Alice Neel: People Come First at The Met

Virtual opening
Alice Neel: #people Come First
The #metropolitanmuseum of Art
Thursday 25 March, 7pm ET

The #metropolitanmuseum of Art hosts a virtual opening today of #aliceneel: #people Come First, which presents #aliceneel (1900–1984) as one of the twentieth century’s most radical artists, a champion of social justice whose longstanding commitment to humanist principles inspired her life as well as her art.

Exhibition co-curators Kelly Baum (Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Curator of Contemporary Art) and Randall Griffey (Curator), both in the Department of Modern and #contemporaryart at The Met, will lead a virtual tour through the career-spanning exhibition, which features over one hundred works, including still-lifes, urban landscapes, and what the artist called ‘pictures of #people.’ The artist depicted a vast range of individuals, from her neighbours in Spanish Harlem to activists, artists, and performers. Also highlighted are Neel’s erotic watercolours and pastels, her images of mothers, and her paintings of nude figures, all of whose candour and irreverence are without precedent in the history of Western art.

Neel was a longtime resident of New York, and the city served as her most faithful subject. Indeed, the sum total of her work testifies to the drama of its streets, the quotidian beauty of its buildings, and the diversity, resilience, and passion of its residents. ‘For me, #people come first,’ Neel declared in 1950. ‘I have tried to assert the dignity and eternal importance of the human being.’