Alice Neel: Dr Jekyll and Mrs Hyde imagine...

This programme contains some strong language.

For Alice Neel, painting was an obsession.

"I had to paint," she said,

"and for art's sake I had to give up everything."

Born near Philadelphia in 1900, Alice Neel was

an extraordinary and prolific painter and yet most of her life

she was broke, living and working in obscurity.

When Abstract Expressionism came into its own, Alice had

already dedicated herself to figurative art, which was

more or less frowned upon by the mid-20th century

as too conventional.

But Alice didn't care about being unfashionable, she had

no conceptual idea other than to "paint the truth".

She painted the people around her, she painted her own life,

her hard, complicated and sometimes broken life.

Tonight Imagine presents an intimate and revealing film about this

remarkable woman and her work.

It is alarmingly honest,

at times upsetting and yet ultimately inspiring.

It was made by Alice Neel's grandson Andrew.

And here is the film-maker.

-Hello, Andrew.

-Hi.

So what made you embark on this, why did you make the film?

I felt like, being a family member, er, perhaps I could, um, bring some

flesh and blood to the story of who she was and what she went through,

and to do that I really used my...my father and my uncle.

Um, Alice was dead, obviously, and so I...I used them,

I would say I sort of bled them.

So they had to begin to tell that story

in a way they hadn't told it to anyone before, didn't they?

Yeah. There was a certain amount of therapy in it, I'd say.

I think that's what I tried to tap into,

both the pain, um, that Alice and, uh, my father and

uncle went through but, um, also what made it worth it.

Why was it worth it? That's... That's the big question.

Well, we're going to watch it now. Thank you, Andrew.

Thank you.

-Are you getting, erm, audio here?

-Yeah.

People want...stability.

They want security and stability and...

That's human nature, you know.

Why does somebody...create an image, you know, of anything?

Why?

You know?

I don't... I mean, I don't know.

I mean, why are you sitting there with that camera...

..making a movie?

She frequently would, um...

..put the sitter in the chair,

in this corner, or on the couch,

or in some other position in the room.

And she would set her easel, like the easel is here, up

and sit and paint...

..right from about this position.

In our apartments, whether we lived here or 21 East 108th Street,

we always were surrounded by Alice's work.

So, it's the most familiar thing.

What have you done since Alice died?

-You and Richard have just continued to rent it? For 20 years?

-Yeah.

I mean, we continued to do, erm...

some business here, to rent it, and it also...

conjures up our mother for us...

..and to a certain extent, you know, you'd like to preserve that.

I don't like Bohemian culture, frankly.

I think that a lot of innocent people are hurt by it.

I consider that I was hurt by it, and the people that engage in it

really don't care about or don't feel responsible for those

that are around them or those that depend on them.

If people are in that position,

you don't put them at risk by your behaviour.

Do you think you were put to risk? I mean...

Absolutely. I do.

But, you know, that's... So what, you know?

We always had this dream that she would be recognised

and she'd be able to get some money from...from her work,

and it really did not work out that way when we were children.

SHE LAUGHS

Do you know what it is? It's a beautiful thing aesthetically.

It's a vase with fingers.

And it's going somewhere but it hasn't arrived there.

It's always in the process of becoming.

'I wanted everything.'

Yeah. I didn't want just art. I wanted everything.

Everybody wants everything.

It's just that they get practical... and they have to settle for

a certain amount.

But maybe I wasn't all that practical!

So I ran into stone walls!

She was a very important person for me, besides the fact that I

liked her work a great deal, because she was one of the people who...

..you know, had found a way to breathe new life into the portrait.

I thought, "She can do it!"

She was the first artist, erm,

you know, that I saw a picture of

that I thought, "Shit! How does she manage that?"

She always has...still this energy, so the...

Picasso does it too. When he's good, he gives you energy.

There was almost like a direct, almost seismic...

er...record with her hand of... of what she saw.

It really felt very specific to the subject,

and very personal, and that's not easy, you know, to do.

There were pictures just everywhere.

And they were stacked in ranks out from the walls.

And it was also completely historically scattered

and this sort of wonderful sense of sedimented painting,

just all just mixed up together, all these people sort of on the walls.

-You mean you didn't ever sell your work for years?

-What?

-You never sold any of your works for years?

-Very little.

So, how did you survive?

And I didn't care, I have it, you know.

Right.

I'm four weeks older...

younger than the century.

I was born on 28th January 1900.

Think of what a benighted world it was then.

I was born at Merion Square, Pennsylvania.

But then when I was small, about three months old,

they moved to a little place called Colwyn, PA.

You see, my family didn't have much money,

so my conscience bothered me that I should be just fooling around

with art when really everybody needed money.

When I was 21, I went to

the Philadelphia School of Design for Women.

It's still just women, you know, although the funny thing is,

the dean is always a man.

Of course, that's wrong, but that's the way it is.

The reason I didn't go to the academy,

I always had a more or less serious view of life.

And you know what they were doing there?

They were doing yellow lights, blue shadows.

And I didn't see life as happy as that.

You know, I didn't see picnics on the grass and all that stuff.

Yeah, I did that when I was very young.

That was in '26.

She met Carlos Enriquez at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art,

their summer institute.

And she talks about Carlos Enriquez not doing very much

in that place,

only really kind of courting her.

I came out of that little town

the most repressed virgin that ever lived!

I met him in the summer school. Oh, he was gorgeous, yeah.

Oh, it was very romantic, the whole thing.

We got thrown out of the school, and you know what he said?

He said he married a rabbit and it turned out to be a lion.

So, I married him. I went to Cuba. And then...

then, of course, all we did was paint day and night.

