The paintings of New York artist Alice Neel were diametrically opposed to those of her contemporary, Andy Warhol. But she nonetheless painted a portrait of the pop artist that exhibits more empathy for him than any other likeness.
For decades she was unsuccessful. But she kept right on plugging away at portraits of the oddballs around her – friends, neighbours, her son, and her lover. In the curious society that she captured for posterity, we meet pensive Communists and tender lovers, sick children and aging strippers, who cling to each other on an armchair, or laze around on a bed looking lost. It all looks inimitably gauche, but somehow elegant too.
Andy Warhol, who sat for a Neel portrait in 1970, is one of these lost souls. When Neel painted Warhol, she was already an elderly lady who kept her hair in a bun, whereas Warhol was a superstar and a co-founder of the pop-art movement. And while he, too, painted portraits, he was enamoured of surface and stylized his motifs into silk-screened icons.
Neel’s portrait of Warhol, which now hangs in New York’s Whitney Museum, is simply unforgettable, mainly because it’s a kind of counter-concept to the iconic, and because it shows Warhol stripped of all the glitz. For here Warhol, who was renowned for going everywhere with a glamorous entourage in tow, sits alone on an austere chaise longue, on nothing more than a simple mattress.
His eyes are closed, his hands clasped over his knees, his torso naked. His corset and the horrific scar on his stomach recall the 1968 attempt on his life by the radical feminist Valerie Solanas at Warhol’s New York City studio, The Factory, where Solanas shot him three times. His pectoral muscles are limp, making him look androgynous, which provoked a considerable outcry when Neel tried to show this portrait at a slide presentation in Nairobi: “The Africans wouldn’t let me,” she recalled later. “‘Oh no, half man, half woman, that would ruin our children.’”
Warhol’s face is craggy in Neel’s portrait, but not repellent. The blue and green pastels Neel used for Warhol’s skin and hair endow him with an almost superhuman aura: you could almost take him for a martyr, saint, or angel – and in any case a being who is no longer of this world. The fact that Neel left some parts of the painting unfinished – one knee, the hands, and the chaise longue – underscores the impression of vulnerability. You almost have the feeling that Warhol is about to disappear right before your very eyes.
Neel’s portrait of Warhol couldn’t be more different from Warhol’s art. He used overexposed Polaroids or pictures from photo machines as the templates for his silk-screens, which eliminated wrinkles, blackheads, and other distinguishing characteristics, thus making a star out of all and sundry.
But Neel focused empathetically on the vulnerability and weaknesses of her subjects. A sensitive artist, Neel didn’t care much for Warhol’s art: “As a person, Andy’s really nice. Polite and rather still. But as a personality on the art scene he represents a certain decline in our era. I find that he’s the best commercial artist working today, but a great portraitist he’s not. From the Brillo boxes to the portraits, I don’t know ... but his soup cans are terrific.”
Alice Neel’s portrait of Andy Warhol will be on view until 2 January 2011 at the retrospective of her work, “Alice Neel Painted Truths” at Moderna Museet in Malmö, Sweden.
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