In 1990, Lucian Freud found his next great subject, an over-the-top Australian performance artist named Leigh Bowery, whom Freud first met at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery, where Bowery had done a week-long installation piece starring himself in an array of exotic getups a few years earlier. Wynn Evans and Cook arranged a meeting between the artist and the flamboyantly-dressed performer (sequins were a favorite motif) at Harry’s Bar, because they wanted to “get one back on Lucian …all those sequins. We thought we’d get Lucian to put that old beige paint away.”

Freud had seen Bowery around before and been impressed by his monolithic legs. A massive man capable of extraordinary physical flexibility, Bowery had the big bald head of a Buddha. Using Bowery as a model over the next four years, until his death from AIDS on December 31, 1994, Freud produced some of the most astonishing work of his career, paintings monumental in both their scale and sensibility.

Freud once said that sculpture was his first love, and he owned a copy of Rodin’s Balzac, which occupied a place of honor at the head of the Holland Park stairs, guarding the studio entrance. Bowery’s form naturally lent itself to a sculptural approach, and Freud energetically exploited the potential of both his huge figure and his ability to maintain contorted poses. The two were highly attuned to each other. As a performance artist, Bowery, who had many body piercings, was usually turned out in full regalia, from quirky clothes to jewelry. But when he first entered Freud’s studio, he simply stripped and removed all his studs, without Freud’s bidding. He wore no makeup, and he shaved himself from head to foot, to afford the artist even fuller exposure.

In the first portrait, Leigh Bowery (Seated) 1990, his figure overwhelms a red armchair. Indeed, Freud kept enlarging the canvas with new strips in order to contain him. And yet, as large as he was, Bowery had an almost dancerly grace. Even in a seemingly straightforward pose like that of Naked Man, Back View (1991–92), where only the model’s back is shown as he sits on a low ottoman, Freud managed to capture a sense of both the baroque and the Buddha-like embedded in Bowery’s presence.

He was inspired both by Bowery’s “wonderfully buoyant bulk” and “the quality of his mind.” Freud described Bowery, as “very aware, very relaxed, and very encouraging in the way that physical presence can be. His feelings about clothes extend to his physiognomy even, so that the way he edits his body is amazingly aware and amazingly abandoned.”

Nude with Leg Up, painted in 1992, shows Bowery reclining on the studio floorboards, amidst a sea of Freud’s painting rags, one leg improbably propped up on a green-striped mattress. For once he looks life-size rather than larger than life, since Freud has him anchor the center of the composition, which is made up of the mattress, the rags, the floorboards and the bottom of a window. In Leigh under the Skylight (1994), the model is standing on a covered table, his head poking up towards the ceiling. Although his ankles are delicately crossed, his huge body is torqued in a pose that recalls Rodin.

Freud also painted Bowery lying naked on a bed with Nicola Bateman, who worked with him and married him not long before his death. And the Bridegroom (1993) is a painterly performance piece, a theatrical composition rendered in a hushed palette that heightens the drama. A bed, heavily draped in a beige sheet, sits in front of a black folding screen. The background of the painting consists simply of brown floorboards and yellowish walls. Bowery and Bateman, both nude, lie in state on the bed, sculptures on a pedestal, their heads turned away from each other. Bateman, a thin but rounded figure, has one slender ankle draped over Bowery’s thick thigh; her long hair flows off the edge of the bed. Named after a line in an A. E. Housman poem (although Bowery wanted Freud to call it “A Fag and his Hag”), it’s a one-act tour de force. “I’ve always been interested in bringing a certain kind of drama to portraiture,” Freud said, “the kind of drama that I found in paintings of the past. If a painting doesn’t have drama, it doesn’t work; it’s just paint out of the tube.”

Nicola Bateman appears in several other paintings, including a poignant footnote to Bowery’s death, the strange piece Girl Sitting in the Attic Doorway (1995), which shows the naked Bateman perched in an alcove above a wardrobe. “As he was coming towards the end of painting…it was around that time that Leigh started to die… And I would sit up there. And I spent the whole time just thinking about Leigh…and that he’s dying right now. I think it gave me a little bit of breathing space from the situation.” When Bowery died, Freud had his body flown back to Australia.