They began to go to the poorest,

most dilapidated parts of Havana, and she would paint people.

And they, I think, began to get their style there.

So at the beginning they move in with his parents.

And I think Alice also speaks of the fact that they came back and

lived with his parents.

But apparently...there was tension.

Families from that sort of social status would not have looked

kindly upon a son being an artist.

And then Alice becomes pregnant and she came back to

the United States.

This is called The Futility Of Effort.

I had a child die in New York of diphtheria just

a year before they discovered that injection that prevents diphtheria.

Their situation in New York was most difficult.

They lost a daughter, which, you know, must have been hard,

before she was even one year old.

Secondly, they didn't have, really, jobs.

Alice speaks of Enriquez complaining of having to go get,

you know, simple jobs doing graphic design and things like that.

They had a rivalry, an artistic rivalry, you know,

going on, that at some point I think all of that together

became an explosive situation.

-Those pigeons are always going by and...

-They won't come in.

Where do you think they're going to... You just don't like it?

SHE COOS

I don't think they'll like this as much as health-store

whole-wheat bread. But still, it's all right, don't you think?

-They look interested.

-Oh, they are. They always come for breakfast.

There's one bronze one. Oh, isn't he beautiful, see? That one.

-See, there's three...six... nine...ten.

-Oh, that's brilliant.

Isn't that beautiful?

Oh, I love that. You can get up even closer. Go ahead.

Because then they'll be larger. Poor things, you see...

Look at their struggle. We should have made them smaller.

When I would give a slide lecture, I would have to apologise

for being psychological, because that was considered a weakness.

For instance, the New Realists, they would take a room, a table,

a chair and a person

and they were all just the same,

and they would paint them all just the same.

Now, I'll admit that compositionally they are the same

but actually they're different.

Human beings are different from furniture.

You know? Furniture doesn't have blood, it doesn't have expression.

And I think that the value of psychology is shown today

because the world we live in is almost purely psychological.

Alice's paintings are not paintings of humanity with a capital H

broken down into individual units but rather paintings of

individuals which, added up, give you an idea of what America looked

like at this time, what the range of personalities was, and so on.

She's not trying to get at an essence of humanity.

She's trying to get at a specific of that person, right?

She doesn't paint a Fuller brush man

in order to say that she painted a Fuller brush man.

She doesn't paint a Fuller brush man as the representative of

a kind of a Willy Loman personality or whatever it is.

I mean, she begins with that guy, you know?

The fact that that is what he is,

the fact that the eagerness of his face

is the eagerness of the salesman,

that all is part of it, but... it's not the reason for it.

I think certainly Alice Neel believed that there was some sort

of individual reality that she could discover and portray in her works.

No, it's not... It doesn't have to be anything specific, Dad, I was just...

-Yeah, right. I can just relax.

-You can just relax.

I can even lie down here,

like being in a psychiatrist's office or something.

Look, like, you went off and became a doctor.

-Richard went off and became a lawyer...

-Yeah.

Like, what is it about your upbringing that made you two

do what you did?

-Well, you have to remember...

-I mean, look, in many ways,

you talk about the bourgeois this and the bourgeois that.

You have completely...uh...

bought into that, on some level.

So then most of them... I mean, she really got by...

I mean, did she get by, like...

Where did the majority of the money come from?

-I mean, I just don't...

-Why are we fixating on this now?

-Oh.

-I mean, you know...

-Oh, actually, I didn't... I don't...

No, I mean, I told you where it came from.

Is this on or off?

Well, do you want me to turn it off?

You know?

Let's be honest. I mean, she had to... I mean...

Yeah, it just depends how you want to slant this thing.

No, but I don't want to slant it any way.

-I'm not looking to slant anything.

-Yeah.

I'm just saying that, like, if you want to do something,

if you want that badly to do something...

-You have to make a sacrifice.

-Yeah, and that means...

See, can you imagine what it's like...

..to not really have predictability in your life to that level?

I mean...

-No, I can't.

-No. Well...

But, you know, she had nothing. She had no...

She was on relief. Er... The kids were born on relief.

I know that...

that...

what's-his-name doesn't want to admit that, but he was, and raised,

and the money that she got from relief wasn't enough to live on.

-What is relief? I don't even know...

-Oh, my God. Welfare.

She got very little money from her art.

In fact, I think, her art was a liability, because she had to buy...

she had to buy canvas.

She had to buy stretcher pieces.

She had to buy oil paints, and that doesn't come cheap.

Did you... I mean, you divorced or what?

No. I thought that was bourgeois, you know?

-So you just...

-Even though it was a wealthy family and all that,

I wouldn't have participated in such bourgeois activity such as divorce.

-As divorce, no.

-I was against everything in those days!

They have a child who died, they had a second child,

Isabetta, and then Carlos Enriquez took the child to Cuba temporarily

for the family to see,

to actually collect money from his wealthy family

in order so that both of them could go to Paris.

It was a time of the Depression.

The family didn't want to give money for both of them to travel to Europe

and he never returned to New York and never returned the daughter.

She felt that the kid would be better off by staying with

his wealthy family...

...which is...sad,

but maybe it was her way of raising it up.

I realised that was just the end of everything.

I was left with the apartment, the furniture, a whole life,

and it was finished.

Because he was very weak and...

Did you feel abandoned?

I was abandoned. I didn't feel it. I was.

Did you feel abandoned that you had lost your child, too?

-Everything.

-Yeah.

She couldn't deal with it, with the whole complexity of it

and the emotional strain, you know,

having this little girl that she loved...

..and yet in some way had to abandon, you know?

It was just too much for her.

You know, she...she couldn't...

she couldn't deal with it all, and she...

