Editor's note: Interviewed here is historian and frequent Political Affairs contributor Gerald Meyer, who is the author of a new article on the life and work of Alice Neel, titled “Alice Neel: The Painter and Her Politics” for the Columbia Journal of American Studies. He has taught history for many years at Hostos Community College/City University of New York and authored the biography of leftist Congressman Vito Marcantonio titled Vito Marcantanio: Radical Politician. He also co-edited the book The Lost World of Italian-American Radicalism.  

PA:  What inspired you to get involved in doing the research and writing your recent article on Alice Neel?  

GERALD MEYER:  Alice Neel was someone I was aware of for some time, specifically since 2002, when there was a large exhibit of her work at the Whitney Museum in New York. I knew her name, of course, but I really didn’t know her work very well. A friend of mine said you have to go and check this out, so I did, and it just knocked my socks off. I just loved the work. There haven’t been many times when I have seen the work of a contemporary painter that really moved me so much.

She is a portraitist primarily, although not exclusively, but she is a portrait painter who is a leftist and a kind of social realist. This is very unusual, I think, and something we don’t expect, at least that I didn’t expect. All of a sudden I was there looking at a painting of Pat Whalen, who was a Communist labor leader in the Longshore Workers Union in New York, and there he is – this would be in the 30s or 40s – Pat Whalen, looking right at me, with his hand clenched around a copy of the Daily Worker, and you can read the headline, “Coalworkers and Steelworkers on Strike.” 

There were also many portraits of African American people, of Puerto Rican people, all obviously working people, and they were done in a way that was special. There was a total sense of the individuality of each person and their personality, and that is something which is very hard to do in a portrait. You clearly got a sense of their background or maybe their dilemma, their concerns and  their hopes, and that gave it a left sensibility, a left consciousness. 

Then I discovered the fact that Alice Neel had been a Communist and remained so. That impressed me a lot. I left the subject alone pretty much after that. Neel died in 1984, and she had become much more well known by that time. But I didn’t pay a lot more attention to her. I was busy with my own projects, which are not specifically concerned with Left art history.      Then, in 2008, there was a documentary made about her.  The documentary was called “Alice Neel” and was produced and directed by her grandson, Andrew Neel. It was being shown at a theater in Manhattan, and I said to my partner, “We have to go. We’re not going to wait around, we’re just going to go. I want to see this.” So we went on the first day of the screening of the movie, and there was a Q&A with Andrew Neel after the screening. When I started to view the documentary I liked it a lot. I thought it was really good. He interspliced all kinds of family film footage and documentary footage, and there was a very good interview with Phil Bonosky. I think some people hearing this might know who he is, an intellectual in the Communist Party still, who was a close friend of Alice Neel’s. He was interviewed extensively, and other realist artists were also interviewed. 

But the focus of the documentary to a very large extent was on her family, which was perfectly reasonable. She was very close to her family. She had two sons, and she remained close to her parents and close to her friends. That was her life. She didn’t move around much and stayed in those circles. So, all of that was reasonable. There were also lots of shots of her wonderful paintings. The documentary is really quite worth seeing. 

As the movie went along, I felt more and more uneasy and started to actually get angry, because at no point did it mention her politics, even in a very general way, and certainly not in a specific way. So we had this picture of a woman taking on boyfriends and letting them go and living in East Harlem for 29 years and painting all kinds of radicals, and there was nothing about the fact that she was a committed Communist her whole life. 