Excerpted from “Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open” by Phoebe Hoban. ©2014 by Phoebe Hoban. Published by Amazon Publishing/New Harvest April 2014. All Rights Reserved.

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The Female Gaze: Women Artists Making their World  at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, November 17, 2012 to April 7, 2013.

In his now notorious remarks in the New York Times,  Ken Johnson invited anyone with a theory about the kind of art “women tend to make” to test it out by visiting the exhibition, The Female Gaze, at the Pennsylvania Academy.  My 13-year-old daughter, who has attended many contemporary exhibitions, revealed her theory when she quipped, “Dad, are there going to be a lot of vagina paintings in this show?”

In fact, the sole match for her particular view of women’s art was an untitled test plate from Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party (1976).  The works in the show might fit any description or label that has been applied to art: abstract, representational, conceptual; personal and political; militant and conventional; academic and outsider. Anyone who attends this show with theories—or better put, stereotypes—of women’s art in mind is bound to be disappointed.

The Female Gaze celebrates an inspired addition to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts’ venerable holdings. Collector, philanthropist, and artist Alter Linda Lee Alter has donated over 500 works in every style and medium imaginable. In the same gallery one finds Daisy Youngblood’s gorilla sculpture; Barbara Takenaga’s swirling, jewel-like abstract painting; Catherine Murphy’s hyper-real painting of a gun target stapled to a tree; Kara Walker’s silhouettes of antebellum figures; and an enameled metal sign by Jenny Holzer.

The bequest is all the more important when understood side-by-side with the Academy’s existing collection, enshrined next door in its landmark Furness building.  Despite efforts to tout a 200-year history of friendliness toward women, the Academy’s past accessions are rather one-sided, and might just as aptly be called the Male Gaze.

During an interview, Alter explained to me that most of the institutions on the short list for this bequest were male-dominated. She believed, however, that her gift to the Academy would be transformative. The size of the existing collection meant that the donated works would be visible, and the bequest came with a commitment by the staff to take care of them and display them alongside existing art.

While Female Gaze reveals no clear tendency among women artists, it does evince the collector’s preferences. The persistence of painting, and especially figure painting, is deeply felt in this selection of work. Greeting us very directly at the entrance are Diane Edison’s painted Self-Portrait (1996) and pastel Nude Self-Portrait (1995). In this second piece the artist gazes down haughtily at the viewer from between her pendulous breasts.  The African American artist is known for her intense portraiture, and in this case gives us a rich expanse of brown hues rarely seen in museum nudes. Alice Neel’s palette is quite different in Claudia Bach Pregnant (1975), with contrasting pinks and greens representing flesh and fabric. The painter keeps the eye busy with a lively cadence of curved lines and culminating black tresses falling over the sitter’s shoulder.

There is also a strong interest in art which turn old idioms to new uses. Judith Schaechter’s stained glass works, for example, project nightmares of the contemporary urban world through the colors and graphic styles of this medieval medium. Like a cathedral window image of the baby Jesus, Child and Toy (1989) is organized according to the decorative geometry of its frame, with figures in the central space and a chain of symbolic elements on the periphery. The artist uses brilliant red and yellow glass to depict a doll-like child menaced by toys: candy and stuffed animals on the one hand, and the more adult amusements, money, drugs and guns on the other. Looking at an entirely different reality, Ann Agee uses the style of the ceramic tabletop knick-knack to commemorate a middle-class ritual in Birthing Class (2001). Colorfully dressed pregnant women listen to a demonstration by a nurse while their hipster-ish husbands look on with excessively cheerful smiles. Glints of light on the glazed surface underscore the overwrought optimism of the scene.

With the emphasis on representational work, the exhibition shows a clear bias toward the retinal and away from the conceptual. There are the occasional objects, however, that raise questions about the boundaries between art and life, image and representation. One is the 1993 painting Target by Catherine Murphy. Easily mistaken for a photograph, this bullet-ridden image brings an object into the gallery that, particularly amidst current debate over gun control, we would rather not see. It also offers a connection to the Academy’s nineteenth century collections, which include a section of tromp l’oeil painting, and a focus on the science of collecting and categorizing lived experience.

