Alice Neel: Painted Truths
Whitechapel Gallery, until 17 September
Paula Rego: Oratorio
Marlborough Fine Art, 6 Albemarle Street, W1, until 20 August
The last time I wrote about Alice Neel (1900–84), on the occasion of an exhibition mounted six years ago by the commercial gallery Victoria Miro, a reader wrote in to correct my statement that Neel’s work had not been shown outside her native America. The point I was making was how relatively little known Neel was, particularly in England, though that situation has now changed. At Victoria Miro (until 30 July) a host of international artists pay tribute to Neel’s work, and at the Whitechapel there’s a major survey of her paintings. Revealingly, though, this is still the first solo showing for Neel in a European museum.
The exhibition is accompanied by a weighty hardback (price £34.95), packed with full-page illustrations and learned essays, including a short text by Frank Auerbach praising Neel’s courage. ‘Her work declares an appetite for experience,’ he writes, ‘has a patent and shaming honesty, is indifferent to rules and hierarchies.’ Walking into the Whitechapel show is refreshing not just for the honesty of Neel’s psychological approach, but for the direct formal appeal of her paint surfaces and application. Gutsy realism is one thing, but Neel’s brand of portraiture as therapy is quite another. Although there are many artists today who ape her style, few achieve its depths and splendours.
The show begins on the ground floor with 1930s pictures such as ‘Degenerate Madonna’ and ‘Futility of Effort’. In the latter, a heartbreaking image in grey, cot imprisonment becomes cot death, as a news story overlaps with Neel’s private life to produce this chilling allegory. In the summer of 1930, Neel suffered a nervous breakdown, and a few months later attempted suicide. If the experience of personal suffering equips an individual to understand others, then Neel was soon fully qualified to paint great and penetrating portraits. But her early work, traditional and often symbolic realist portraiture, did not receive much recognition. Only in the 1970s did she begin to be valued, as her work grew in assurance and fluidity of handling.
There’s an early portrait of the artist Robert Smithson before he became famous for ‘Spiral Jetty’ in 1970, his flesh all green and pink. (Neel made a speciality of painting art world personalities.) Then there’s the relentless bonhomie of the ‘Fuller Brush Man’ in grey working suit, anxious to maintain his quota of 25 sales a day. People, as Neel admitted, both terrified and fascinated her, though painting was clearly her way of dealing with the terror, for it only rarely comes across in her pictures. Even the arresting portrait of Warhol, naked to the waist to display the fearsome scars of his 1968 gunshot wounds, is a statement in vulnerability rather than aggression. Interestingly, Warhol’s closed eyes also serve to remove him from the world with a kind of weary disdain, further distancing him from the viewer.
Upstairs there’s a room of cityscapes and portraits from memory, including a crisply structured painting of a fire escape and the nearly Abstract Expressionist ‘Night’. Another large gallery shows Neel doing nudes and double portraits, both of which she’s uncompromisingly good at. And don’t leave without confronting Neel’s nude self-portrait aged 80. Disapprove? Yes, she probably does. But the magic remains, despite the brashness, the willed awkwardness and the expressive distortion. The show, already seen at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston (which organised it), tours to Moderna Museet, Malmö, Sweden (10 October 2010 to 2 January 2011). Certainly worth a viewing.
The latest work of Paula Rego (born 1935) makes a striking contrast to Neel. The Whitechapel show may have been called (more or less accurately) Painted Truths, but Rego’s exhibition could be titled Searing Truths and still not touch bottom. Her principal theme is man’s inhumanity to man — or, more often, woman’s to woman. She is a narrative artist par excellence, and a draughtsman rather than a painter. Her etchings are superb, and in these new hand-coloured proofs she reaches new levels of invention and effect. A great storyteller, Rego delves deep into folk tales and nursery rhymes, but does not neglect the hideous facts of existence. Her latest work deals with two main subjects: ‘the exploitation, loss, grief, sex, love, parenthood and childhood’ at the heart of the story of London’s Foundling Hospital, for which she made the installation that forms the centrepiece of this exhibition; and the reality of female circumcision, the barbaric custom of ritual mutilation still widely practised in the world.
There is a new authority and looseness of handling to Rego’s drawn images, composed in a telling mixture of pastel, conté and charcoal, and executed with a boldness and economy that rout complacency. The fantasy has got wilder (while maintaining its grim clutch on unpalatable truths) and the wit sharper. Look, for instance, at the complex narrative of ‘Stretched’. A seated man holds what may be the end of a belt in his fist, while the girl beside him leeringly proffers the snakey length of another belt. Meanwhile, the penile imagery is compounded by the leg and foot of a chair protruding between the man’s legs. And that’s only one section of an intricate image that ends up with a wonderfully wonky mouse-cat at the front of the picture space, seemingly smashed out of its head. Or consider the series of well images, in which a bucket of unwanted babies is emptied down a well-shaft, without even benefit of bathwater. Of course, bodies hidden in wells poison the water supply, an apt metaphor for this secret disposal poisoning society.
Rego’s subjects may make you feel uncomfortable — that’s what truth can do — but the power of her imagery, and the aesthetic charge it carries, are undeniable. Her black and white etching and aquatints demonstrate her mastery of the medium, but the hand-coloured proofs go far beyond mere technique. Each is original and unique (‘Different colours are a different story,’ says Rego), and the typically Hogarthian satire has been tempered by something greater — perhaps a Goyaesque humanism. Here we have Dickensian rage without the sentimentality. Face your fears: even the ‘Guardians’ are terrifying, ready to upset the boat and drag you down to the deeps, keeping monsters on a chain but crowned. T.G. Rosenthal, a Rego expert, contributes an appropriately provocative catalogue essay. Not to be missed.
And finally, last chance to see a retrospective of Alan Lowndes (1921–78), at Crane Kalman, 178 Brompton Road, SW3, until 31 July. (Ring the gallery on 020 7584 7566 for details: the show may be extended into August.) Lowndes was from Stockport and often — with only limited justification — called ‘the poor man’s Lowry’. This exhibition and the accompanying monograph by Jonathan Riley (price £45) demonstrate his originality, his real strengths of colour and design, and his relevance as a tough realist painter as well as a social historian.
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