..tried to commit suicide.

When you look at the number of mother-and-children pictures

that she did around 1930, they are all to some extent,

I think, self-portrayals.

When you've lost a child through death and you've lost another child

because it's been removed from your care because you're

manifestly not capable of looking after it, you probably do have

a feeling of yourself as being degenerate in some way,

er, incapable, erm...dirty even,

erm...

and I think those kinds of feelings come out in those paintings.

That in a way it was my own fault.

I pushed my brain back,

and then after it got back there,

I was much worse off.

I forgot all the Spanish I knew. I couldn't read.

I couldn't do anything.

When she was in the hospital,

she must have had to have done

quite a lot of work on herself, psychologically,

and I think the specialists said,

"Look in the mirror, look at yourself in the mirror

"and realise who you are," and I think that was probably a pretty

critical moment for her,

when she realised that actually by looking

at herself...and examining herself...

she could give herself a chance.

So what is my tech...

I guess, what is my relation to you?

-You're my cousin.

-Right.

Because your father and my mother were half-sister, half-brother.

So, we are the offspring of those two,

which...puts us at the same level, so we're cousins.

We're cousins.

As far as I knew she was...

she did...she was... she had died a long time ago.

-Who had died a long time ago?

-Alice.

-OK.

In other words, there was no... there was...

I didn't have a grandmother from that side of the family.

Let's put it that way.

This picture was from 1976.

Isabetta was a tiny little girl,

I guess, about two years or something like that.

She was left behind and she never...

..she never was... came to grips with that. She was...

In a sense, she was...

She didn't...care for her mother, if you know what I mean.

She was hurt, really hurt.

-Have you ever seen the painting of Isabetta?

-Yeah.

-What do you think of that?

-The one she's naked?

-Yeah.

Erm...I liked it.

I don't... I don't feel...

I didn't feel... offended or, you know...

It's a little bit strange, no question about it.

I think it's disgusting.

I mean, I'm conservative but I'm not, you know, fuddy-duddy

and I would never have my children...naked like that

standing for a photograph or a painting.

I... I just don't think it's correct.

All that genitalia, you know?

It... And it was very pronounced in that picture and it was...

I... I think it's ugly.

-Come stand here a few minutes.

-Again?!

Yes, again.

What did they say? You're not a block of ice?

Yeah, I'm not a block of ice. I'm a human.

LAUGHTER

-Alice!

-What?

-Can I show you something?

-What?

I don't like that hand.

All right, I'll take it out.

HE SINGS

Why don't you go back over there and do that?

Go to the other side of the painting, but don't hit it.

-NEWSREEL:

-5,000 banks shut their doors to depositors

now in greatest need of their savings.

Many would never...

It was tough. It was very tough.

It was tough, not only the situation itself

but the times did not, er, encourage you.

-NEWSREEL:

-This is no unsolvable problem

if we face it wisely and courageously.

It can be accomplished in part

by direct recruiting by the Government itself.

I pledge myself...

..to a New Deal for the American people.

All over the nation, Works Progress Administrators are hurrying

to transfer millions of idle from relief rolls to work payrolls.

138 Greene Street, New York, tomorrow morning, nine o'clock.

The Works Progress Administration was launched

late in 1935 as the key agency in the federal work programme to

employ able people from relief rolls.

Painters too contribute their bit to making the Works Program

a real and permanent accomplishment.

The WPA was a life-saver in terms of keeping me alive,

so I could continue to literally stay alive and paint.

To participate in the WPA and to see what was going on around you

made you more aware of reality.

I had not done street scenes before,

but on the WPA I did any number of neighbourhoods and street scenes

where, besides showing the street and the neighbourhood

and everything else, I showed the condition of the people.

A great deal of the...of the culture of our times,

a great deal of the colour of our times

was formed then in that decade.

And was made by paupers, people that were on relief.

After the Cuban marriage blew up, I lived with this man who was

a sailor, and also he was an early dope fiend.

This chap smoked opium in my apartment.

I didn't dare, I had just had a nervous breakdown.

I wouldn't have smoked any drug of any sort.

See, but opium shouldn't make you very creative.

-Oh, it made him wonderful.

-Opium usually makes you calm.

Yeah, I don't know why he took... Maybe he took...

He used to take snow, he used to take everything.

I have never seen a person so concerned about his own

sensations, you know.

He thought, living with someone, you owned them.

So he cut up about 60 of my paintings and burned up about 30.

-You're kidding. Oh, this was one you your...

-Boyfriends.

-One of your boyfriends.

-Yes.

-And he got...he got angry?

-He got angry, yes.

-Oh, that's a shame, OK. And this gentleman?

Oh, yes, in fact he got angry because

this gentleman was sending me flowers.

LAUGHTER

John lived at Gramercy Park, a very swank apartment.

And I used to work at West 17th Street all day,

paintings like longshoremen coming home from work

and the Magistrates' Court.

But I'd go for dinner so I'd have my upper-class evening.

-He had just left his wife.

-Uh-huh.

-And a couple of children...

-This was in 1935?

Yes.

John was providing very material support

at a time when Alice still

had virtually no income from her paintings.

And I think she enjoyed, and came to expect,

getting a good meal periodically.

At the end of '30s, she moved out of Greenwich Village,

and she moved up to Spanish Harlem.

And I think, there, she was, to a certain extent,

committing artistic suicide.

She was saying goodbye to the scene

and isolating herself.

She said she moved there because she was after the truth,

she wanted to paint what she would call "real people",

the people on the streets,

not the sort of literati and the glitterati and the artists

but, you know, the Puerto Ricans or the immigrants or whatever,

the people who were having a hard life.

