- [Alice Neel] One of the reasons I painted
was to catch life as it goes by,
right hot off the griddle.
Because besides painting specific people,
I'm painting all the happenings.
After all, I represent the 20th century.
I was born in 1900,
and I've tried to capture the zeitgeist.
When painting or writing are good,
it's taken right out of life itself, to my mind,
and put into the work.
Now, that doesn't mean
that the work has to tell about real life.
I mean, it can be abstract or anything.
But the vitality is taken out of real living
and put into the creative project, whatever it is.
(upbeat piano music)
Where that head should be, high, I guess...
[Alice Neel] The first time I sat in front of a canvas,
I knew exactly what I wanted to do.
Now turn your head a little away.
A little more away.
In life itself, I never knew what I wanted to do,
because in a way, it was all wrong for me.
Even when I was little, my mother would say,
"Do you want cocoa or coffee or tea?"
And I wouldn't know, I wouldn't know what I wanted.
I didn't care, that was it.
I lived in a small town. I hated it.
Do you know what benighted little towns are like?
Oh, I used to sit on the front porch
and try to stop my heart from beating
and my blood from circulating,
I was so bored.
There was everything in that town,
but an artist and a writer.
Because a young man even exposed himself at a window there,
but there was no writer to write about it.
And the pear blossoms looked beautiful in the spring,
but there was no artist to paint them, you know?
Only me, and I wasn't grown up yet.
My mother was a salvation for me.
She knew all about the theater, music, literature.
She didn't know about art, but she was not against art.
She died in '54, she was 86 then.
The reason I did this of my father
was not that I was morbid.
I knew I'd just never see him again
and I had no portrait of him.
And also, he doesn't even look 82.
He looks very peaceful in sleep.
Harold Rosenberg thinks
that this is one of my greatest paintings.
I have one of his brother dying of cancer, you know?
And he said to me about that one,
"You can't look death in the face."
But I did look death in the face.
From 21 to 25, I went to a school called
the Philadelphia School of Design for Women,
which was a girl's school.
(upbeat piano music)
I deliberately went to a girls' school,
because I didn't want to be distracted by boys.
I was a very good-looking girl,
so my whole life was disrupted by men.
I never knew what to do about them.
Though I did really know! (laughs)
I went in the summer to Chester Springs,
that's the academy's summer school,
and I met this handsome Cuban.
Carlos Enriquez de Gómez,
who I married June the 1st, 1925,
and went to Havana, Cuba.
I had just gotten out of
the Philadelphia School of Design for Women.
This was painted in 1926.
He was very much a Spanish grandee.
His father was the big doctor in Havana.
He was an artist, too,
so we went out in the streets of Havana,
and we paid these two to pose for us.
We were living outside of Havana, in the suburb, La Víbora,
and this woman came around with a little girl
and posed for us.
I had a child in Havana,
and then we came to New York,
and she died there of diptheria.
Carlos went to Havana,
and the family were going to give us money
to go and live in Paris.
But meanwhile, the Depression had hit.
So when he got there,
they didn't want to give it to him.
His friends told him he was a genius
that was ruining his life,
being a petty bourgeoisie with families and all that.
They bought him a ticket for Paris,
these artist friends of his.
So he wrote to me from Paris.
Now I, knowing the type Carlos was,
since he was just a rich boy,
he didn't know how to make a nickel, you know??
I knew that he was just in Paris, that's all.
So I had an apartment on Sedgwick Avenue,
and I worked all summer.
I painted like mad.
I never produced so many paintings.
But instead of being able to do anything about all my art,
I had a nervous breakdown instead.
(slow piano music)
I moved from the Village to West 17th Street.
This is the 9th Avenue El.
And there's a typical unemployed, standing on the corner.
I met this poor chap, I think, late in '31.
He was carrying some lumber in the Village.
He had nothing, of course.
It's not a specific person or anything, it's just...
Well, it's a symbol of the Depression,
'cause that's all people could afford then,
cup of coffee.
