©

Alice Neel

Last Sickness

When Alice Neel was a child, her mother said to her, "I don't know what you expect to do in the world. You're only a girl." Neel later spoke of her mother's frustration at having no outlet for her own energy and intellect. Mrs. Neel came to live with her daughter in 1953 and died the next year. A sense of her frailty and anxiety prevails in this painting, despite the stabilizing horizontal and vertical shapes of the chest of drawers, the chair, and the plaid of the bathrobe. Intimate and unsentimental, the work reads as a daughter's record of her strong mother's decline.