#Repost @artreview_magazine ‘Portraiture,’ a new exhibition at London’s Barbican makes clear, is a term that Alice Neel hated, perhaps because of its too-neat categorisation: in Nancy Baer’s 1978 documentary about her, Collector of Souls, which plays in the exhibition’s penultimate room, we hear her resisting it. Still, her figurative paintings, Helen Charman writes at the link in bio, embody her belief that abstraction was a ‘distraction’ from what really mattered: people. It’s important not to regard this interest in individual bodies and faces as a disinterest in collective political life. In her own words, Neel sought to identify in her subjects, who range from the very famous (Andy Warhol) to the celebrated but less famous (CPUSA chair Gus Hall) to the decidedly unfamous, ‘what the world has done to them, and their retaliation’: she depicts societal structures in the lines around their eyes and the shape of their hands. Above all, she understood each image to be equally weighted: we are all bodies in history. 📷 Alice Neel, ‘Marxist Girl (Irene Peslikis)’, 1972 @helchar @barbicancentre #aliceneel #portrait #painting #contemporaryart #artworld #london #figurativepainting #artreview #essay #irenepeslikis (à Sète, France) https://www.instagram.com/p/CpUL5TjIkFk/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