Now, this was done before I was born.

This was done in the '30s, like '36 or '37.

And who is it?

It's Jose, my father.

In 1936, she met my father, Jose.

It's funny, you know,

she WAS down in the Village, she WAS part of the scene,

and she sort of opted to get out of that scene

and to set up another relationship and to have children.

-Toward Jose I made my one aggressive action.

-Uh-huh.

I went down there one night...

..to that night club and I knew Jose

was going to want to come home with me.

And that was the most aggressive thing I ever did.

-You went down by yourself?

-I went down by myself, yes.

-And Jose did come home with you?

-He did come home with me, yes.

-You were 35...

-I'm 35 and he was 25, yeah.

-So I think that....

-But I wasn't thinking about years.

No, I know, but I think that that...

You know, I think it shows a kind of pizzazz

-when you take up with a man who's younger than you.

-Do you?

Oh, yes, it's very dashing.

Hartley and I have different fathers.

Jose left when I was about three or four months old.

She met Sam, and they got together and,

you know, Hartley was born in September.

This is a man I met, very brilliant but crazy.

This is him after I knew him better.

I've always felt that the most important element

in motion pictures,

the most important and the most effective

and the most influencing power of film is in documentary.

There's always been a sense of him as some sort of mystery man,

who hovered at the side, at the edge of things,

and no-one, you know, could quite find out

who he was or what his real role in Alice's life was.

They said a lot of nasty things to each other,

and Alice gave as good as she got

and, in fact, much of their encounters were, you know,

if you felt like there was a winner to be declared, she won.

How do you feel about your grandfather?

I mean, when you come across references like that,

they're usually unflattering and they picture him as being

unrestrained and very...even violent.

Although he didn't...

at least in his expressions he was.

I don't know. I think that he...

I mean, as...

I suppose I respect him as an intellectual, I guess. But...

He was. A powerful one.

Believe me.

He discriminated against Richard in many ways.

But Richard and I stuck together very much, but...

at times it was...

The situation was just awful, is all I can say.

One of the things that you said in your...

the things that you gave me is about this abuse.

-And so, I'm going to put it like this. Sam, he abused Richard.

-Yes.

OK. And then what else do you want to say?

Just say Sam's attitude toward Hartley was entirely different

and this created a very difficult situation.

-That's all.

-OK. Good.

-And that's it.

-OK, that's enough.

It's very hard for me to comment on

what impact having children had on Alice Neel.

Now, when I say children, I mean Hartley and Richard,

because, of course, Isabetta was not in her care.

Obviously, being a single parent

meant that she was going to have to devote more time to her children

than she might have had to if she hadn't been a single parent.

Our room was transition between two rooms,

so people would come in at a certain place, have to pass through our room

to get to the main living room and the studio.

So even if they came at ten o'clock at night, we would be in bed,

they would go through the room, and we were used to this.

There were people who read to us.

There were people who told us stories.

As a child, you appreciate it as your world.

Meanwhile, she had her world in the other room, right next door.

Those two kids grew up in an environment

which was rich intellectually.

But also they met so many blasted lives,

so many complicated lives that they were terrified of living that way.

How did you find a way to support yourself since...?

Well, everybody has that problem. I mean, every artist has that problem.

First, you have to be able to live, and then you have to paint,

but you do that any way you can. You give classes and somehow...

And then also, I had acquired the idea that for art's sake,

you had to give up everything.

If I had some money, I wouldn't buy a dress or anything,

I'd buy canvas and paint materials.

A lot of people want distinction without risk.

They want to be known for themselves without knowing themselves.

They want to stand out in crowds

but not far enough to actually be isolated.

She was the kind of person who, I think,

must have been isolated from very early on in her experience of life

and got used to it, and learned how to stylize it,

and learned how to play it, and learned how to use it as a medium.

Distinction was a medium for her, I think,

as much as a thing to achieve.

If she had been satisfied with

the paragon of what women were supposed to be in her era,

she would have accomplished nothing.

OK? Nothing.

She might have been the greatest mother and housewife and all that.

This was the other side of the coin in terms of the way Alice saw it.

She didn't want any of it. She didn't want that stuff.

She wasn't interested in it.

She didn't even know what it was, in some way.

It's a privilege to paint and it takes up a lot of time

and it means there's a lot of things you don't do.

But still, with me, painting was more than a profession -

it was also an obsession. I had to paint, you know.

If you were out of the mix, if you were somehow

not part of a coterie of artists

who were all talking about each other,

who talked to the gallerists,

who like to know who's doing what and what's interesting,

if you're out of all that,

then there's no word on the street about what you're doing.

And that can be very problematic.

During the past 50 years,

all the arts have had to accept the triumph of the machine.

Traditional forms of painting and sculpture

have no function in our streamlined existence.

If they are to find a place

in the civilisation of the next half-century,

the visual arts must effect a compromise with the machine.

This can be done only within the terms of what we call abstract art.

There are times in postwar art history

when one thing seems so much to define the moment

that it drowns out every other kind of activity.

One of the things about the period

when abstract expressionism dominated

was that it dominated so thoroughly.

Well, I mean, those artists who felt that

they should do what painting can do rather than what photography can do

went towards an abstract mode, you know.

And certainly at mid-century with someone like Clement Greenberg,

he wanted painting to do what painting could do

and not try to be like photography

or not try to be like a short story.

It should be pure.

Even Picasso said he doesn't believe in pure abstraction.

There is no such thing. Everything comes from reality.

The human brain is incapable

of inventing something it never has seen -

that is, these shapes.

They can be combined in such a way that you don't know

what the hell they are, but somewhere they have been seen.

