My Caravan

Facing Uncertain Death (35/42): A Light that does not Blind

Given that the recent sequence on veils, words and values focused at some length on R. S. Thomas’s struggles to access God, reposting this poem that touches on a similar idea seemed worthwhile. My new poem to be posted tomorrow was triggered by Thomas’s later poems.

Facing Uncertain Death (36/42): Hints of Woodsmoke

Given that the recent sequence on veils, words and values focused at some length on R. S. Thomas’s struggles to access God, reposting this poem that touches on a similar idea seemed worthwhile. My new poem to be posted next Monday was triggered by Thomas’s later poems.

Book Review – ‘Collecting Souls’ (4/4): Alice Neel & Expressionism

Ginny, 1984 (scanned from Alice Neel: Painter of Modern Life — page 219)

The sequence which partly focused on Táhirih caused me to think about other female artists who, while they did not suffer devaluation as a woman as she did, were also seriously underestimated for much of their lives. Alice Neal is one such artist. 

At the end of the previous post I indicated that I would be moving onto the Expressionist leanings of Neel’s art, primed by comments in Collecting souls. For example,[1] ‘[as] Alice withdrew increasingly into herself, her paintings exploded in expressiveness.’

She resisted what the Belchers term ‘abstract expressionism.’[2] They go on to explain why:

Alice remained committed to the human figure as the centre of her art. Her faithfulness to a belief in the importance of the human being stretched beyond an ideology of humanism. To Alice, artists have an obligation to history, not just to record, but to interpret the richness and complexity of the life of the period in which they live. She believed “that more is communicated about an area and its effect on people by a revealing portrait than in any other way.”

She persisted down this path even though she knew that ‘figures were not commercially viable.’

In Painter of Modern Life, Petra Gördüren in her chapter on Emotional Values lists her expressionist influences:[3]

The founding figures of modern art – Vincent Van Gough, Munch and Oscar Kokoschka – are primarily cited in this context, artists who, like Neel, understood painting as the expression of subjective sensations and did not hesitate to explore the depths of the human psyche.

Her expressionism seems to blend with her politics, into something I am tempted to label ‘social expressionism,’ as Gördüren seems to hint at when she writes (my emphasis):[4] ‘Neel established herself as a painter of the very personally felt social realism that dominated American painting of the late 1920s and the 1930s.’ Laura Stamps in her chapter, A Marxist girl on Capitalism, points very much in the same direction:[5] ‘She developed her characteristic style, tending on the one hand towards Expressionism, and yet also towards the documentary.’

Following up on my discussion in the previous post, this appears to be also linked with her tendency towards projection, as Stamps is strongly indicating: [6]

She wanted to capture her subjects psychologically and socially… Neel also deliberately projected her own desires and fears onto her subject. She in fact chose portraiture in order to enter into dialogue with “the other.”

The Belchers quote the words[7] ‘capturing of things essential’ to describe this quality in Neel’s work, and refer to[8] what seems to be ‘an unusual mingling of social commitment and subjective intensity.’ They attribute her motivation for this blending of personal and political to her being[9] ‘an individual who had suffered greatly’ so she therefore ‘painted pictures that communicated one of her core creeds, that “no one on earth should suffer.”’ A telling way to summarise this can be found in Laura Stamps A Marxist girl on Capitalism:[10]

She was working on something that, though it clearly concerned herself, also transcended the personal.

Closing Comments

In Painter of Modern Life, in the Catalogue of Works, we find an appropriate portrait on which to end this sequence: Ginny, 1984:[11]

Painted during the winter in Vermont, it depicts Ginny in mourning for her mother who died the previous year, and was painted at the time when Neel knew her number was up, for she had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. . . . It is clearly an expression of endings,… an image of such power and subtlety that it appeared to subsume the knowledge of a lifetime of painting.

A perfect example, in fact, of the empathic projection I have been attributing to her most emotionally powerful portraits.

