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[Thomas Eakins’] women do not wither under the interrogating gaze of his penetrating realism, and it is this look, rather than his style, that deeply influenced Alice Neel as a young student in Philadelphia. She too sees, under the surface affects, the twisted subject of a new age with different demands.

Like her other great influence, John Sloan, she thought the occupants of tenements were worthy of documentation. Even as her sitters changed over the years from the people of New York’s Spanish Harlem, where she lived for twenty-five years, to the mavens of the art world, she never flattered or fawned over anyone. She penetrated their disguises and offered them only their scars, their histories, their failures.

In an interview with Eleanor Munro, she spoke frankly of her own breakdowns and time spent in sanitariums. While there, she did many drawings of the patients and began to understand that mental illness was always accompanied by a physical depletion that was fully observable to a keen perception. This insight was to mark all her future portraits, even her one self-portrait done near the end of her life.

Unsparing in their honesty, her portraits reveal either a sense of lost aspirations or, in her depictions of her husband and lovers, an almost demonic air of manipulation and control. A number of these men destroyed all of her paintings and drawings from the thirties.

—Maureen P. Sherlock

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