At the end of the movie in the Q&A I raised my hand – I was careful not to be the first person to raise my hand, so I was the second one called on. The theater was full. I said to Andrew, “I think that you left something out and I think it’s a disservice to your grandmother.” I said that she was a Communist, and I went on to say that without the audience knowing this, it made it almost impossible for them to understand her choices, why she chose to paint the people she painted, why she lived where she lived, who her friends were, and the aesthetic that she chose – that she was a social realist, an expressionistic social realist. I said that none of this was understandable without that information being provided. I went on a bit about that, and then when I stopped he said two words, and this was quite unique in my experience after an encounter of this sort. The two words were, “You’re right.” I said to myself, “Oh my goodness, that’s interesting.” He then went on to exculpate himself by saying that he couldn’t figure out how to do this, and that when he tried to integrate that kind of material, it threw the work of art, his film, off.    I was sufficiently perturbed by all of this that I wrote a review about the documentary, and sent it off to PA. As I was writing the review, it was getting awfully large and I had to cut it back a lot, and I realized that I had, in fact, an article. So I spent a summer with it. I had some health problems that year and was kind of semi-homebound for the summer, and that became my project. I started to read more about her and write about her.

Eventually I produced a long article, over 55 pages, which was recently published in the Columbia Journal of American Studies, entitled “Alice Neel: The Painter and Her Politics.” It takes the reader through her life, but with the focus on her political commitments and their relationship to her painting.   

PA:  In discussing Alice Neel’s biography, you talk about some of the things that she did in the Depression era, which saw the budding of her artistic career. You mention that she was affiliated with the New Deal program and the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which you describe as like a kind of boot camp for her, and then you talk about how it saved her life. Could you talk a little about that?  

MEYER:  I am, like many people of my politics and age, devoted to the work of the WPA in all its aspects. The Federal Arts Project, which was an arm of the WPA, is one area that attracts a lot of attention. In the WPA, one percent of the appropriations for work of any kind had to go to the arts, and since there were billions of dollars involved, there was in fact quite a bit of money for the arts. There had never been anything really quite like it before. 

There were three different branches of the WPA involving the arts: the Federal Writers Project, the Federal Theater Project, and the Federal Arts Project. The Federal Arts Project had three branches. One was the graphic arts wing; the other was for art teaching. Neel was part of the smaller easel-painting group, which was the hardest to get into. With all the WPA art projects, by the way, the artists and the writers had to be on welfare (or what was then known as home relief). The people involved in the WPA projects, whether it was a construction project, building a park, or painting a painting, they were all on home relief, on welfare. But once they worked for the WPA they got more money – I think probably around another 50 percent in pay, and working on a WPA job meant a significant increase over what they received merely by getting a relief check. 

Alice Neel, like so much of the country, was unemployed and on welfare, and then she got into the Federal Arts Project. There were many artists involved doing various kinds of art, not necessarily easel-painting as she was doing. They worked collectively really. Neel worked at home, but most of the artists went to a center where they drew and painted. They created posters of various sorts, or they taught classes, but they had a collective experience, and that is something that artists almost never have. Once they were assembled in that way, because the Communist Party was so strong at that time and so many of the artists were leftwing as well, what naturally developed was an Artists Union. The Artists Union, which Neel was very active in, brought artists together and gave them a collective consciousness as workers, as cultural workers, and they fought for the maintenance of this program for artists, the Federal Arts Project of WPA, and also connected with other struggles. The experience affected their art and affected their consciousness, and it connected them to the Left.    There was a very important publication called Art Front, which was the organ of the Artists Union that Alice Neel was involved in. She was actually one of the last people to work for the WPA. She worked for the WPA until 1943, when it was completely shut down because of the war, and everything was put into the war effort. Being in the WPA for close to a decade meant that she had to deliver a painting every three weeks, and I think that really helped her to be very productive and to do a certain kind of painting as well. Then, after the WPA shut down, she went back on welfare and remained on welfare into the 1970s, living in East Harlem. Still, she was extremely productive, producing canvases on a regular basis, and they are really so remarkable.   

PA:  In doing your research on her, what do you see as the relationship between her politics and art?  

MEYER:  I think that is what she wanted to do, to connect her politics with her art. She was profoundly political and committed to socialism and to the Communist Party, and her work was part of that. It wasn’t separate from her politics. Her art was connected to the people she socialized with and her political activities outside of, or adjacent to, her painting. She said, “I want to paint humanity one portrait at a time,” and she saw herself painting the times she lived in through her portraits. 