The brain itself, without having seen the thing, cannot invent it.

I lived in Spanish Harlem and I just worked as I always had worked.

I taught some private classes,

and my main thing always was to paint pictures, like it always was.

Here she was, engaged with a certain kind of realism,

which would have seemed to the people who were the power brokers,

the people running the magazines,

the people running certain galleries...

To them, Alice Neel would have seemed

just not it, just not...engaged.

A lot of the time that Alice Neel was painting,

she was painting figuratively, and so was De Kooning, for example.

She actually was not outside of the mainstream of American painting

for a lot of the time in which she was working.

It's just at that moment in the '50s

where there's a dominance of abstraction,

a kind of hegemony of abstraction,

that then her work

appears to be completely outside the mainstream.

And I think people who were figurative painters in that time

felt tremendously excluded.

It was like you're broadcasting and nobody is picking up the signal.

It was really life or death for a lot of people.

I mean, they really saw it...

in moral terms,

you were closer to God if you worked certain ways.

And, conversely, you were closer to the devil if you worked other ways.

I hate to use the word portrait

because, for so many years, the portrait was so despised.

In fact, it still is.

Abstract expressionism is still more acceptable

than anything that resembles anyone.

However she was neglected, however she was scorned

and however she was even mocked,

there was one person in her life who did not, who valued her work

with total sincerity, and that was Sam Brody.

He totally believed that she was a great artist when nobody else did,

and told her so, and convinced her that she was.

And she was grateful to him for that

and she forgave him everything, I think, for that reason.

He used to kick me under the table.

All the time, he'd kick me under the table.

And, one time, I screwed up enough courage to say,

"Stop kicking me under the table."

Well, she had to go out that evening, and he beat me up.

He really did. I mean, that probably was one of the worst incidents.

It was intermittent, but it was physical violence, and it would...

could be directed at Alice and it certainly was directed at me.

Out of the chaos of the emotional situation,

Alice, somehow, you know,

teased out some higher reality for herself.

And I don't know how to say it exactly.

She got energy from the emotional stress

and intellectual, um, jousting

that went on in these interactions.

She just wanted to know

not what people presented themselves as being

but what was actually their inner lives.

And that was one of the ways she did it.

She wanted to know what you were like when you were very angry,

when you were mad, when you were whatever - off-guard.

And she would do it. She was capable of it.

I never liked that about her.

The fact is she tolerated this person

that she knew was abusing me for years and years.

I mean, I didn't hold that against her, but the facts are the facts.

I mean, the world isn't just you,

the world is you and your relationship with the other people,

and you have to deal with your situation.

And other people have to deal with theirs.

You didn't know anything of him

because I never chose to talk about him.

I saw no reason to bring him into my life.

You know, one has to declare one's loyalty.

And...

..my loyalty was definitely with Alice,

who was the one who...

..who we could depend on, who really loved us in an unqualified way.

And...

so I really rejected...

..rejected, er...

totally rejected, I would say, Sam.

You're happy. You look happy.

Oh, I look happy, but that's just a fake.

I'm serving a sentence.

Yeah.

Instead of jumping out the window, I'm putting in the time.

Yeah. But your face looks like you...

Always.

Some woman solved the whole problem

when she said I was Dr Jekyll and Mrs Hyde.

Because I have always done morbid pictures, a lot of them.

But I, myself, am always smiling, but that's just a face.

All other faces are part of it, too, I guess.

I don't know. I don't care.

In the '50s, all the men took their wives out to the suburbs

and the women conformed more.

There is a tendency in the human race to make everybody alike.

The whole thing is to homogenize the world.

I saw the world as difficult.

I saw the pressures as terrific

because the pressure to be normal.

Besides everything else that you have to do,

they invented these frightful shirts that had to be laundered,

and buttoned, and you're even supposed to put on a tie.

But all those things were very difficult for me,

to keep up with your clothing,

to keep up with all the things in regular life, make you absurd.

Staring at an individual that is looking at them fully frontal,

eyes wide open and gauging them visually

is very intimate and very demanding.

We do not ordinarily

engage at length

individuals face-to-face

who look at us as we look at them.

We tend to look away.

I think some people may be embarrassed

to look at pictures like that but the fact is

that she was not embarrassed to look or paint in that manner.

So, the space between her understanding

and the viewer's understanding

is the space that the painting essentially

invites the viewer to cross.

I'd go so out of myself and into them

that, after they leave, I sometimes feel horrible.

I feel like an untended house.

I feel so...

I have been living in them for two hours,

so to go back to myself is sometimes difficult.

She had to deal with disappointment,

sometimes on a daily basis,

in terms of where her art was,

where she was going, what it meant.

I can remember her denigrating herself in front of people,

because she wasn't so secure in her own mind about things.

At the very end of the '50s, I think that that was the really low period.

She wanted to be noticed.

A famous artist is not anything

unless people are looking at their work.

She lived her whole life producing paintings

that got only the scantest kind of notice.

Whatever invitation she got

to go and make a showing, she went.

Universities would ask her to come

and she would always do it for a very small honorarium,

or just her fare.

She would take her slides and show them

and lecture along with it, and she became very popular.

Listen. My son won't see this film, will he?

No, he probably won't. I mean, you know...don't...

-They're so...

-We make...

-They're so anxious to be respectable.

Well, they have a very respectable mother. They should be happy.

-Well, I am. Wouldn't you say I'm respectable?

-I mean, yes.

They got kicked out of college. They were gone.

They were done for.

And I think they were aware of that.

During the Columbia University riots - remember in the '60s?

-Uh-huh.

-Both stayed out of them. They were opposed to all that.

