Word: neel
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Neel, who died in 1984, led a passionate and sometimes turbulent life. Perhaps too often, biographical descriptions of Neel focus on the hardships she experienced-the death of her first child, separation from her husband Carlos Enrquez, who took their second daughter with him, a mental breakdown, a string of sometimes difficult lovers. Certainly the artist did deal with many losses-but over the course of Neel's life, her artistic expression seems to have gained a greater emphasis on the passionate than the turbulent...
...Even in Neel's most trying times, her work demonstrates an absorption of death as well as life into her art. Several of the earliest pieces in the show convey Neel's struggle with the death of her daughter Santillana. "After the Death of a Child" (1927-28) is an especially haunting watercolor: children dressed in red and blue appear on a playground, fenced off from the adults in the black and gray street who have been reduced to figures out of Munch's "Scream"-both elongated and hunched with hollow eyes. Shortly after the burial of her father...
...Addison show clearly chronicles Neel's evolution from a recent art-school grad (she attended the Philadelphia School of Design for Women), dealing with her rejection of academic training, to a confident, comfortable portraitist. Her earlier work is somewhat primitive in its calculated naivet. The tones are earthy and dark, and the way she renders her sitters varies. Some portraits give an impression of purposeful awkwardness, while others are just somehow off. Walking through the show, the figures become more colorful-blacks become blues, browns, yellows; purples appear-and the backgrounds behind them become simpler. The show does not skip...
...main room of the show, in a gallery with a ceiling installation by Sol LeWitt, holds Neel's large portraits of the late '60s and '70s. These big, light paintings are all a pleasure, each one as grippingly individual as the people who inhabit them. Among the sitters Neel painted during the later years of her life were recognized figures on the art scene, including Andy Warhol. The appearance of large numbers of art-world types reflects the growing recognition Neel received in the '60s, out of which came a 1974 solo exhibition at the Whitney...
...paintings from the years just before Neel died are bold images. In them, Neel arrives at true expression of the individuals she examines, reaching an immediate confrontation with her subjects. One of her last images, "Hartley and Andrew" (1983), depicts her son and grandson. Both father and child are outlined in blue, as was Neel's habit at the time; seated on a stool, they stare not out, but into the viewer. Background is eliminated or, rather, Neel chooses the gessoed canvas for her background, as she does in many of these late works. This is the ultimate demonstration...