Finding other points of connection to the Academy’s historic collection will determine whether Women Artists Making their World is indeed transformative.  If the displays in the old gallery had a subtitle, it would be “Male Artists Making the World”—for the artists there, like Benjamin West, Gilbert Stuart, George Inness, John Singer Sargent and Thomas Eakins, have taught us how to see. The question for me, then, is not how women artists create their own world, but how they complete our picture of what the world looks like.

One indication of how this might be done is in Female Gaze’s inclusion of works from the Chicago art milieu of the late 1960s and 1970s. This radical scene saw the participation of men and women in collectives like the Hairy Who, and spawned the careers of artists such as Nancy Spero, Christina Ramberg and Suellen Rocca, alongside of men like Roger Brown, Ed Paschke, and Jim Nutt.  Ramberg’s painting Hereditary Uncertainty (1977), exhibited in Female Gaze, contains the jagged shapes and colors found in work by Roger Brown. Yet Ramberg’s subject, the straightjacketing of women’s bodies through clothing, is distinctly feminist. Significantly, this painting was also included in a 2012 Academy exhibit on the influence of famed Art Institute of Chicago teacher Ray Yoshida. It was displayed in the historic Furness building, only footsteps away from Thomas Eakins’ monumental surgical scene, The Gross Clinic. On that occasion, the female gaze revealed to us a way of hacking up a body that Eakins overlooked.

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Joffe blatantly references the more psychological—and painterly work of —Alice Neel (on view at David Zwirner through June 23) and strongly relates both to the stylized, affectless portraits of Elizabeth Peyton and the faux pornographic work of John Currin. But Joffe uses the canvas as a room of her own to explore contemporary femalehood—not so much the eternal feminine as the external feminine, writ large.

The in-your-face impact of her paintings comes as much from scale as technique. These are big blowups of women, exaggerated and poster-like. There is no visible brushwork or impasto—instead there are obvious drips. It is in these drips, casual yet deliberate, random but not really, that Joffe’s latent expressionism lurks.

Oddly, one of Joffe’s strengths is her sense of purposeful restraint. She is to painting what Raymond Carver is to short stories: an expert minimalist. While employing more detail in her approach to portraiture than Alex Katz, whose legacy she also clearly inherits, she refrains from full-blown realism, implying rather than mirroring reality. And yet she captures something ineffable—a certain mystery that every woman exudes. Who is that blonde clutching her baby as if it is an unwilling fashion accessory, the fingers of its little hand splayed, Neel-like, as if to quote its mother? Or the placid, almost-beautiful woman with the dazzling green eyes and striped shirt, strangely missing any décolletage or cleavage, her sensual lips just a bit too close to her prominent nose?

The two most realized paintings in the show, both done in 2012, are, ultimately, the most interesting: Woman in a Red Flowered Dress, whose commanding presence and disapproving mouth cannot be ignored, and Self-portrait Sitting on a Striped Chaise Lounge, a nakedly honest portrait of Joffe herself, seated on stripes—a direct reference to Neel’s influence in its nudity, composition, and evocative expression that pointedly evokes Neel’s own famous nude self-portrait (on a striped chair) made when she was 80. While the other six paintings suggest an interesting narrative, these two canvases are the interesting narrative.

We live in a Facebook world—that seems to be the subtext of Joffe’s work. And yet even Facebook profiles hint at something deeper than the merely superficial. Joffe’s reductive approach reaches its apex, perhaps, in “Blonde in a Lace Coat,” a pale painting that is nearly pure ephemera, portraying not so much a woman as a wisp. While her minimalism has its uses, in the end it is content, rather than form, that satisfies. Joffe should take an unfashionable risk and imbue her gallery of femme fatalities—everyday vampires of a sort—with more real flesh and blood.

Phoebe Hoban is author of Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty (St. Martin’s Press, 2010) and Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art (Viking/Penguin, 1998.)

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In 1974, a decade before her death, Alice Neel was the subject of a career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Spanning the previous 40 years, the exhibition included 58 portraits, the genre for which, then as now, Neel is best known. In her absorbing biography, Phoebe Hoban quotes Neel on her approach to her work and her interest in the dark side of her sitter’s psyche: “I am never arbitrary. Before painting I talk to my sitters and they unconsciously assume their most typical pose—which, in a way, involved all their character and social standing; what the world has done to them and their retaliation” (p. 305). Such is the unending fascination of her work: her knack for getting under her sitter’s skin, behind the façade of physiognomy and comportment, and expose something raw and real. The reader of Hoban’s study gathers that Neel’s portraiture was, sometimes quite consciously, itself a form of retaliation against what the world had done to her.

