COLLECTOR

WSW went to the Alice Neel slide lecture on January 23 at the Cleveland Institute of Art and we're glad we did!

Ms. Neel, the portrait painter, now in her late 70's, has been painting all her life, but it is only since the late 60's that she has gained the international recognition that she deserves.

The first slide she showed was a painting done early in the century of a Yale Man, cockey and confident. The next slide, a portrait of the same man after the crash of '29, poorer but still confident. The third painting showed the man as he appeared a few years ago, middle-aged and trapped. Alice Neel showed several similar seriesportraits of the same person done over a period of time. She is truly interested in people. In fact, she says she is "obsessed" with life. She is interested in what time does to people to their faces and bodies, as well as to their personalities. "What I want is the complete person, inside and outside." There is no person that Alice Neel is not interested in painting. She paints rich and poor, black, white and Spanish American, men, women and children, the famous and the anonymous. Even the Fuller brush man has found himself sitting for Alice Neel. "My subjects are all around me," she says, "the 20th century, the faces of the people."

Ms. Neel is a plump, cheerful-looking woman with white hair. She was wearing a blue suit and comfortable shoes. Yet she has always been rebellious, a bohemian even in the art world. A fellow artist has described her: "She is a loner, unclassifiable and receives no popular publicity such as some fourth rate followers... obtain."

She has participated in pickets and demonstrations. Once, after prisoners rioted in an upstate New York prison, she carried a sign at the Museum of Modern Art which read, "At Atticaand at the Modern-Rockefeller calls the shots." However, Ms. Neel is now accepted for the tremendous psychological insight of her portraits and for her draftsmanship, use of color and line, and figure painting ability as well.

She had a one-woman show at the Whitney during the fall of 1974, and several major museums, including the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art, own her works.

The slides of her paintings were shown generally in chronological order, beginning with paint. ings of poets, and other Greenwich Village and Spanish Harlem denizens done during the 30's. She ended with recent works.

It was clear that Ms. Neel had given careful thought to the positioning of the slides. For example, she showed, in sequence, a series of paintings done of women before and after the birth of a child. She contrasted and compared subject matter and painting technique.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of the lecture was the painter's interest in her subjects, or "victims' as she sometimes calls them. She told a story about every painting. Ms. Neel has total recall and her portraits are rooted in a lively concern for what is human. She gratified our curiousity about the paintings: Who is that person? What are they like? Where did they come from? Her entertaining, tolerant and thought-provoking explanations made the paintings easier to appreciate in terms of technique, more approachable. She is also concerned with

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Just thinking about an art exhibit which featured work by women only was exciting compared tp all those tours through museums and galleries in the past. Walls full of works by men!

Women artists are now demanding recognition, not only individually, but as a group. They are demanding that they be taken seriously as artists, and represented fairly in galleries and museums so that the female experience be recognized as valid, if unexplored, subject matter for art. The creative abilities of women are being unleashed in a wide variety of mediums. The separate experience of being a female in this society is an important, balancing and possibly healing part of the whole human experi-

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exhibit, raising $, publicity, as well as selecting the artists. The nine artists were chosen from 175 entries. The show is not intended to be a cross-section of contemporary art, but the work of nine individual artists. The emphasis is on the artist and her creative growth. Each artist selected the works she wanted to exhibit and was given the space she need.

The content as well as the structure of the

With these thoughts (assumptions) in the back of our minds, WSW reporters attended the opening of NOVA's Women's Invitational.

How did the work of nine Northeastern Ohio Women come to be exhibited at NOVA? The idea for a women's invitational came out of a CR group composed of 10 local women artists. The women were prodded into organizing the exhibit because of their dissatisfaction with their place in the art world. Ms. Vivien Abrams, a member of the CR group and a trustee of NOVA proposed the idea to NOVA. Since there was no money available for the project the CR group recruited women who volunteered to do the work of preparing the gallery for the

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esthetics. She says, "We have no esthetic today. just like in Washington, where the politiciarn can't tell right from wrong." She is proud of one critic's comment that her portraits were paintings first and pictures of people second.

Ms. Neel does commissioned work frequent/ men art dealers who want to record their own irr.. portance. However, she says she never "went after the dollar" if it limited her freedom to paint as she pleased. Not all of Alice Neel's subjects will buy their own portraits. Her insights make her "victims" more uncomfortable than they want to be in their own living rooms. Most of the artist's subjects are of her own choosing. It would be impossible to describe or even remember each painting that she discussed. Ms. Neel's prolificacy is as impressive as her prowess as a painter.

Most memorable were her paintings of young men, her sons and their friends, and of older women. Alice Neel also paints portaits of relationships as well as of individual people: brothers, mothers and daughters, whole families, friends and lovers.

Alice Neel has never done a self-portrait. She feels that it would be an overwhelming task. But she may be getting closer to being able to do it. "Maybe a nude," she says. Alice Neel has a wonderful sense of humor. She showed one slide which was a painting of a minatour. "You know, the mythical beast that's half man, half bull... one of my husbands." While she has never let go of her belief that the human is more important than the material, she sees the irony and humor in many situations. She has a lot to tell us and a perspective from which we can learn.

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Invitational proved to be interesting. There was was a mixture of things "traditionally female" such as Sandra Humberson's quilted pieces and Joyce Moty's ceramictea sets; things less "conventional", such as Jane Neet's large "junkyard" sculptures and Athena Tacha's spare wood and plexiglass constructions.

We were impressed with the huge acrylic paintings of Audrey Skoudas. Although they were full of mystical symbols all of which we could not decipher, they were fascinating, especially in the use of startling color combinations.

We liked Barbara Cooper's "Sophie", a fiber construction with long appendages looped up under a central large oval shape. We wondered if Sophie had five children.

Sandra Huberson's quilted screened fabric hangings were mind boggling in their detail and crafting Equally appealing was her elaborate wood and fabric shrine which included tiny, wooden replicas of household equipment, such as rolling pins, irons and T-squares.

Much of the work in the show seemed to us sparse, remote and intellectual. April Gornicks drawings, which were stream of consciousness memories and life fragments, were hard to get into. Rose Ann Sassano's acrylic paintings and Jane Neet's sculpture were not entertaining, that is the viewer had to work at finding a way to approach them.

page 5/What She Wants March, 1975