Alice Neel Film Premieres at ICA/Boston
Documentary on Painter Neel by Grandson Andrew Neel
By: Erica H. Adams - Aug 21, 2007
Documentary Alice Neel, Directed by Andrew Neel; directors of photography, Mr. Neel, Ethan Palmer and Hillary Spera; edited by Luke Meyer; music by Jonah Rapino; produced by Mr. Palmer; released by SeeThink Productions. Running time: 82 minutes.
This new film on Alice Neel, directed by her grandson Andrew Neel reveals a familial portrait of one of the 20th century's greatest painters. Neel's raw, psychological portraits, often out of step with the times, frankly depicted her neighbors in Spanish Harlem, relatives and a bohemian milieu including Andy Warhol, Annie Sprinkle, Bella Abzug and Communist party leaders. The Sunday August 19th premiere was presented at the Institute of Contemporary Art in partnership with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston where it will be screened from August 23 to October 7, 2007. Andrew Neel fielded the audience's questions at the ICA while Neel's son Hartley, in a beret, sat in the theater.
This prismatic view of Alice Neel (1900-1984) formed largely by recent interviews with her sons and descendents, some family photographs, and historical footage is not apart from the new genre of personal documentaries on artists by their children, apparently damaged by a bohemian childhood. Son Hartley explains 'people want stability', something Neel's career never provided. Her fame grew with feminism, after Abstract Expressionism gave way to new figurative painting, content based art and the personal politics of the 60s. Later, Hartley asks 'why create images of anything?' even this documentary. Ginny Neel, mother of filmmaker Andrew upped the anti-art/artist sentiment -Alice became famous, was it worth it? To mistake this film's casual postmodern mélange as being less erudite than a recent documentary, My Architect, on Louis B. Kahn by his children is to underscore how Andrew Neel's film's replicates the painter's emotive, unrepentantly direct and necessarily incomplete portraiture.
Interviews of art historians balanced the family's observations of Alice Neel: we tend to look away, Richard Brillant said, while Neel doesn't. Unlike photography which stops time, Robert Storr Dean of the Yale School of Art observed Neel's painting allows you to see 'time happen'. After the portrait, and inhabiting the model for two hours, Neel said she felt like an untended house. For all the complaints, Neel's son the stockbroker who favored President Nixon, lives in her house and concedes that while the 'protection' was not there as a child, he got something else -'it was a gift to have her as a mother'. To be an artist is to search for freedom, something (you never find) that doesn't exist, Alice Neel concluded.
For a different perspective on painter Alice Neel there are two previous films and a 374-page biography, "Pictures of People: Alice Neel's American Portrait Gallery," by art historian Pamela Allara. Neel's self-portrait at 81, naked except for her glasses is on the cover.