Neel’s struggle began early, as a high-strung, unhappy girl caught in the conformity of small-town life in Colwyn, PA. Her mother was tough, stern, and misogynistic in her abysmal view of what young women—including her daughter—should hope to achieve. But her dominant personality provided an emotional and intellectual focus for the young Neel, who later attributed her own powers of observation to early training in reading her mother’s face for clues to her mood. (Her father was meek and distant; when in her mid-30’s, Neel attempted suicide by putting her head in an oven, her father mused aloud at how high the gas bill would be.)

Neel received her most salient art training at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, where she was strongly influenced by the pedagogical philosophy of Robert Henri’s The Art Spirit. Wildly popular when it was published in 1923 and still widely read, the book proselytizes for everyday subject matter, emotional expressiveness, and a direct, alla prima method of which drawing was to be the basis. Neel would put these principles into action in her own work, with a twist.

She married the Cuban painter Carlos Enriquez in 1925 and spent much of the next year in Havana living with her husband’s family and traveling to the poor sections of town to paint. Her work from this period, which was in synch with the concern for the “emotions of everyday life” championed by the painters of the Vanguardia movement and the Grupo Minorista, positioned her in sympathy with the social realism that would preoccupy American artists on the Left during the 1930’s.

Meanwhile Neel’s personal life was a mess. After returning to the States, the impoverished couple lost their first daughter to diphtheria at the age of six months; Carlos left Neel shortly thereafter taking their second child, also a daughter, from whom Neel remained permanently estranged. For decades, she had several troubled, sometimes destructive relationships with men. One lover reportedly slashed a number of Neel’s paintings in a jealous rage; another, a “brilliant autodidact” and a volatile, sadistic bully, mercilessly persecuted her sons.

But then, Neel “seemed to thrive on drama and discordance” (p. 208); she painted continuously. In this she was greatly aided by the WPA’s Easel Painting Project, which employed her from the mid-1930’s until its cessation in the early 40’s. (Hoban’s overview of the radical political and artistic cross-currents of this milieu is superb.) Surrounded by kindred spirits in then-bohemian Greenwich Village, Neel’s nonconformist streak blossomed. Her gift—and it was awesome, even then—was her ability to nail her subject’s vulnerabilities and the effort to mask them. This facility was feared as much as admired. Joseph Solman, a painter and friend from the WPA years, said, “If she did a portrait of you, you wouldn’t recognize yourself, what she would do with you. She would almost disembowel you, so I was afraid to pose for her” (p. 108).

Of her dual portrait of Milton Resnick and Pat Pasloff, the critic Harold Rosenberg suggested that Neel “have that in a tent and charge a dollar admission.” In ARTnews, Valerie Peterson wrote that the portrait “really belongs in the closet with the skeletons” (p. 245). The homeless, eccentric Village character Joe Gould was pleased with his 1933 portrait in which, with a gleeful smirk, he displays his three sets of genitals. Said Gould of the bizarre painting, “it was not really a nude because I insisted on a cigarette holder” (p 94).

Her portrayals of the innocent and beloved could be tender, as in her paintings of her sons, Hartley and Richard, and of her neighbors in Spanish Harlem where she lived and worked for twenty years. Her nonfigurative work is often richly introspective, as if an elevated train track or snow-covered fire escape might symbolize human aspiration or frailty. And in portraying Andy Warhol (1970) she gives herself over to her subject’s predilection to remain a cipher; drawing his eyelids closed, he displays his lurid scars and his pristine footwear.

But her most brutal portraits combine the grotesqueries of Ensor, the bleakness of Munch, and the subtlety of a sledgehammer. She renders the unpopular director of the WPA’s Artist Project, Audrey McMahon (1940) in joyless grays and browns, as a sort of desiccated vampire with eyes like trapdoors, a nose like a newel post, and a clenched, lipless mouth. Ellie Poindexter (1962), a dealer who did not warm to Neel’s professional advances, looks, with her beady eyes, slit of a mouth, and prominent breasts, like a python who has just swallowed a pair of hamsters. Even Frank O’Hara, the much-liked poet and curator whom Neel sought out in the hopes of interesting him in her work, comes in for some rough treatment in a 1960 portrait. Reproduced in ARTnews, it was a career milestone, but Irving Sandler turned down Neel’s request to paint him because “she was like a voodoo person who would stick pins in me” (p. 246).

