Psychological approach

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.