For example, in East Harlem she was painting her neighbors in the building and the surrounding area, so you have a lot of Puerto Rican and African American people who are sitting for a portrait by someone who is really a very great artist, and someone who is interested in documenting their lives. There is a sense in the paintings that these are not defeated people, they are not victims – they are poor and they are not white, and they are looking ahead towards something. They are looking for something and there they are – and they are very commanding of our attention and respect. Interestingly, Neel also created a kind of iconography, a comprehensive set of paintings of many Communist leaders and activists. So in her work the idea of being of service to the Left is strongly present. Alice Neel was doing for people on the Left what the rest of society would not do, and doing it in the same way she did for the people of East Harlem – something that society would never do for them. They would otherwise never have had an oil portrait painted of themselves; it was almost inconceivable.    When we think of portraiture, it seems like an elite genre of art. Portraits are painted of kings, of very rich people, people who want themselves memorialized. There is often an element of glorification in it. But Neel takes that art form and applies it to poor and working-class people, minority people, dignifying them, individualizing them, and immortalizing them. It is very moving. You get a sense of them as social actors, as part of what is going on in society, and that they are, in fact, part of something that commands our attention. For instance, in her portrait of Pat Whalen, you have the Daily Worker right there, and that gives us a big clue, while in another, the painting of her second husband, Jose Santiago Negron, who was a musician, he is playing the guitar, but then you see at the bottom of the picture the sheet music, and it’s “Puerto Rico Libre.” This gives us a clue, in writing, that these are Leftists, and that we are to think of them in that way. But even without those clues, you repeatedly get a sense in her portraits of a determination, or a kind of pensiveness, that will lead to some activity.    Later on, in the early 1970s, she moved to the Upper West Side, not any place fancy, just a third story walk-up in a corner building on the Upper West Side, and her subject matter changed a bit. She began to paint gays a lot, gay couples or individual gay people – so there was a shift, and there were more women too. As she became more aware of and more involved in the women’s movement and then the nascent gay movement, the subjects of her paintings changed to reflect what was going on in society at that time.   

PA:  You described her earlier as an “expressionist social realist.” Social realism seems to encompass a lot of things. Could you help us by giving a definition of what socialist realism is, and how Alice Neel was an expressionist socialist realist?  

MEYER:  That’s a big topic, but I think it is something we do need to consider here. At one time on the left, I think we claimed a great deal for ourselves and for our movement, a very large part of reality, really. We spoke to reality as a whole, not just to the immediate issues that were out there at the moment, but also to questions of art and philosophy, literature and theater, and so on. Social realism is a form of aesthetics which can be applied to the theater, to literature, or to painting. It takes into account the social context of the individuals who are the actors or actresses, the subjects of the art itself. They don’t exist in a disembodied way or disconnected from society, but they are real people who are connected to specific situations, to specific places and conditions, specific sets of circumstances, and a specific time. However, there is a kind of vulgarization of social realism which can easily occur, where the art, in whatever genre, can lose what is actually artistic about the presentation. By that I mean, it can lose the aesthetic content, the demand that art must possess some transcendent quality, you might almost say, certain laws of art about what makes a novel good or a play good, or a painting good. What you have in Neel is an artist who worked within social realism. She was interested in seeing the subjects of her paintings in a social context. She sees them as part of a particular society at a particular time, not as somehow floating above or outside of society, but as part of society. So there is something occurring more than mere description. 

