At the invitation of Fabienne Dumont, seven women artists cast an eye on the work of American painter Alice Neel (1900-1984).
The work of Alice Neel is marked by a powerful political and social commitment. Down the years, she mainly produced portraits, realistic accounts of the remarkable diversity of America. For Transatlantique, art historian Fabienne Dumont brings together seven European women artists and their views on this exceptional body of work.
Fabienne Dumont is an art historian, art critic and associate professor at the Jean-Monnet-Saint-Étienne University, specializing in feminist, gender and queer issues addressed from a cultural, social, and political point of view. After editing the anthology La rébellion du Deuxième Sexe – L'histoire de l'art au crible des théories féministes anglo-américaines (1970-2000) (Les presses du réel, 2011), Dumont published her thesis as the book Des sorcières comme les autres:Artistes et féministes dans la France des années 1970 (PUR, 2014) and went on to co-edit two collective projects, L'histoire n'est pas donnée. Art contemporainet postcolonialité en France (PUR, 2016) and À l'Ouest toute ! Travailleuses de Bretagne et d'ailleurs (Les presses du réel, 2017). In 2019, she cocurated at the MAC VAL the exhibition Nil Yalter, TRANS/HUMANCE. On this occasion two books were published with her texts: Nil Yalter – Where the memories of migrants, feminists and workers meet mythology (MAC VAL Éditions) and Nil Yalter: Interview with Fabienne Dumont (Manuella Éditions/Aware).
Born in 1900 in Merion Square, Pennsylvania, Alice Neel lived in Philadelphia and Havana before settling in New York (where she lived until her death in 1984), becoming part of the social milieu of the Harlem neighbourhood. She painted figuratively throughout her life, often using the people "around her" as subjects, models and muses. For Neel, this meant portraying both the residents of Harlem as well as strangers, friends and intellectuals who often shared her proximity to the Communist Party. A figurative painter in an era dominated by Abstract Expressionism, Neel developed remarkable and radical new ways of representing the human body in painting, such as with her celebrated nudes of pregnant women.. The introspective aspect of Neel's work, her ability to capture the essence of her subjects and their souls, has made her today one of the most appreciated and respected artists of the twentieth century.
Neel's work has been the subject of retrospectives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. It forms part of the permanent collections of institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Moderna Museet in Stockholm; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston; the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Tate Modern in London; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota; and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
