AT HOME: ALICE NEEL IN THE QUEER WORLD
David Zwirner
Los Angeles
Sept. 24, 2024
On a scalding Saturday afternoon — peak heat wave in Los Angeles, temperatures around 107 outside — a small crowd of art writers gathered around a seersucker-suited Hilton Als inside the main gallery at David Zwirner. Als had flown in to introduce a new exhibition of Alice Neel paintings he’d curated.
“I’ll keep this short! I know you’ve got white wine spritzers on the brain!” he joked before stopping beside the show’s opener: a portrait of Allen Ginsberg, seated cross-legged in the dark on the set of the Jack Kerouac – penned 1959 short film Pull My Daisy, flanked by a glowing yellow candlestick and haloed by trippy black orbs that echo the shape of his wet lips pursed into the O of his “Howl.”
Underscoring the main themes of the show — alienation, disconnect, love — Als pointed out connections between Ginsberg and Neel: Ginsberg’s mother, Naomi, died a few months before Neel painted this portrait. Naomi and Neel were both open communists. Neel’s Allen Ginsberg represents an anomaly — she painted almost exclusively in her own domestic spaces. Naomi suffered from schizophrenia during her son’s youth, and she, like her son, like Neel, was institutionalized after an attempted suicide. Neel, a mother of two boys herself, would’ve acutely felt Ginsberg’s loss.
Born in 1900, Neel graduated from the Philadelphia School of Design for Women in 1925, soon marrying Carlos Enríquez and briefly settling in Havana. After moving to New York City, they lost their first child to diphtheria, and Enríquez absconded with their second child back to Cuba, driving Neel to despair and a suicide attempt. By early 1930, the couple was separated, and in 1938 she moved to Spanish Harlem in New York, where she would spend the rest of her life, eventually raising two sons with different fathers.
The word “portrait,” to Neel’s mind, was elitist. She preferred to say she painted pictures of people. Marxist to the core, figurative in the face of abstractionism, Neel, as Als posits with this show, openly and ardently worked outside the establishment. She was queer in sensibility, if not in sexual orientation. Largely unrecognized until the 1970s, she “worked in obscurity most of her artistic life [and] made a place for herself out of no place,” as Als puts it in the show’s catalog. Her subjects spanned across the social range of her daily life and working years: handymen and sex workers, poets and politicians, neighbors, occasional lovers, and art-world contemporaries, including at least one esteemed art curator and critic who had shunned her — Henry Geldzahler, whom she painted almost like a child, with, as Als said, his “opulent pinkie ring and petulant mouth.”
On a chilly September morning a week later, the painter Jake Longstreth, planning to see Neel at Zwirner alongside Ed Ruscha at LACMA, put it this way: “I don’t usually call anyone a GOAT, but Alice Neel just is.” This is one of those shows: the kind New York usually gets first, as Als pointed out in his thanks to the gallery for having the good sense to give Angelenos its first taste; the kind you saw or you didn’t.
At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World, curated by Hilton Als, is open at David Zwirner from September 7 to November 2, 2024, at 606 N. Western Avenue, Los Angeles. The accompanying catalog, published by David Zwirner Books, includes contributions by Hilton Als, Alex Fialho, Evan Garza, and Wayne Koestenbaum.
