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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.
Posted in Poems | Tagged spirituality, mysticism, poetry, Mind, heaven | Leave a Comment »
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.
Posted in Poems, Poetry & Song, Spirituality | Tagged poetry | Leave a Comment »
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.”
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.
[3]. Collecting Souls – page 78.
[8]. Painter of Modern Life – page 28.
Posted in Art & Writing, Book Reviews | Tagged Alice Neel, communism, death, Edvard Munch, Expressionism, Gerald & Margaret Belcher, Jeremy Lewison, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Vincent van Gogh | Leave a Comment »
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.
Posted in Art & Writing, Book Reviews | Tagged Alice Neel, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Vincent van Gogh, Virginia Woolf | Leave a Comment »