They kept their skirts clean.

And I said, "Well, you will make it, boys.

"You'll certainly make it."

To her, our ability to swim in the deep waters

of American society and professional life, and so forth,

was something that she wanted us to be able to do.

And she arranged one way or another

for these tremendous educational opportunities we had.

Alice didn't...

She was proud of us because we achieved what we wanted to achieve.

"What do you want to do?" "Well, I want to do this."

"I want to do that." "OK, I'll help you do it, whatever it takes."

If you're a professional, you live the life of a professional.

You're expected to represent something.

In many ways, it is a controlled world.

It's certainly a safe haven compared to the life of an artist.

Why do you think it is...

-All right. Fine.

-No, go ahead.

-What do you want?

-No, go ahead, roll it, roll it.

-Look, I mean...

-Yeah, go ahead. Don't be so fucking sensitive.

Hey, fuck you.

Fuck you, too.

And the horse you rode in on.

That's you.

BOTH LAUGH

All right.

So, you got to just relax about it to a certain extent.

Look. Look. Look at that. Look at that.

That's a flying turkey.

It's going after another bird.

Yeah, yeah. It went after a small bird.

Did you see that?

Look at it. Holy shit, it's running now.

Is that a raptor-looking thing? Look.

Oh, its babies! Here come its babies, Andrew! That's why. Look.

There are its little babies, look. Oh, my...

They're tiny. Look at the size of them. Here, binoculars all around.

Holy shit! Did you see?

It was defending its young.

I've never seen that before in my life.

Where...? Oh, look at the little things, Andrew.

Do you know how many there are? Hold it. Stop, don't move.

Simone de Beauvoir, in her novel Second Sex, she says,

"I never felt I inherited the world, because it was male-dominated."

Well, then what DID she inherit? You inherit the world.

Somehow, you find a place for yourself.

We all converged in Washington to go to this conference

and it was a panel, and Alice Neel was one of the people on the panel.

She sort of grabbed the mic and grabbed the podium

and pulled out about 40 carousels of slides and started showing them.

And she wouldn't stop. And we kept saying, "OK, Alice.

"It's time for you to get off.

"We got a programme to finish up here." No, she wouldn't stop.

She kept going and kept going and kept going.

People were just amazed. She'd never had that kind of...

She was hungry for attention, she was getting it,

and people were giving her attention, so she kept going.

And, obviously, the ladies' room had a lot of business

since mostly women were there. And she got tired of waiting,

and so, she simply pulled up her skirt and peed.

Now, that was a gesture not without its irony.

She wasn't just doing this to relieve herself.

Jackson Pollock was famous for having peed in a fireplace.

So Alice was making sort of a performance statement about herself.

Her outrageous gestures gave women permission to claim space,

to claim psychic space, physical space, world space

to do things that were over the top in some way.

And it's not that she directed anybody to do it,

but she just gave an example of how you could operate.

At any rate, can we get back...

I would like to know how you... how would the art...

You must take what I give you. Don't be too demanding.

-I see.

-Just sit there.

-All right.

What was I talking about?

It was so clear to us, the people who went in and out,

the art public, really believed the art world was a meritocracy.

They believed whatever was shown at the museum

got there because it deserved to be there.

And if you weren't there, it meant that your work was not of any value.

You know what, when I got alone in a room, I didn't care what I was.

You see, like Judy Chicago,

I never just paint my pussy - I think that's absurd.

I mean, to do your pussy over and over - how monotonous.

I never... And I don't think there was any difference... Finish that.

..There's any difference between

male art and female art.

What was she like when you met her?

What were your impressions of her...?

Well, she seemed like an angry housewife.

I mean, she would say very belligerent things

and then people would yell at her, would say very nasty things to her.

We got the vote in 1920.

The year before, women's suffrage demonstrated in Washington.

And you know that the men spat in their faces

and burnt their bare arms with cigars.

I don't think she saw herself in any way

as a person who was part of a group.

It wasn't just Alice. Joan Mitchell was exactly the same.

Georgia O'Keeffe was famously resistant

to being part of the feminist movement that arose in the 1970s.

They came way before the feminist movement.

They didn't really want to be seen as feminist,

but they were held up as feminist models for the rest of us.

I think the women's movement did a hell of a lot for her.

I think this was true of a lot of women artists,

that until the women's movement,

they'd always had a little circle of admirers.

But it took a movement.

She has this ability to seize on a certain characteristic.

And that characteristic both characterises the sitter

but it also epitomises something about the age in which we live.

And that's what she would try to seize on.

I like it first to be art.

So actually dividing up the canvas

is one of the most exciting things for me.

And then I like it not only to look like the person

but to have their inner character as well.

And then I like it to express the zeitgeist.

You see, I don't like something in the '60s

to look like something in the '70s, and they don't.

It's amazing.

Well, every decade changes like that.

But, lucky for me, as old as I am, that I can still change

because I've known people to get stuck back in their 30s or 40s

and never get out of it,

and just keep on doing the same thing over again.

There's been an anti-humanist attitude that the human creature

is unimportant.

I read an introduction to some abstract chap's catalogue

and he said, "With all our machines, with planes and everything else,

"we've lost complete interest in man himself

"and he has become, for us, unimportant."

I, on the other hand,

feel that no matter what invention they have, man is the catalyst.

If there is a nuclear attack, man pushes the button.

It's true science does the rest, but a man invented that.

Man does everything. He's here in the world.

I don't think he's made the best of it, but he's been given it.

I like to paint people, you know, who are in the rat race,

suffering all the tension and damage that's involved in that.

Under pressure, really,

of city life and of the awful struggle that goes on in the city.