I can’t quite avoid being triggered into reflections here about van Gogh. When I am confronted by his life and his greatest art I find myself asking, ‘How is it that we so often find such life-enhancing beauty flowering from the soil of such peace-destroying torment?’ It gives Dylan’s dictum that ‘behind every beautiful thing there’s some kind of pain,’ a strange relevance. Behind the obvious meaning that encounters with beauty create a fear of their loss, there lurks the idea that out of some kind of pain everything of beauty flowers.

With Neel, though, you almost always see the pain behind the beauty: not so with van Gogh’s greatest work, where the beauty often masks the pain.

With both van Gogh and Neel, of course, we need to be concerned at least as much by the pain they caused to others as by the pain of others they capture in paint.

Alice Neel, at least to a significant extent, saw herself as painting to draw attention to the costs of inequality and discrimination, and is now credited with having succeeded in doing so. From a Bahá’í point of view one of the main purposes of art is to enhance consciousness, not least in terms of raising our awareness of our interconnectedness with all humanity, in fact with all forms of life, as well as widening our compass of compassion. This seems to have been the main purpose of Neel in amassing this collection of souls. I am not sure she would have been aware that this title for her work had been in a way anticipated by a woman poet of the 19^th Century, Elizabeth Barrett Browning when she wrote in her narrative masterpiece Aurora Leigh (First Book – lines 1097-98):

. . . .paint a body well

You paint a soul by implication.

Does the extent to which she succeeded in doing so justify the pain she caused others by focusing on her art and neglecting them? Are we facing a Dickensian problem here – and I don’t mean the Jellybys in Bleak House – I am referring to the novelist’s total lack of care and consideration for his wife, the mother of his children, whom he demonised, and deprived of contact with them, while at the same time exploring Scroogian conversions to caring and compassion, and advocating the mantra that ‘humanity is our business.’

Maybe we all face dilemmas of this kind, for example when we try to balance the needs of work and family. In the process we all make mistakes, perhaps only realising too late that we have spent too little time with our children in pursuit of our career, because of what we saw as our vocation.

Getting the balance right is a difficult art in itself, from the mastery of which our devotion to what we see as our real work in life can permanently derail us.

So, I am not keen to leap to judgement against Alice Neel, and condemn her for the possibly negative impact of her art on those closest to her who needed her most. I don’t see her as being as ruthless and deliberate as Dickens was, in defaming his wife to disguise his own involvement with his end of life romance. She was, as we have seen, to some degree tormented by the conflict between her art and the needs of others. Possibly the damage she caused was more than compensated for by how the suffering she depicted may have lifted her contemporaries’ attitudes to the left-behind and deliberately excluded to a higher and more compassionate level.

The Belchers seem to think so:[12]

. . . . hundreds of canvases, a buried treasure trove, chronicled Alice’s America over forty years, and even if any one portrait was not enough to capture the attention of the new category of viewers, the ‘oeuvre’ as a whole was compelling. . . . One art historian wrote that Alice had made portraiture “something more generous, more democratic and more expressive than it had been before . . .”

I can only suggest that this is a judgement call we each will always have to make for ourselves, both about the balance of our own lives as well as that of any public figure we admire and respect, be they artist, politician, activist, philanthropist, parent, partner or whatever else.

Anyway, I am grateful to these books on Neel’s life and art for forcing me to confront this important issue in all its complexity. Both books are definitely worth reading carefully, and her paintings will reward equally close attention, I believe.

References:

[1]. Collecting souls – page 123

[2]. Ibid. – Page 201

[3]. Painter of Modern Life – page 31.

[4]. Ibid. – page 38.

[5]. Ibid. – page 41.

[6]. Ibid. — page 44.

[7]. Collecting souls – page 80.

[8]. Ibid. – page 172.

[9]. Ibid. – page 176.

[10]. Painter of Modern Life – page 42.

[11]. Ibid. – page 228.

[12] Collecting Souls – page 240.