That snow scene is '33.
The reason I made such a cheerful picture,
I had a letter from the Whitney Museum,
and I went over there
and they said, "How would you like to paint for $30 a week?"
And I said, "Oh, I'd love it."
I had to hand in a picture every six weeks.
That's Kenneth Fearing, who was a poet those days,
and he lived near the Sixth Avenue El.
Those people across the bottom
are the characters out of his poetry.
The night before his wife went to a hospital
and had a little boy, he said to me,
"Why don't you take that Fauntleroy out of my heart?"
But the reason I put it there was
that even though he wrote ironic poetry,
I thought his heart bled for the griefs of the world.
And then the other one is Audrey McMahon,
that was the head of the Working Art Project.
I suppose she did her best,
but like all heads of things,
nobody liked her very much.
I did that from memory, and John Flanagan,
who was the head of my branch of the easel project,
he told me I should show it and call it
"The Portrait of a Lady,"
after that novel of Henry James.
But the fact is, I've never shown it.
I don't feel either that there is definite female painting.
I don't think you could tell a man's painting
from a woman's painting.
I don't think there's an iconography
that goes especially with women.
In fact, some man on the WPA,
he was a Puerto Rican,
I think he said, "Oh, Alice Neel,
the woman that paints like a man."
But I told him, "Look, I don't paint like a a man."
"I paint like a woman,"
"but I just don't paint china or something."
Not that that's despicable either.
I don't think that's despicable.
That was just being anti-woman,
to think that painting china was despicable, you know?
I think what I was trying to do too,
was get away from the soda-cracker quality of America.
I lived in Harlem for 25 years, Spanish Harlem.
Carlos, the TB case.
I painted this in 1940.
Statistically, Spanish Harlem had the highest TB rate
of any place in the city.
This was a young man about 23.
He's still living, he recovered.
And over there are his family.
His wife, a very courageous woman
and three of his children.
I think he had five altogether.
The two boys in the street were done in '55.
I wanted to show the environment,
plus the people that were living there.
The two little girls at the top, that's 1959.
When I painted James Farmer, he loved this painting.
I painted his two daughters.
He owns that now, you know?
Oh, Georgie, Georgie Arce.
I had a Boxer dog in those days.
In '55, I did this.
I met him out in the street, and he said,
"Can I come and play with your Boxer?"
So I did a whole series of Georgie.
Very smart, but he was so proud
he wouldn't even let them know
that he couldn't read and write.
And they had so many pupils in the class,
they couldn't concentrate on one little boy, you know?
He had more than usual intelligence,
but he also saw
that the thing in this country was to have money.
He got mixed up, I suppose, with some gangsters.
He's in jail now, he's in Attica.
He still writes to me.
You have yourself, and that's a first premise.
And then you have the world.
And if the world changes,
of course, your vision changes in a sense with the time.
It isn't just that I'm older.
It's that people also are different.
Maybe I have changed also.
I don't know.
(slow piano music)
These men really fought for
what they thought would be a better world.
But now, especially this generation,
we don't know maybe what a better world is.
I don't know.
But anyway, that's what they fought for.
On the floor over there is Bill MacKaye,
who organized the Ford plant.
He was a wonderful person.
He was a Scotsman,
very intellectual, not like a labor leader here,
not rough or tough or anything.
He doesn't look it, do you think?
The Ford plant was one of the last places to be organized.
Then this is Pat Kush, who organized steel.
He worked in a rolling mill for about 40 years,
and he told me that he felt
that the Frick Art Collection was partly his,
because I think Frick made his money with steel.
And of course, James Farmer is later.
When I painted him, he was marching in Mississippi.
That's about '64.
(piano music)
Art Shields. he got the evidence
in the Mooney and Billings case
that finally got them acquitted.
This is David Gordon, who died in '73.
He fought in the Lincoln Battalion in Spain.
And then he also fought in World War Two
and had many decorations.
A very nice person.
He was the head of the cultural section of the Daily World.