Generally when the subject of social realism is discussed, there is a distinction made between naturalism and social realism. With naturalism, there is only a description of what is occurring – it could be a description of poverty, or it could be a description of something else, but that is all it is, a description. In social realism, there is something beyond description which points in a certain direction, in a direction that makes us say that what we are seeing is unacceptable and therefore requires change. Or perhaps in what we are seeing or reading about, or watching in the theater, we get the sense that the subjects themselves are going to do something about the situation they are in, that it is not tolerable. Therefore, the art becomes critical of reality, so it is not just a description of that reality but a description that embodies a criticism of it. I think you have that in Neel. There is a sense that these people don’t deserve to be poor, and that they are capable of doing something about it. They are not just victims.    I would like to say something about the expressionist aspect of Alice Neel’s art, which I think is important. She had lots of expressionist influences. Certainly Goya was a big influence – the wonderful work of Goya – and Van Gogh was also an important influence, who was very progressive and really very left. There are lots of influences there. Another influence was Robert Henri (the founder of the “Ashcan School”), who was not particularly progressive politically. He was from Philadelphia, and Neel was born in Merion Square, a town near Philadelphia, and she also went to college in Philadelphia and had her artistic training there. Henri painted African American people very respectfully, and she knew his work very well.   There is something very sexual in her work, by the way, sexual in the sense of seeing men as erotic figures, which is unusual in the work of women painters.  That I think comes from Thomas Eakins, another Philadelphia painter, who is one of America’s greatest artists. There are many influences, but what I see in her paintings a lot is the influence of the German expressionists, almost all of whom were leftists and quite a few were communists. I think that expressionism, which is more or less strong in all her painting, really tends to exaggerate a great deal. She takes some feature or some part of the painting, and builds that up more and exaggerates it in a way that might not actually exist if we were looking the subject coldly, photographically, for example. She catches on to something about the person’s character or personality or situation, and that plays an exaggerated role in what she is doing, in the depiction of her subject, in the portrait itself. Or it can be in the use of color, the use of just one color for the background, for example, which you see in Van Gogh. So something stands out for us a lot; it demands our attention and our interest.    

PA:  One of the interesting things about your article and about the documentary are the details about her personal life. In a lot of scholarly work about Communist cultural figures, there is a tendency to dwell heavily on political debates about this or that subject, or some public political activity that they were involved in. But so much of Alice Neel’s life seems to blur the boundary between private and public. Was this a case, where she really lived out that old doctrine about the personal being political, and that her personal life is, in effect, a political life?   

MEYER:  Well, she said that herself. For instance, she said she couldn’t relate to the women’s movement because she had already done that herself, and I think that was true. She really took control of her own life. It was hard, it was very hard what she did, but she wasn’t going to be under a man’s thumb. I think she picked her husbands, and there were quite a number of them, you know, all quite interesting guys and sometimes very good looking. She was very interested in sex and had a series of long-term relationships, all with leftists – everyone was a leftist or a communist. The longest relationship was with Sam Brody, who was a founder of the Photo and Film League. They were together I think for almost 20 years, and he was the father of her second son, Hartley. Jose Santiago Negron was the father of her first son, Richard. She was not together with him for very long. She was bohemian in many ways, I would say. She wanted pleasure, I think.  She wanted a sexual life. She wanted to do what she wanted to do. She didn’t want to conform, and was willing to live really on the edge of poverty. She had a rich boyfriend on the side. I think that is just fabulous, not that I live like that, God forbid!

She was a free spirit, and I think she paid a price for it, because some of these guys were not so good to her. One destroyed a great deal of her work out of jealousy, and it was a nightmare for her. Almost half a lifetime of her work was destroyed by an enraged lover. So she didn’t choose these guys so wisely necessarily, but she was doing the choosing and she was living her life. I think we don’t usually think of a communist that way. We think of a communist as someone being a bit stodgy, perhaps, or even puritanical – and she wasn’t that at all. It does certainly add interest to her life. We become more interested in her as we know her biography. I certainly did. The more I knew about the terrible difficulties in her life, particularly in the beginning, all this tragic stuff, and how she worked her way out of tragedies – the loss of two children, the death of one daughter and then the lose of another. She couldn’t take care of her, and she lost the daughter to the parents of her first husband, a very bourgeois family in Cuba. That caused suicide attempts and a very long hospitalization for a complete nervous breakdown. That was in the very early 1930s, coinciding with the worst days of the Depression. But she works her way out of that; she keeps on doing her art. 

