Study for a Portrait of Andy Warhol
Black ink, graphite, and gouache on tracing paper
6 1/8 x 4 1/4 inches
Biography
Alice Neel was born in suburban Philadelphia in 1900. She became a painter at a time when few women's lives reached beyond the traditional family sphere. After graduating from the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art and Design), Neel spent a year in Havana before moving to New York City with her husband in 1927. She remained there for the rest of her life.
In the early 1960s, Neel received her first recognition outside a small circle of admirers. Her astounding emergence, late in life, corresponded with the dawning of the women's movement and with the art world's reawakened interest in the human figure. Neel's work of the next two decades reflects her increasing importance in the larger art world. Her portraits of fellow artists, including Andy Warhol, Frank O'Hara, and Faith Ringgold, document a professional world in which she was suddenly a seemingly improbable star. It was during these years that Neel perfected the style for which she is now best remembered: large-scale portraits in the realist tradition of Thomas Eakins and Robert Henri, but newly inventive and unforgettably direct.
