Alice Neel Retrospective at Guggenheim Bilbao Highlights Photographic Approach to Painting

A retrospective exhibition of American painter Alice Neel is currently on view at the Guggenheim Bilbao through February 6, 2022. The exhibition, curated by Kelly Baum, Randall Griffey, and Lucía Agirre, previously appeared at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art from March to August 2021 and will travel to the Centre Pompidou in Paris in October 2022. Neel, born in 1900 in Pennsylvania, studied at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women in the early 1920s. She married Cuban painter Carlos Enríquez Gomez and lived in Havana, where she exhibited work. After returning to New York, she settled in Spanish Harlem in 1938. Her paintings focus on portraits of marginalized communities, including women, gay individuals, and Black Vietnam veteran James Hunter, depicted in the unfinished 1965 work 'Black Draftee (James Hunter).' During the 1930s Great Depression, Neel worked for the Work Projects Administration, creating urban scenes with skeletal figures reminiscent of James Ensor. Her 1943 painting 'The Spanish Family' portrays a Hispanic woman with three mixed-race children, echoing Dorothea Lange's 1936 photograph 'The Migrant Mother.' Neel's approach has been described as creating 'photography in painting,' aligning with the humanist photographic tradition exemplified by Edward Steichen's 1955 'Family of Man' project. The exhibition presents Neel as a socially engaged artist with communist sensibilities who believed art should improve society.