Despite or because of this aspect of Neel’s output—the “deliberate hideousness” ARTnews had chastised her for in the 40’s—her work struck a chord with the art world in the early 1960’s. Having achieved some visibility in the heyday of class-struggle art for her depictions of the downtrodden (who were often, in fact, her friends and neighbors), Neel was marginalized during the ascendency of Abstract Expressionism, the “great broom that swept everything else away.” But in the context of renewed interest in the human figure that was a hallmark of Pop, Neel’s tenacity gained traction.

Not that she was universally popular. Elke Solomon, curator of prints and drawings (not paintings) at the Whitney in 1974, organized the Neel retrospective. “A nasty piece of work,” she said of Neel years later (p. 289). The artist May Stevens rejects the notion that Neel was some sort of protofeminist: “She wasn’t a feminist—she was an Alice Neelist… She was totally antifeminist and antiwomen… I didn’t want anything to do with Alice” (p. 267). With her outrageous anecdotes and salty humor, she was a hit on the college lecture circuit, but feminist intellectuals felt she contributed to a cliché by discussing her work in an autobiographical, rather than a conceptual and/or historical, context. Nothing if not self-aware, Neel no doubt judged that the spectacle of a sweet-faced, gray-haired older woman giving voice to a libidinous turn of mind and a profoundly nonconformist world view would have a broader appeal—a bit of the old “drama and discordance” played for laughs.

All of which is to say that Neel did not much care whose feathers she ruffled. The world had roughed her up pretty good but she gave as well as she got. Hoban theorizes that Neel “didn’t see her subjects just as victims; she also saw them as survivors, however scarred. As such, almost all Neel’s subjects mirror her own identity” (p. 331). This seems right, but it doesn’t go far enough. The invasiveness of Neel’s portraits became her persona. Under the guise of probing others she used portraiture to retaliate against the world for the many psychic wounds she sustained. This is what made her tick, and what makes the uncomfortable, aggressive edge of her work so compelling.

Phoebe Hoban: Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty (New York: St. Martin’s Press, December 2010. ISBN: 978-0-312-60748-7 512 pages, plus one 8-page b&w photo insert and two 8-page color photo inserts. $35 ($16.99 ebook)

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May 6 – June 20, 2009
Alice Neel: Nudes of the 1930s at Zwirner & Wirth
32 East 69th Street, 32 E 69 Street, between Madison and Park Avenues,
New York City, 212 517 8677 (Zwirner & Wirth now closed)

Alice Neel (1900-1984) is widely considered one of the most important American painters of the twentieth century, but it took critics decades to come to terms with her oeuvre. Independent from any art movement – despite many friendships with artists and art professionals of her generation – Neel was a force all her own. In the context of American art, which in particular in the 1940s and 1950s was almost exclusively associated with Abstract Expressionism, Neel’s work seemed to contain an unusual nod to a past aesthetic. Like the Abstract Expressionists, Neel also had her roots in European art. But rather than Surrealism, her principal inspiration was German Neuesachlichkeit painters like George Grosz, Otto Dix and Christian Schad. Her many still lifes and portraits of friends, family members, lovers, and strangers, reveal a similar fusion of expressionist color and line with a keen eye for inherent psychological and emotional complexities. The individuals she depicted were often deeply intertwined with her personal life and addressed subject matters close to her heart, ranging from gender and racial inequality to politics. In Neel’s work it is evident that to her, people and their stories mattered most. It was her particular skill, as well as passionate mission, to paint them with honesty and sincerity. Thinking of herself as a “collector of souls,” Neel created an oeuvre that not only reveals different facets of humanity, but also sums up the diversity of American urban society.

