Curated by Jeremy Lewison and Barry Walker
Though Alice Neel (1900–1984) could sometimes appear matronly (she played a bishop’s mother in the 1959 Beat film Pull My Daisy), she was a political radical and a bohemian whose portraits questioned social and artistic categories with enduring acumen. While she mastered the figural distortions developed by modernists before her (limbs like pulled taffy, faces with not-quite-level eyes, oversize heads heavy with psychic burdens), she rendered her subjects with a sincerity that modernists typically feared. The MFA’s sixty-eight-work retrospective spans more than fifty years of painting and includes subjects that range from a nursing woman to a family in Spanish Harlem, from a cowlicked Robert Smithson and a toothy Frank O’Hara to a man named Joe Gould sporting an impressive three penises.
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