Book Review – ‘Collecting Souls’ (3/4): Alice Neel – her social consciousness

Mother and Child (Havana), 1926 (scanned from Alice Neel: Painter of Modern Life – page 71)

The sequence which partly focused on Táhirih caused me to think about other female artists who, while they did not suffer devaluation as a woman as she did, were also seriously underestimated for much of their lives. Alice Neal is one such artist. 

I closed the previous post with the reflection that, in perhaps a similar way to van Gogh, her art was her most constructive way of connecting with life: in her case, this was mainly with people:[1] ‘Alice Neel once said that, for her, painting was a way of reducing the distance between herself and others, and the world around her. It enabled her to express a deeper sense of experience: [2] ‘Neel repeatedly described the absolute necessity of visualising an inner sensation, and inner reality, as the motivation for her tireless productivity as an artist.’

There is a wealth of evidence to support the view that she had a special affinity with those our unequal society has left behind, what in Collecting souls is called ‘opposites’. The Belchers list her typical subjects in Havana as ‘beggars, poor mothers, and blank-eyed children, black dancers, and quietly desperate old people.’[3] It’s perhaps worth noting that Naifeh and White Smith in their biography of van Gogh describe him as equally fixated on the same strata of his society in his early work: he did not display the same degree of understanding as Neel seems to have done, and one reason he chose such models may have been that he could afford no others.

Neel’s motivation seems to have been more political: painting the left behind was her way of ‘condemning the society that produced outcasts.’[4] She joined the Communist Party in the mid-1930s, as ‘the thing to do for anyone with a social conscience.’[5] One of her admirers called her a ‘poet of the ugly, the lyrical, the down and out, bohemian to the core.’[6]This relates to the description of someone else who knew her:[7]

“You have done in art what writers do in the characterisation in a novel. You have called yourself a collector of souls; you have said that you would like to make the world happy.

There seemed to have been other factors at play as well. Lewison, in his introduction to Painter of Modern Life[8], mentions the possibility that in her art ‘a new humanism was another way of maintaining or developing painting’s relevance post photography.’ Annamari Vänskä, in her article in the same volume, describes ‘the driving theme of Neel’s output is her social consciousness’ and argues that she ‘saw art as an arena for social criticism .’[9]

There is another possibility, which complements rather than contradicts this perspective. In the Catalogue of Works which completes the volume Painter of Modern Life the commentary on the painting Mother and Child refers to Neel’s ‘lifelong interest in depicting mothers with their children.’ This sits easily alongside what the book describes as Neel’s ‘great empathy for the disadvantaged.’ [10]

However, her interest in this theme of motherhood to me also implies that there might also be an element of projection in Neel’s portrayals of her subjects. This could easily combine most of the time with a degree of genuine sympathy with the subject. It may even have helped enhance the emotional impact of her portraits.

There will be more to say on this matter when I come to discuss her choice of Expressionism. For now, suffice it to add, her attitude to motherhood was in no way sentimental. She painted it as it was in a way that was anticipated by Munch ‘when he wrote in a notebook around 1889: “No longer should you paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. They must be living beings who breathe and feel and love and suffer.”’[11]

The Catalogue continues to highlight how she conveys ‘a sense of adversity experienced by the poor in a period of high capitalism,’[12] and, for example, portrays ‘an African-American man with his Caucasian or Hispanic girlfriend in 1954’ as ‘a statement of solidarity with a cause.’[13]

Death, as I mentioned in the first post of this sequence, was also a constant preoccupation, not least because of her loss of Santillana, ‘as it had been in the mind of her mother following the death of her child, Hartley, from diphtheria before Alice was born.’[14] We will see later a powerful example, painted towards the end of her life, where she captures the grief of a young woman for the death of her mother, even as she paints that portrait in full knowledge of her own diagnosis of terminal cancer – a perfect fusion of empathy and projection.

