Alice Neel: A Painter of People First

Alice Neel called herself a 'collector of souls'. The Metropolitan Museum's 2021 retrospective 'People Come First' celebrated the American painter who spent her life making honest, tender, unsparing portraits of the people around her.

She painted neighbours, activists, pregnant women, the poor and the famous alike — in Spanish Harlem and Greenwich Village — with a directness that captured both the body and the inner life.

Overlooked for decades while abstraction reigned, Neel was rediscovered late in life and, in this major survey, confirmed as one of the great humanist artists of 20th-century America.

Image: “Bust of Shapur II the Great in the Metropolitan Museum of Art” — Unknown author, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.