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Neel has made it clear that there has been no seminal portrait artist for our time, no Daumier or Manet, who expressed the fate of humanity at a specific moment of history. Neel took up the challenge to render not the surface but the character of her sitters, jostled and scarred though they may be. In doing so over thirtysome-odd years, she revealed the contortions of subjectivities set adrift in changing economies. When Munro asked Neel how she would describe her portraits, the artist answered:

I am only showing the barbarity of life. . . . I think it’s a wonder people survive. It is an inhuman demand made on them. . . . Everything shows. The face is the center of the senses. Life, history, the environment shows. Everything. I’ll tell you what you can see. Their inheritance, their class, their profession. . . . I have painted faces of the ’50s, the ’60s, the ’70s. Each of those decades is so completely different. [The most recent]: they’re driven. Well a certain amount of driving sharpens them up. Less time to dream.

What changed in those successive decades was New York City’s move from being the country’s center of small-scale industry, through its transformation into a banking center with service industries. The art luminaries she painted were instrumental in the conversion of factories into lofts and chic shops for the newly developed office space that was to become the business core of southern Manhattan. Like Daumier, she defined a class in caricature, her art-world personalities are counterimages to the representations often attributed to them. Lacking any glamour, with their tentative postures and less than sterling physiques in plain view, they struggle, like Daumier’s bourgeoisie, to appear in control in the midst of their overly exposed vulnerabilities.

—Maureen P. Sherlock

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