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.
Sometime in 2017 I made a trip, not for the first time, to Hay on Wye. For those who do not know, this is a book lovers’ paradise. However, it is probably a dangerous place for a bookaholic such as myself to visit.
I came back with my usual trawl of several only apparently fascinating books, including over the years, as my worst example in 1992, the complete works of Chaucer in a single hefty volume, which has remained unread ever since.
One of the purchases, though, has stood the test of time: it’s Collecting souls, gathering dust by Gerald and Margaret Belcher. It describes the lives of two initially closely connected people, Alice Neel and Rhoda Medary.
I have touched on their relationship briefly in an earlier post, written shortly after encountering her work for the first time.
The main impression I was left with at that point I summarised as follows:
Her dedication to portraying the oppressed delayed her due recognition till very late in life. Her motive was not gain but compassion. The portraits are still in part maps of her awareness of and responses to the subject as a person, a fellow human being, not just plain reproductions of their outer appearance. The courageous portrait of Rita and Hubert, at a time when the current of racism ran stronger even than now in American society, testifies to that, I think.
Recently I felt moved to revisit her work and the biography I’d read. I came away thinking I need to do more justice to the depth and complexity of her work, and the way it again forced me to confront the vexed issue of the artist and their life. She has been labelled a ‘narcissist’ and I feel the need to try and tease out how far a devotion to any form of art must necessarily interfere with our relationships with others and how far this warrants applying that pejorative label.
It is important to flag up right from the start that there are several issues that predispose me to connect favourably to Alice Neel in spite of all her well-recorded failings.
First, there is the conflict described in ‘Collecting Souls:’[1]
‘Alice was not a leader or a joiner. She was a loner who events pressed for commitment. She joined groups, but made her real commitment on canvas and not in cabals or on committees.’
Right from the joke my Jungian psychotherapist shared with me many decades ago, even to some extent till now, there is a reason why this resonates with me. We were discussing what my epitaph would be. With a wide grin he suggested, ‘He died with his options open.’ I had consistently found ways of avoiding making commitments or joining groups. Even though I have been an active Bahá’í now for 39 years and married for almost as long, the way I have gravitated towards poets and artists who are misfits and loners strongly suggests that I share their ‘solitario’ streak to some extent, as a number of posts on this blog seem to indicate.
Then there is the question of death.
In reading the gloss to Neel’s picture of her dead father, I found:[2]
‘Death was ever present in Neel’s mind following the demise of her first child, as it had been in the mind of her mother following the death of her child, Hartley, from diphtheria before Alice was born.’
It should come as no surprise to anyone who has read my poems about my family to hear that my sister Mary’s dying four years before I was born in 1943, and the atmosphere of grief surrounding my childhood, causes me to resonate to that.
Then we have her taste in art. The painters she admired included Munch, Van Gogh and Goya, three of my favourite artists, as my blog once more suggests in places. The fact that they steered her towards an expressionist rather than an abstract form of art also helps me connect more easily with her work
Her social values, which led to art as her kind of activism, were not dissimilar to the values which led me to move from socialism and choose the activism of providing therapeutic support to one of the more neglected groups in our society: those who had been labelled psychotic.
I don’t think these biases blind me completely to her flaws as a person or her possible limitations as an artist, but they might lead me to minimise them somewhat, so beware.
There are now three main themes that I would like to explore:
1. The Art versus Life conflict, with its associated issues of aloneness, possible narcissism and mental health problems;
2. Her social consciousness and related issues of humanism and communism; and
3. Expressionism.
Art versus Life
I’ll make a start on this theme now and expand on it more fully in the next post.
First of all I want to confirm that there was indeed such a conflict for her.
Collecting Souls portrays exactly that. Almost from the start, she was concerned that her first husband/partner, Carlos, ‘would want more. He would expect children, a commitment of a new kind.’ He would want her to ‘become the mother of his children.,’[3] but she ‘refused to play the role of Cinderella and live happily ever after.’[4] She didn’t ‘want to be pregnant.’ She rebelled in Havana when she sensed ‘more strongly the restrictions that Latin motherhood was about to impose on her freedom.’ [5]
After the birth of her first daughter, Santillana, ‘she felt more trapped’ because she ‘was a distraction who took time away from the day and night painting schedule that had been established before her birth.’[6] She wondered whether Carlos would be able to withstand ‘the pressures from his family to take control of his wife and bring his daughter back into the family household.’ She could not be sure so ‘[w]ithin four months of their move to La Vibora, in May 1927, Alice packed her paints, bundled up her baby, and fled Havana, Cuba, and Carlos.’[7]And with this dramatic illustration of where art can conflict with the demands of ordinary life I’ll pause for now.
[1]. Collecting Souls – page 168.
[2]. Painter of Modern Life – page 124.
[3]. Collecting Souls – Page 73.
[4]. Ibid. – page 75.
[5]. Ibid. – page 78.
[6]. Ibid. – page 81.
[7]. Ibid. – page 82.
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