For much of her life, Alice Neel was an obscure figurative painter. She worked for the WPA during the Depression, but Abstract Expressionism drover her underground; then, in the '60s, when she was in her sixties, she blossomed into celebrity. Now comes a full-career retrospective, organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “There's something about history,” remarks curator Ann Temkin: “Every time women act up, it's treated as the first time. The feminist eruptions get forgotten. But Alice, in the '30s, decided she could be a woman painter, and the audacity of those works—they're as fresh as anything.”

— David Frankel