In May of this, after taking over the Alice Neel Estate from Robert Miller Gallery, David Zwirner opened two concurrent exhibitions of her work.  At Zwirner & Wirth, there was an intimate installation of Neel’s nudes from the 1930s. Some of the works show Neel in autobiographical scenarios – in others she has portrayed friends and acquaintances. It is work that followed probably the most traumatic years of her life – the late 1920s – and was made during a period, when she regained emotional strength and confidence. Neel’s biography of the preceding years read like an emotional rollercoaster ride. In 1924, Neel had met the Cuban artist Carlos Enríquez (1900-1957), son of a prominent family in Havana at the Chester Springs summer school of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The couple married the following year and in 1926 they traveled to Cuba together, where Neel gave birth to her first daughter Santillana in December. In 1927, the family moved to New York City, but just before her first birthday, Santillana died of diphtheria. Shortly after the baby’s death, Neel became pregnant again with her second child, Isabetta, who was born in 1928. In 1930, Carlos returned to Cuba, taking Isabetta with him, before continuing on to Paris by himself, leaving the child with his family. In the year that followed, Neel lived through a massive nervous breakdown, several suicide attempts, hospitalization, and a prolonged stay in the suicide ward of the Philadelphia General Hospital. She was released from the sanatorium in 1931 and returned to her parents’ home in Colwyn, Pennsylvania. Not until the end of that year, after visiting her close friend and frequent subject, Nadya Olyanova, did Neel move to New York City.

Therefore it comes as no surprise that the 1930s show Neel as a matured soul. Her subjects reveal a new sense of vulnerability that leaves one more intensely guessing about their darker sides and the experiences they have had. One of the most compelling works in this particular installation is Nadya and Nona (1933). The painting shows two nude women lying side-by-side; one of them being Olyanova. Some of their physical features have been exaggerated, such as the white, almost ashen skin tones, the dark shadows that accentuate each body curve and bone, or the long eye lashes. The atmosphere is sensual, erotic, and mysterious. Though it remains unclear if the women are lovers, an unquestionable bond exists between them. Be it by gender, history or feeling – they are confidantes in a world solely their own.

In several of the watercolors and drawings, Neel has depicted herself alongside her longtime friend and lover at the time, John Rothschild. A Harvard graduate from a wealthy family who ran a travel business, Rothchild met Neel in 1932. In these drawings, which are some of Neel’s most intimate works, she is in her thirties, beautiful and curvy, with her long red hair sprawling liberally. In Alice and John in the Bathroom (1935), Neel can be seen sitting on a toilet seat while urinating. John stands at the sink, urinating with an erect penis in his hand. Various shades of red accentuate details, such as Alice’s pubic hair, the toilet seat, John’s slippers and the head of his penis. Alice’s legs are turned outward, her arms crossed over her head, almost taking on the posture of an Indian deity. The scene could not be more humbling in its honesty and lack of glorification. Leaving the viewer in the role of a voyeur, Alice and John in the Bathroom is an ode to the pure sense of trust and privacy that two individuals, despite all imperfections, can experience when truly caring for each other.

At David Zwirner, Neel is only revealed through the individuals she portrayed. Gone are the self-portraits. The paintings here range in date from the late 1940s to early 1980s. Several of her subjects, like her son Hartley, for example, Neel would paint repeatedly over time. Throughout her life, Neel was attracted to strong individuals, in particular women, who were confident in their sexuality. The most provocative work along these lines is a portrait of Annie Sprinkle from 1982. Neel depicts the former prostitute and porn star turned performance artist, facing the viewer frontally, eye-to-eye. The boldness and dignity of Manet’s Olympia comes to mind, which in its time was not less shocking. Even more than twenty-five years after it was conceived, Sprinkle’s portrait does not fail to make an impact. This might partially be due to the stark contrast between Sprinkle’s half-smile and the dominatrix outfit she wears that leaves her genitals exposed. But it probably is mostly due to the company she finds herself in – the various children, young adults, men, and women both dressed and nude. Overall, she is just one of many colorful individuals in the room. While Sprinkle’s make up suggests her profession, just as a fur stole around another’s sitter’s shoulders might suggest her financial background, we do not know her intimately. What Neel does give us, however, is her view on how she perceived the person before her. It is a character assessment of sorts and a testament to the fact that Neel was able to access something deeply within herself, to be able to reveal something meaningful about somebody else.

