Alice Neel: My Animals and Other Family, Victoria Miro

In the first solo exhibition at Victoria Miro gallery of American portraitist Alice Neel, paintings of cats and dogs reflect Neel’s intimate and personal style. Responding to her surroundings, Neel has a wonderful ability to identify the unique gestures and mannerisms of her sitters, even the four-legged ones. A particular highlight is the portrait ‘Lushka’ (1974), in which the dog is given complete agency as the central subject of the painting, her personality delightfully conveyed.
These vignettes of daily life also picture animals alongside their owners, capturing the bond between human and animal as well as the Wnnate character of these enigmatic creatures in both mythological and metaphorical scenarios. Wonderful additions include ‘Eddie Zuckermandel and the Cat’ and ‘Carol and the Dog’, where a blonde woman sits beside her red-eyed poodle.
You might recall her startling painting of Andy Warhol, a self-contained image with his hands clasped and his naked torso exposed to reveal the scar from where he had been shot in 1968. Similarly famous is the portrait of Frank O’Hara which many have thought signalled Neel’s dislike of the poet who is shown to be fairly unattractive with a receding hairline and distorted mouth.
Born in 1900 in Pennsylvania, Neel has been described as one of the great portraitists of the twentieth century by Marlene Dumas and Frank Auerbach, whose work has captured dark moments of her personal history from the death of her small daughter in 1930 to her own suicide attempts.
Her recent retrospective at the Whitechapel gallery 2010 elaborated upon her ability to translate the personality of her subjects onto the painting’s surface, leaving her sitters, from drag queens to pregnant women, raw and exposed. This exhibition at Victoria Miro’s St George Street gallery proves to be no different.