doctor and his wife reclining on their futon in San Francisco—they lie close together on the red patterned surface. Julie is nude and pregnant in the foreground; Algis, is behind her and completely clothed. He wears a white ruffled shirt, tight black pants. Julie is fully exposed, but her body language conveys ambivalence. Her left arm is held back, anchored by Algis’s arm and slightly clenched fist. Her left leg seems deliberately outstretched while her other leg is coyly bent. Her soft brown eyes are fixed on the viewer; she seem vulnerable, diminutive, and a little frightened. Algis, on the other hand, looks vacantly over Julie’s nude body, his body relaxed inside his rumpled clothes, his legs comfortably crossed. I love this interpretation–” he provides a wall of protection, while his narrowed eyes extend a gaze of possession over Julie’s vulnerable nude body. She is exposed to the world. What I found off putting in the painting is Julie and Algis seem disconnected, their roles unequal.
This is what makes Neel’s paintings so characteristically unique. You see human and human form the way she did. One of the paintings that just blew me away was Childbirth, oil on canvas 1939. She depictsmotherhood in this painting as–I love this description by curator Randal Griffey “an excruciating almost nightmarish experience” The body, lying on a bed, is much more flattened there is a sense of chaos in arms, they are flailing around her face, her breasts are swollen, the pubic area covered with a sheet–her eyes stare above us, there are deep black circles beneath them. The woman is not idealized–what we experience in throbbing outlines of the woman’s body is a harrowing realism and a beautiful brutalness. The painting illuminates the bravery of Neel, she goes places few artists, if any artists, especially woman artists of her generation dared to go.” It is worth underscoring what I noted previously. She makes visible what has ordinarily been a woman’s hidden experiences she recasts pregnancy as a common condition, a human event. What I admire most about her is she refused to generalize the expectant female within the conventions of fertility figures and earth mothers; instead as writer Linda Nochlin suggests, “they dwell on the unnaturalness of pregnancy for modern urban women.” I found that comparison very striking conventions of fertility figures and earth mothers to Neel’s perspective of pregnant women–let’s consider another comparison; visual expression of earth mother juxtaposed to a Neel portrait. The iconic Women from Willendorf–a small figurine, just over 4 inches tall, displays a female figure, believed to be a fertility figure–there is an emphasis on her female anatomy, large pendulous breasts, round buttocks and rotund belly. The exaggerated forms of characteristically female elements of human anatomy celebrate the woman as a mother and bringer to life. We can visually see parallels in both figures, Neel’s to the ancient figurine–notably in Neel’s works is the individuality of the sitter. Women from Willendorf’s sphere head has no facial features, it is replaced by a series of cross hatchings. It reminds me of a knit cap.
There is something spellbinding and riveting in Neel’s pregnant woman. From the writer Pamela Allara, “they transgress the codes for representing the female nude, they do NOT conform to the norm in Western culture–the purity and clarity and logic. I grew up in the Catholic faith; I was bombarded by the Virgin Mary
Neel establishes a new “aesthetic of physical form.” Her women are sensuous but they are definitely not a sex object. Again I think the writer Allara illuminates this point–“No fantasies of possession are possible… Because her sexual history is inscribed on her body, the look cannot penetrate her.” Neel’s images of the female pregnant nude speak directly to women of their experiences of themselves and their bodies. She averts the patriarchal gaze and portrays a more human, broad range of the female experience–the pregnant woman. And Neel composes her, represents her, reveals her aspects of her inner self through spellbinding strangeness–her portraits are just riveting.