I didn't know what the '70s was about until I painted him,

and then I realised that it was the time when the corporations

enslaved all these bright, young men.

He just looks used up, you know?

He'd go to work early in the morning, and by the time

he got home at night, he wouldn't have any energy left for anything.

She's described this... I mean,

she's has described it

in publications, saying that

it was like I was caught in a block of ice.

I think those were her words.

Whether I'm painting or not,

I have this overweening interest in humanity.

Even if I'm not working, I'm still analysing people.

It's built in, sort of, you know?

She used to say that her nerves were at the ends of her fingers...

as she felt... they were raw and exposed.

She could look into your life and talk to you,

and get pretty close to what your devils are.

And sometimes she'd just walk around and start crying,

like, she's looking at some fish,

and she starts crying,

looking at the fish in...in a big...

It was like a big aquarium, and it's, like, she felt like,

you know, how everything is useless

and the fish are in, like, a glass tank.

They make me so sad.

They do?

No. You know what they give me?

Come into the sun a little bit.

They give me an intimation of life, you know?

They do make you sad, don't they?

And they are kind of like...

Oh, they make me feel awful. Do you know what?

They also make us all seem so frivolous.

-Come on, Alice.

-I don't know...

You know, I'm not quite all there...

Come on, we'll go.

It may be her truth to start with,

but after being subjected to some time,

it could come close to being THE truth.

It can become objectively the truth.

Time doesn't...doesn't mark it.

You react with immediate...

immediately, as though it were alive, as though it were now.

-TV:

-'We calculate margin rate using current fluctuating market rates

'and we say to ourselves, "There's a margin rate in there..."'

Is it ever strange to work and spend so much time in the house

that your mother lived in?

I like this place because, you know, it brings up memories.

I've been working here for years,

and, obviously, I watch the markets,

and whatever I do in terms of investing.

I was very much in favour of Richard Nixon.

At one point, Alice said to me,

"I don't want you ever to mention that man's name again.

"You can mention it to anybody else but don't mention it to me."

And I don't think I did.

I think I stopped talking about Richard Nixon to Alice.

I think it's natural, though, that if you're...

If you go the opposite way from the way you were when you were young,

you know, you maybe go too far on the end of the pendulum.

But there are very few people that are as right-wing as I am.

And they were very few people that were as left-wing as I was

when I was a kid.

When I'm here alone, I really get peculiar.

I think it's wrong, in a way...

What do you mean?

Well, you know what they say,

"Man was not made to live alone."

-Uh-huh.

-"It's better to marry than burn."

SHE LAUGHS

Hello, sweetie-kins.

-Let's see...

-They're getting on.

Oh, yes, I think you're just great.

She looks tired here.

This was in 1979...

..a passport shot.

One time, when Alice came to speak

about her paintings

in Fort Lauderdale...

..my mom went to the seminar, or to the lecture.

And she sat right up front.

And Alice spoke, and she asked questions,

and she was interacting with the audience.

My mother said nothing, she just sat up front.

And she went to the reception afterwards,

and Alice never recognised her.

And my mother looked exactly like Alice.

You know, she had... She'd had some problems in her life

and I don't doubt that some of them were related to Alice.

Some sort of mother-daughter acceptance thing.

And she had attempted suicide, I think, twice,

before she finally succeeded, so...

She walked out of the house,

went out to the sea wall...

sat there and took the pills there,

all by herself so as nobody could find her.

And that was it.

She took sleeping pills.

She meant to do what she did. She meant to do what she did.

She took her jewellery off, her big, honking jewellery.

She left that for me.

And she walked to the end of the point,

I can show you where it is in Miami,

and she just lay down on the sea wall.

That was it.

I was the last person that spoke to her.

I mean, life is life. You know, you...

I mean, that's the way it was.

You know, I loved my mother and, you know, she had her reasons.

Who am I to argue with that? Probably...

She probably did the wrong thing.

She probably should have somehow re-established her relationship

with her mother, but that's not for me to judge.

I had a one-person show at the Whitney.

I had the whole second floor.

I had 60 paintings, you know,

but the man that put it on, Jack Baur,

he wanted to give me credit for having preserved figures

for five decades.

I said, "You know, Mr Baur...

"..it'd be great if Alice Neel could have a show here."

I said, "I think she certainly deserves it."

And he said, "Maybe we'll be able to do that in a few years."

And I said, "Well, we...you know...

"I don't know if we have a few more years.

"I think we should go ahead and try to do it as soon as possible

"because Alice isn't getting any younger."

Of course, it was also the moment of a changing tide

in terms of the women's movement,

and Alice having a show at the Whitney,

Alice became an iconic figure.

And it was an extremely important moment in that respect

cos here she was,

here was a woman artist

having an exhibition in the premier museum for American art.

-They're going to be fine...

-You guys don't remember me, do you?

..in a few days.

-Olivia's here. Did you see the painting of Olivia?

-Yeah.

-I just did them.

-These are brand-new.

-I just did them.

People like Alice led the sort of path of that direction.

Here was an artist that was producing extraordinary work

that wasn't recognised properly,

and so we could play a role by presenting her to the public.

And we thought the work was of extraordinary quality.

I would say the exhibition was the milestone in her career.

'I'll tell you what that show did for me.

'I always felt, in a sense,

'that I didn't have the right to paint

'because I had two sons and I had so many things

'that I should be doing, and, here I was, painting.

'But that show convinced me that I had a perfect right to paint.

'I shouldn't have ever felt that, but I did feel it.

'And, after that show, I never felt that any more.'

You are about to meet a most charming lady...

APPLAUSE

Alice Neel is with us tonight.