Though Neel only showed sporadically in the beginning, by the 1960s, she was exhibiting regularly and in 1974, the Whitney Museum of American Art organized their first retrospective (another one was held in 2000). In 1984, she appeared on the Johnny Carson show. Despite all the recognition during her lifetime, it was not until more recently that the impact of Neel’s oeuvre on younger generation painters has become more evident. The exhibition at Zwirner, as well as a major survey of her work, organized by the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and scheduled for spring 2010, will provide ample opportunity to convince oneself of exactly that.

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547 West 25th Street
New York City
212 242 7727

September 20 to November 3, 2007

In Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s “Triumph of Death” (circa 1562), hordes of skeletons swarm upon a town, pitilessly inflicting lessons about the transitoriness of life and its diversions. Popular depictions of death have evolved in the centuries since, but death’s grip on our imaginations has hardly lessened. In “I Am as You Will Be,” more than 30 artists, from James Ensor to Andy Warhol and Donald Baechler, arrange bones in almost every possible configuration and medium as they grapple with mortality and our perceptions of it. In this intriguing exhibition, which was curated in part by James Ensor scholar Xavier Tricot, the images of death range from the romantically morbid to the coolly cerebral.

The most intimate and earnest works tend to be the earliest. These includes three Ensor etchings, among them one from 1895 that describes several skeletons in ill-fitting clothes, all vainly trying to warm themselves about a stove; Even death, it seems, has not delivered them from human misery. Edvard Munch’s drypoint etching “Death and Love” (1894) portrays a young woman and a skeleton in a rapturous embrace, her full, naked body contrasting poignantly with the wizened bones.

Some contemporary artists revisit the impression of mortified flesh, and none more effectively than Louise Bourgeois, whose 1997 torso-like construction of fabric, bones, and wire arches painfully inside a glass case. The pathos of death, however, is downplayed or deflected in many other works. Picasso’s 1946 lithograph of a still life with skull, book, and pitcher turns the vanitas genre into an excuse for wonderfully vigorous spatial rhythms and velvety tones. Later pieces tend to analyze attitudes towards mortality instead of the formal components of its depiction; among these, Warhol’s mixed-media self-portrait from 1978 pictures the artist coyly balancing a skull on his head, while McDermott & McGough’s “Flames of Jealousy 1964” from 2007 consists of what appears to be a real skull resting on comic books.

Other works show an almost fetishistic enthusiasm for craftsmanship. Kris Martin’s “I Am Still Alive” (2006), a silvery, life-size skull, glistens like oversized jewelry. (The exhibition catalogue indicates that it was executed from scans of the artist’s own head.) Angelo Filomeno’s ten-foot-tall piece from 2007 is an ornamental tour de force that renders a dagger-wielding, fish-clutching skeleton on silk fabric with embroidery and tiny crystals.

Elsewhere, Marcel Broodthaers’ 1965 piece makes a complex and gritty political statement with simple means: a female thigh bone painted in the colors of the French flag. The gothic title of Jenny Holzer’s “Lustmord Table” (1994) adds a chilling dimension to her tidy arrangement of human bones. Damien Hirst’s “Male and Female Pharmacy Skeletons” (1998/2004) is exactly that: twin life-size skeletons hanging from stands. Hurst’s original contribution appears to be limited to small, cryptic diagrams painted on the skulls, in appropriately pink or blue colors.

Other notable works include Roland Flexner’s tiny graphite drawing from 1995, which poignantly catches the rounding gleam of a skull on a darkened shelf. Jan Fabre’s construction of a stuffed budgerigar, clamped in the jaws of a beetle-encrusted skull (2000), stands out for its exotic violence. The biggest surprise, however, may be three remarkably diverse pieces by Alice Neel. Her painting “Natura Morte” (1964-65) captures a lone skull warmed by sunlight on a kitchen or dining room table; It could be a casual portrait of a studio prop. Utterly different is the ink drawing from 1958, portraying the artist as a ghoulish, screaming skull with stringy hair and bleeding eye socket. Her third piece is one the most modest in the show, and yet one of its highlights. Her small watercolor “Requiem” (1928) depicts two shrouded skeletons reclining on a shore alongside a beached fish. The setting sun filters tangibly through the air, enclosing distant boats and land masses in its ebbing light. Dark glimmers of waves echo the skeletal forms, one of which props a bony head thoughtfully on an arm. What is he/she thinking? We haven’t a clue, but willingly or not, the phantom feels fully alive in Ms. Neel’s dynamic little scene.

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