She had to paint, and when she painted she was connecting to reality and to people. and I think she had some sense certainly that she was a very good artist. Sam Brody was very important in that. He encouraged her a great deal. She also got quite a lot of support from within the Communist Party. From the historical literature, some people suppose that the Communist Party in the United States had disappeared by 1947 or 1949, but you can see that Alice Neel is still getting support from the Communist Party well after that. There were exhibits of her work in different settings, at the Jefferson School, for example, and other places, which were Party initiatives. She had letters published in Mainstream, the Party’s cultural magazine, and she was having her drawings (including two covers) reproduced there. She was also giving lectures sponsored by the Party and getting support in that way. It couldn’t give her a complete life or a big career, but the Party did give her a context for her work. She knew Mike Gold and other people who praised and encouraged her and tried to help her in various ways, even during this period of decline in the Party.   

PA:  You mention that later in her life, by the 1970s, she began to paint more women subjects and gay men. Could you talk some more about some of the subjects she painted in this period? That is about the time when she emerges as a cultural icon, not of the Left per se, but of the women’s equality movement, and this sort of raises her out of obscurity. Could you talk a little about how that happened?  

MEYER:  There were two things, but first there is a bit of personal history I think we need to insert here, because it’s not all political. Her relationship with Brody ended some time at the end of the 1950s. Although he was supportive of her, he was not always a decent person to her and especially to his stepson; he was violent in fact. When she broke with him she started to go into therapy. The therapist worked with her on getting her to take steps to take her work out into the world, and she did that; she went around with a slide show of her work – the slides were done by Brodie by the way. That is important to keep in mind. He wasn’t a totally negative character and they were together 20 years. He produced the slides for her and photographed her and her work in ways that were very effective, and he was in his own way a very talented person. So she took the slideshow around everywhere. Wherever she was asked to go, she would go. Sometimes she got carfare and sometimes she’d get a small honorarium, and she started to get her work out. 

Also, perhaps with the encouragement of her therapist, she started to paint people in the art world who could help her. For example, she painted Frank O’Hara, who was the curator of portrait art at MoMA, a pretty left guy by the way, and gay. She also painted Jack Baur, who was the long-time head of the Brooklyn Museum’s Department of Painting and Sculpture, and a lot of other people in the art world. She was now taking steps on her own to get out there, and that coincided with the rise of the women’s movement. She was also politically involved, in the sense that she picketed museums, including the Whitney, that didn’t includes women’s paintings. She did the same for museums that excluded African Americans. But I think that without the coincidence of the women’s movement really burgeoning at this time she would not have gotten as much fame. She rose with that movement. I don’t know how aware she was of that, and she doesn’t say that herself. I think it is quite clear, however.    She also saw gays in a very positive way. She painted a lot of heterosexual couples, too, and almost without exception she really shows their dysfunction and their conflict. That comes across in her really extraordinary paintings of couples. But the gay couples, gay guys for example, are very endearing and affectionate. You can see that the partners are very affectionate to one another, and there is a sense of their love, which I almost never find in the heterosexual couples that she painted. She became very gay-friendly. She became very friendly with Andy Warhol, interestingly, and one of her best paintings is of him. The Whitney owns it, but I don’t think they have it up, at least right now, but it is one of her best portraits.    The only other thing that I would say, is that for us on the Left, it is really very important that we include the arts in our concerns. I think we need to do that for ourselves, in order to nourish ourselves and to have a kind of spiritual life, too. This is especially true for leftists, like myself, who are nonreligious and non-theistic. As we are doing our various kinds of political work – our political tasks – we need to connect to the world within a framework of values that relates to beauty, so that we get a deeper kind of understanding, one that cannot always be expressed in a mathematical or expository way, but can only be expressed in a more artistic way. I think there was once more of that on the Left, and I am glad that we are paying attention to this particular subject now for that reason. Alice Neel is a great, great figure, and I would like more people to know about her.