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.
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.
[8]. Painter of Modern Life – page 190.
[9]. Collecting Souls – page 136.
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