The issue of projection was almost certainly not restricted only to motherhood and death. In the Catalogue of Works there is a rare self-portrait painted late in life. The comment on it contains an illuminating sentence:[15]

Neel was, in general, uninterested in self-portraits, preferring to project herself into others; thus in some senses her portraits of other people contain elements of her own character.

We are left at this point with a quandary. Did she choose the subjects of her paintings because she genuinely felt for them or because she perceived them as reflections of herself, or possibly both?

I think the evidence suggests it was a bit of both. The Belchers’ view is that:[16]

. . . as an individual who had suffered greatly, she painted pictures that communicated one of her core creeds, that “no one on earth should suffer.”

and mention that:[17]

art historians have noted simply that her paintings during this period were marked by “an unusual mingling of social commitment and subjective intensity.“

Whatever the exact truth of that may be, her work became more clearly expressive, partly as a result of an enforced change of medium:[18]

Her other discovery, during those months and the following year, was also the result of her poverty. She learnt to paint, expressively and with control, in watercolours… If Alice had been able to stay with oils alone, she might not have developed the crisp new style with the bold lines that became her hallmark after 1930.

Alongside that,[19] ‘[as] Alice withdrew increasingly into herself, her paintings exploded in expressiveness. Her line grew bolder as her morbid preoccupation with herself grew stronger.’

More of that next time when we come to consider in more detail her choice of Expressionism.

References

[1]. Painter of Modern Life – page 46.

[2]. Ibid. – Page 38.

[3]. Collecting Souls – page 78.

[4]. Ibid. – page 80.

[5]. Ibid. – page 159.

[6]. Ibid. – page 242.

[7]. Ibid. – page 247.

[8]. Painter of Modern Life – page 28.

[9]. Ibid. – page 58.

[10]. Ibid. – page 70.

[11]. Ibid. – page 166.

[12]. Ibid. – page 112.

[13]. Ibid. – page 132.

[14]. Ibid. – page 124.

[15]. Ibid. – page 206.

[16]. Collecting Souls – page 176.

[17]. Ibid. –  page 172.

[18] Ibid. – page 88.

[19] Ibid. – page 123.

Book Review – ‘Collecting Souls’ (2/4): Alice Neel – her mental health

Benny and Mary Ellen Andrews, 1972 (scanned from Alice Neel: Painter of Modern Life – page 191)

The sequence which partly focused on Táhirih caused me to think about other female artists who, while they did not suffer devaluation as a woman as she did, were also seriously underestimated for much of their lives. Alice Neal is one such artist. 

I am going to leap to rather later in her life to gain an understanding of where her attempt to deal with the conflict between art and life described in the first post led her. We’ll see whether she was simply leaping out of a frying pan into a fire, or whether something more constructive was in process.

In spite of being clearly drawn towards social causes, she was not a ‘joiner,’ as I have mentioned already in the first post. She seemed instead to be ‘a loner whom events pressed for commitment’ but ‘her real commitment’ was ‘on canvas and not in cabals or on committees.’[1]

From 1936 until the end of 1941, she ‘had lived with two different men, [and] had a son by each.’ Her explanation for why her life was ‘so out of hand . . . was her complete devotion to her art. She consciously created her art; the rest of her life just happened.’[2] Her relationships with men were hardly ideal. When Spanish Harlem was her home, she lived with Sam Brody, who was ‘[s]elfish and quarrelsome’ and even ‘sometimes violent.’ Her relationship with Hartley, her second son by Sam, was ‘complex and difficult’ for the next seventeen years.[3]

But more difficult even than all that, by her own account, was ‘living with the selfishness that painting demanded.’[4] She said that ‘to be an artist, one must have the will of the devil.’[5] Those who knew her described her as having a ‘tremendous ego,’ and beneath her ‘marked sweetness’ lurked undertones of ‘unpleasantness and a touch of paranoia.’[6] In summary, ‘She was becoming, to some, intolerably self-centred.’[7] In a commentary on her painting Benny and Mary Ellen Andrews, the adjective ‘narcissistic’ creeps into the mix.[8]

It’s not looking good on the basis of this, neither for her quality of life nor the nature of her character.

