Organized in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, Paris, this exhibition brings together over 70 of Neel’s most vibrant paintings, shown alongside archival photography and film, bringing to life what she called ’the swirl of the era’.Īn Engaged Eye, at the Centre Pompidou, is the first solo exhibition in Paris dedicated to Alice Neel. In recent years, the politics of her work has given her cult status among a younger generation of artists. A member of the US Communist Party, Neel and her radical portraits caught the attention of the FBI. Crowned the ‘court painter of the underground,' her canvases celebrate those who were too often marginalized in society: labor leaders, Black and Puerto Rican children, pregnant women, Greenwich Village eccentrics, civil rights activists and queer performers. This is the largest exhibition to date in the UK of American artist Alice Neel whose vivid portraits capture the shifting social and political context of the American twentieth century.ĭescribing herself as ‘a collector of souls’, Neel worked in New York during a period in which figurative painting was deeply unfashionable.
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