Alice Neel: Biography

Alice Neel was born in 1900. She studied at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, now the Moore College of Art. She married a Cuban artist, Carlos Enriquez, and lived with him in Havana, where her first child, Santillana, was born. In 1927 they moved to New York City, where Santillana died of diphtheria. Another daughter, Isabella, was born in 1928. Neel and Enriquez were frequently apart, the daughter remaining with her father's family. In August of 1930, Neel suffered a nervous breakdown, and for the next year she was in various institutions. By 1932, she was living in New York again, with a man who, the following next year, vandalized approximately sixty paintings and 300 drawings and watercolors. Many of the paintings that Neel made for the Public Works of Art Project and the Federal Art Project in the 1930s and 1940s were also destroyed.

During the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Neel continued to paint despite little public recognition. Only in the 1960s--and her 60s--did Neel begin to receive national attention. The 1970s brought her an honorary doctorate of Fine Arts from the Moore College of Art. Retrospective exhibitions of her work were shown at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, at museums in Georgia and Connecticut, and, in 1981, at the Artists' Union in Moscow. She was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and received a National Women's Caucus for Art award presented by President Jimmy Carter.

Her sons, one a lawyer, the other a doctor, married and had children, and she spent time with her grandchildren, painting them frequently. In the last twenty years of her life, Neel was able to travel to Europe, Mexico, Russia, Greece, and Africa. She died in 1984 in New York City.