She is considered one of America's foremost portrait painters.

She has the honour of being a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters.

This is a story of her life and her work.

Would you welcome, please, Alice Neel. Alice!

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

PIANO MUSIC PLAYS

How are you feeling?

Fine, thank you.

We really met for the first time

just for a couple of minutes back in the make-up room.

Yeah, and he looks so human. I was surprised.

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

You have a good sense of humour. You started on me right away.

You said, "You actually appear in the flesh?"

-Yes. Yes.

-Occasionally, I do.

-And then I said...

-<

-Oh, God! Oh, dear.

Then I said, "You remind me of a decadent Prince of Wales,

"rather amused."

Rather amused, I like...

-And then he offered to marry me.

-That's right.

We sort of met in the middle of Prince Street,

and the mutual friend said, "Alice, you know Chuck Close?"

She said, "Chuck Close? I hate your work!"

So, I said, "Oh, well,

"that's interesting, cos I'm a big fan of your work."

And she said, "In that case, I'll have to take another look."

This idea of the Bohemian as the person who suffers

and suffers and suffers and may be silently rewarded

is one highly-stylised,

partially true but not entirely true narrative.

You know?

In her case, it was largely true, you know?

And then she shifted gears

and she entered an art world which had been going on all along,

of which she'd not been a part, and she hit the big time, right?

And where is the rest of the party?

They are not here yet. I told them to hurry.

And Andrew...

-Andrew grown up, no?

-He gave you that tie.

Yeah.

INDISTINCT

I never expected anything like that.

-How are you? Nice to see you.

-How are you?

Give me a kiss! Oh, I'm glad to see you.

-I'm glad to see you. Can I take your picture?

-Sure.

'When I sit in front of a canvas,

'I don't think about all the notice that I've gotten.

'I don't think that they think I'm great.

'I don't think anything of that.

'All I think of, "Will I be able to do this?"

'And that's a very good attitude to have for painting.

'It's not a good attitude for the rat race,

'but it's good for painting.

'And I would rather paint than anything.'

The thing that's difficult I think for you is,

you were brought up to think that in some way

the struggle had to be part of the honour.

She led her life the way she wanted to.

She didn't lead her life so that

she'd be a struggling artist.

The interesting thing about this story is that she became famous,

so it was worth it.

Just the slightest twist,

and she could have never been much heard of, and then what?

It wouldn't have been worth it?

She was...

She was a good mother.

She was a very good friend to me,

and the fact that she might not have been able to

give me the protection that I might have gotten somewhere else,

that's a fact, but suppose I got the protection

but I didn't get something else?

It's just one of those things, I mean, that we have to deal with.

Every single one of us has to deal with what they're dealt

and the people we are exposed to.

And she was...

It was a gift to have her as a mother, certainly.

No question about it.

When you're an artist, you're searching for freedom.

You'll never find it because there ain't any freedom.

No?

But at least you searched for it.

In fact, art could be called "the search."

Some of my very good friends from the Harvard radiology program

were the first ones to see the various tests

that came through and images that came through.

So, I walked into one of our lecture rooms

and she was one of the cases on the board.

She's dying.

I had spoken to her on the phone before,

when she got the word that she had cancer.

And she said, "Phillip, pray for me."

And...

So, what can I do? Pray for her.

You know, I don't know what purpose it serves,

my going into detail about this...

..but it just looked like there was spread of disease, that's all.

And, that day, when you left,

did you know that that was the death knell for her?

I mean, did you...

-When you saw that, did you think to yourself, "This is..."?

-Yes.

Just a matter of time,

and not that long a time.

But here I feel the dice is loaded against me.

I'm just too old. Still, if I...

I've painted some good pictures lately.

I'll do maybe a masterpiece of you.

But you can't think like that, either.

Art is not as stupid as human conversation.

You can really...

Art is better.

You never know what the hell makes good art, you know.

Just the result.

-What?

-Just at the end, you see it when it's done.

Yeah, when it happens, you're grateful, and there it is.

She had to be an open nerve to make these paintings.

Right.

It's just like a strength that...

I don't know. It's uncommon.

Yeah, it comes from within, somewhere.

HE CLEARS HIS THROAT

But I think, for me, that is like Alice is...

Like, she's inspiring because...

..she's just...

You know, she teaches you, never give up.

Never give up your inspiration, you know, your...

..your bliss, you know? Whatever...

What?

Nothing.

I can't verbalise everything.

-That's OK. You don't have to.

-I've tried, you know?

No, it's all right, man.

MUSIC PLAYS OVER SPEECH

APPLAUSE

It is my privilege and honour as secretary of the Institute

to welcome these new members and to introduce them to you.

May I ask you to wait to applaud the new member

until I have finished reading the citation.

Alice Neel, painter, a unique figure...

APPLAUSE

Thank you.

I understand you're breaking ranks.

A unique figure in contemporary American art,

Alice Neel is, in this age of photography, a portrait painter.

She probes courageously, almost violently, into the human psyche.

Hers is a difficult art to bear without ingratiation,

without pretty nuances of colour and drawing

but with great validity.

Like most serious accomplishment in the arts,

it supplies the viewer with energy for its own delight.

APPLAUSE

The world is in a troublesome period, you know?

But, actually, I saw a film recently on television with Kenneth Clark,

and he went back to the 1500s and their theory was mine.

They said, "Man is the measure of all things."

That's what I've always thought, and, in fact, one man said,

"You can do anything you will to do."

He didn't just mean art, he meant anything in the world.

And I loved that, too,

because that means that if you're sufficiently tenacious

and interested,

you can accomplish what you want to accomplish in this world.