You see, art for me was more than a profession.
It was also an obsession.
And also, long before
they talked about being autobiographical,
I was, and yet not completely,
because there's aesthetics in my work also.
It's not just autobiographical, although I can't see why
if Velázquez was around the royal family and painted them,
I can't see why
I can't be around my own family and paint them.
These are my sons.
Hartley on the left, and Richard on the right.
Richard's father was a Spanish nightclub entertainer,
and Hartley's father was a Russian filmmaker.
That was painted in 1950.
That's Richard, Richard in '69.
He's a lawyer.
And there he seems to me,
sort of captured by the establishment.
Although I said that to John Canaday, the critic,
and do you know what he said?
"Well, there could be worse fates."
And I said, "Given the world as it is,"
"I suppose there could be."
And that's Hartley, who's two years younger,
when he was a medical student at Tufts.
This is Hartley's wife, Ginny.
And they have one little girl, Elizabeth.
She rode horseback a lot when she was little. (chuckles)
That may be one reason for this pose, you know?
This is my daughter-in-law, Nancy, Richard's wife.
That's Nancy's first child, Olivia.
She's wonderful, Nancy.
She's my best friend, you know?
If it wasn't for Nancy, I couldn't exist.
And she also, she's a great judge of art.
I'd rather have her opinion
than any art historian or art major.
She's here all the time.
It's wonderful.
She only lives seven blocks away,
so she saves my life.
(sighing)
I don't look clever like this, though.
I look as though I'm struggling.
- [Interviewer] Do you think of it as hard work?
- [Alice Neel] Well, it's easier for me now
to accomplish more faster than it was.
On the other hand, I don't really have as much strength.
But certainly, if you do something for a number of years,
you can do it better.
Or if you can't,
it means you're in the wrong profession,
or there's something the matter with you. (laughs)
(slow piano music)
One day, I was walking down Madison Avenue,
and I spied a lady in this beautiful orange hat.
So I tried to catch up with her, but she went into a bank.
So I followed her into a bank.
So I said, "Would you let me paint you?"
Now, I don't usually do this.
I only did this maybe one other time, with a taxi driver.
And she said, "Yes, if God will let me."
So then she called me up about a week later,
and she said God would let her.
So I painted her.
Later, I met her on Madison Avenue,
and we went into ...
I think Schrafft's was still there,
and we had a sundae together.
I said, "Like Chichikov, I'm a collector of souls."
Actually, I meant all these different kinds of people.
You see, Cézanne once said
that he loved to paint people that had grown old,
normally, in the country.
Now, I wouldn't mind painting those people,
but I really love people under all kinds of stresses also.
I'm, frankly, a psychological painter,
because life does a lot of things to people.
(slow piano music)
And also, when I finish a painting,
I also sometimes feel another way.
You see, I get terribly involved,
so that I leave myself, and I go into that person.
So sometimes after the person goes,
I feel this is all I have, an empty inside,
that I have nothing inside.
But if I didn't paint all the time,
I probably wouldn't live,
so it keeps me alive,
because you feel weary every once in a while.
It's hard to start, and it's hard to stop.
It's one of those things.
There's momentum in it, you know?
Once you start, it's very hard to stop.
I never stop for long,
but I don't paint every day, like people go to an office.
I paint in...
well, in batches, sort of, 10 or 12.
And then maybe I rest for a few weeks, and then again.
I like to paint.
I love to paint, in fact.
I feel as though I'm living for a purpose,
that life isn't just empty.
Actually, I painted in obscurity for years and years.
I used to think the important thing is
that you do a good painting.
So I didn't care what happened to it afterwards,
and I often just put it on the shelf.
But they took a lot of paintings off the shelf
and put them in the Whitney.
And then they gave me that great big show
down in the Museum of Modern Art in Athens, Georgia.
And in 1976,
they made me a member
of the Institute of the American Academy
of Arts and Letters.
(piano music)
Maybe I should sing something. (chuckles)
(piano music)