![]() ![]() ![]() Her palette, the globs of pigment now dried into nearly colorless husks, sits nearby on an aging page torn from The New York Times. ![]() In the absence of a person, material details come into sharp relief: The artist’s blue paint-flecked smock hangs from her easel in the front room. It can be disorienting, then, to recognize some of those settings in the artist’s final New York City residence - a 1,000-square-foot Upper West Side apartment, into which she moved in 1962 and which has remained largely unchanged since her death in 1984 at the age of 84. The settings in her artworks are often mere suggestions: the shade of a blue wall, the outline of a sofa - the room receding while the figure remains. Her work, which attests to the cleareyed compassion Neel felt toward humans of all walks of life, reveals the deep interiority of her subjects through vivid, almost caricature-like renderings - wide-set eyes, dimpled chins, skin mottled in shades of green or blemished with blue-purple veins and exaggerated, spidery fingers. ROOMS AREN’T SO important in an Alice Neel painting her focus was on people. ![]()
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