Alice Neel: People Come First will be the first retrospective in Spain of American artist Alice Neel (1900–1984). This ambitious survey will position Neel as one of the century’s most radical painters, a champion of social justice whose longstanding commitment to humanist principles inspired her life as well as her art, as demonstrated in the selection of approximately one hundred paintings, drawings, and watercolors.
Images of activists demonstrating against fascism and racism will appear alongside paintings of impoverished victims of the Great Depression, as well as portraits of Neel’s neighbors in Spanish Harlem, leaders from a wide range of political organizations, queer artists and performers, and members of New York’s global diaspora. The exhibition will also highlight Neel’s erotic watercolors and pastels from the 1930s, her depictions of mothers, and her paintings of nude figures (some of them visibly pregnant), all of whose candor and irreverence are without precedent in the history of Western art.
