Alice Neel at the Serralves Museum
The title of Julie Phillips’s 2022 book, The Baby on the Fire Escape, comes from a story about Alice Neel: One night—allegedly—the artist placed her wailing infant outside on the fire escape of her apartment so she could concentrate on her painting. Phillips tells us the story is likely false, a concoction of Neel’s in-laws. But the tale represents a real dilemma Neel struggled with for much of her early creative life: how to balance the demands of motherhood and domesticity with those of her art.
It was a dilemma Neel never quite settled in her personal life, but one that bled beautifully into her work, with psychologically astute and almost painfully intimate paintings like Well Baby Clinic (1928–29) and Self-Portrait (1980), the latter completed just four years before her death at 84. Those paintings and almost 90 others are on show today in a retrospective at the Serralves Museum (opens in new window) in Porto, Portugal. It is one of the largest-ever European showings of Neel’s work.
Considering Neel’s decades-spanning paintings alongside one another is revelatory. Well Baby Clinic, begun when she was 28, a new mother, and estranged from her flighty husband, is a miasma of maternal anxiety and dread. In it, babies with wormlike limbs writhe on narrow beds, mothers bare too-large teeth and sport reptilian eyes, and Neel herself appears with a blank, gray face. Half a century later, we reach Self-Portrait and see a wrinkled, white-haired, stark-naked, and utterly dignified Neel staring right back at us, paintbrush in hand, full of composure, vaguely unimpressed, having now seen it all and survived.—NXE
