Contemporary Art

ALICE NEEL
(American, 1900-1984)

Priscilla Johnson, 1966
Oil on canvas
Purchased with funds from the New Collectors and the National Endowment for the Arts 1980.14

Alice Neel called herself "a collector of souls," and her intensely introspective portraits suggest a deep empathy for her subjects. The elongated limbs and exaggerated features of this young woman, as well as the coloration of her face and flesh, are innovations Neel inherited from turn-of-the-century European Expressionists such as Oscar Kokoschka, Ludwig Kirchner, and Otto Dix. The raw emotionalism of Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch also anticipate Neel’s use of color and form to portray the sitter’s feelings as well as her figure.

Bathed in an acid green and with a bony hand raised in imitation of the plant encroaching eerily from the left, this woman (a friend of Neel’s sons) seems haunted, although we cannot know what troubles her. Priscilla Johnson’s dress, pose, and hair all identify her as a fashionable young American from the 1960s.