CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
Latest editorial
Rebel with a cause
CHRISTINE LINDEY explores the remarkable 20th century career of the finest female communist artist in the US
(L to R) Support the Union, 1937; Carmen and Judy, 1972
[Courtesy the estate of Alice Neel]
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
Alice Neel, “Hot off the Griddle”
Barbican Art Gallery, London
A NATURAL rebel, Alice Neel (1900-84) was born in Colwlyn, a staid Pennsylvania town which she said was “utterly beautiful in spring, but there was no-one to paint it.”
She wanted to be an artist from childhood but she had a placid, provincial upbringing in which her mother said: “I don’t know what you expect to do in the world, Alice. You’re only a girl.”
And as her family were not well-off, Neel became a secretary. But she insisted on studying art at night school and saved up to study at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women when she was 21 years old.
Similar stories
JAN WOOLF examines work that aims to give viewers a material experience of the environments in the polar north and Britain equally affected by the climate crisis
JOHN GREEN welcomes a remarkable study of Mozambique’s most renowned contemporary artist
BLANE SAVAGE recommends the display of nine previously unseen works by the Glaswegian artist, novelist and playwright
NICK MATTHEWS previews a landmark book launch taking place in Leicester next weekend