Neel & Santillana at Belmar, New Jersey, 1928 (scanned from page 220, ‘Alice Neel: Painter of Modern Life’)

The Mental Health cost

Possibly the worst of it was the impact of all this on her mental health. Santillana, her first child, died two weeks before her first birthday. Isabella, or as Carlos preferred to call her, Isabetta, was lost to her along with Carlos when they split. When she was asked once, later in life, what caused her breakdown, she did not mention any of that:[9]

… But when she was honest with herself, she was able to admit that she had reached the point when she was no longer able to cope with the demands made on her by her passion for painting, her love of Carlos, her guilt over her children, and her dread of the future.

Moreover,[10] ‘It was in her mother’s home that she was made to feel irresponsible and selfish for wanting to paint.’

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the attitudes of the time both to women and to art, in the mental hospital, [11] ‘Whatever their technical diagnosis, they would not let her draw or paint. Instead, they wanted her to sew.’

And this is the point where I think we get at least a pointer towards the true nature of the issue here:[12]

. . . by denying her art, her psychiatrists denied a part of her.

. . . Would her treatment have been different if one of her psychiatrists had penetrated to her soul and there discovered a need for painting so great that it had consumed most of the rest of her identity?

If this description is true, what exactly does it imply?

I am currently revisiting the life and art of van Gogh. The biography by Naifeh and White Smith suggests a more disturbingly intense but not dissimilar combination of factors: most pertinent here would be his mental instability, his fractious relationships with others and in the last quarter of his life the possibility that a complete and unqualified devotion to his art gave him at least in part the fulfilment he had been yearning for all his life, even though its true value went unrecognised in his lifetime.

And that last point, a dearth of recognition, was also true for Neel over many decades. She did at least live long enough, though, to earn respect as an artist before she died.

During the peak of her breakdown she contemplated suicide. What helped her transcend that darkness? Her art:[13]

. . . Alice decided, sometime in the spring of 1931, not to die. Virginia Woolf found no reason to live; Alice did.… Alice stumbled again onto art. She credited the rediscovery with saving her life.

It was not an easy path back to her vocation, but she trod it successfully:[14]

. . . .at the time she started to draw again, Alice was incontinent. But she had to learn to hold her bladder long enough to execute a drawing. It was torture, but she imposed this first of many disciplines upon herself in order to do art. From that point on, she decided to get well.

In perhaps a similar way to van Gogh, her art was her most constructive way of connecting with life: in her case, this was with mainly people:[15] ‘Alice Neel once said that, for her, painting was a way of reducing the distance between herself and others, and the world around her. It enabled her to express a deeper sense of experience: [16] ‘Neel repeatedly described the absolute necessity of visualising an inner sensation, and inner reality, as the motivation for her tireless productivity as an artist.’

This is where it becomes difficult to dismiss her dedication to her art as merely narcissistic, while at the same time making it equally hard to excuse its cost to others, including her children, even though many of her paintings inspire the kind of compassion she sometimes seemed to lack. She’s by no means the only artist enacting this dilemma.

Which brings us to point at which I need to discuss her social conscience or should I say consciousness. I’ll save that for next time.

References:

[1]. Collecting Souls – page 168.

[2]. Ibid. – page 177.

[3]. Ibid. – page 178-79.

[4]. Ibid. – page 202.

[5]. Ibid. – page 203.

[6]. Ibid. – page 204.

[7]. Ibid. – page 213.

[8]. Painter of Modern Life – page 190.

[9]. Collecting Souls – page 136.

[10]. Ibid. – page 137

[11]. Ibid. – page  139.

[12]. Ibid. – page 140.

[13]. Ibid. – pages 142-43.

[14]. Ibid. – page 143.

[15]. Painter of Modern Life – page 46.

[16]. Ibid. – Page 38.