Mary Cassatt, Alice Neel, Karen Kilimnik: Painted Faces

Virtual Tour
Mary Cassatt, Alice Neel, Karen Kilimnik: Painted Faces

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In January 2002, the Goldie Paley Gallery presented “Mary Cassatt, Alice Neel, Karen Kilimnik: Painted Faces,” an exhibition that explored the relationship between three Philadelphia artists from three succeeding generations: Mary Cassatt (1844–1926), Alice Neel (1900–1984), and Karen Kilimnik (b. 1955). Whether these women look into their own social circles or outward to the famous, portraiture remains the vehicle through which they have described society and humanity’s struggles, joys, pains, and aspirations. Their talent has been directed toward recording their lives and times; their production is inextricably linked to their respective generations.

Neel strips bare the soul of her sitters; from members of her family to a dazzling array of midtwentieth-century New York literati. Whether subjects of fame or obscurity, from Andy Warhol to her daughter-in-law, Neel’s works offer neither false beauty nor pomp, but truth and familiarity.

Cassatt’s paintings give the nineteenth-century French middle class a simple grandeur. Often engaged in everyday activities and in moments of quiet intimacy, her sitters are given an iconic stature.

Kilimnik’s works are also iconic, but her subjects are often the opposite of Cassatt’s—they are true icons of popular culture. Her paintings and drawings rely on such celebrities of the moment as Leonardo di Caprio; they read like a fan’s journal of adulation, although they are produced with a stylistic and compositional relationship to the wan, clean lines of Cassatt’s prints. Kilimnik plays with the ability of portraiture to mask and, alternately, to reveal, and with the representation of a face as a locus for obsession and as a site for tribute and homage.

The Galleries at Moore College are an ideal venue for this exhibition as it highlights the contribution of important women artists both past and present, reexamines and reframes the work of these artists, and gives the Philadelphia community a chance to investigate both the historical and cutting-edge art of the city.

“Painted Faces” fosters inquiry into art history and criticism on many levels: it surveys artistic tradition and influence in Philadelphia over several generations; it investigates the fluid definition of portraiture; it charts changing representations of popular culture and modern life; and it underscores the persistence of the figural in artistic production (in times when portraiture has been more and less accepted as important high art); and the allusive capacity of the individual portrait to portray the human condition.

The text for this virtual tour is excerpted from the illustrated catalog that accompanied the exhibition. The catalog features essays by cultural theorist Jeanne Randolph, feminist-artist-writer Mira Schor, and philosopher Maureen Sherlock.

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