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“I like to paint – I love to paint, in fact. I feel as though I’m living for a purpose, that life isn’t just empty. … One of the reasons I painted was to catch life as it goes by, hot off the griddle” — Alice Neel

As we emerge, blinking in the daylight of the easing of pandemic lockdowns, one of our favorite activities – particularly being here in New York – has been to visit uncrowded and crowd-restricted museums and galleries. Beyond the delight of seeing art in person again, actually looking forward to an exhibition feels almost like a forbidden pleasure. One of the many exhibitions we are looking forward to this spring is a new retrospective of the work of painter Alice Neel at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Neel’s first retrospective in over 20 years, Alice Neel: People Come First is particularly timely as it foregrounds the influence that the city and people of New York had on Neel, as well as her commitment to social justice. The exhibition opens March 22, but you can catch the exhibition trailer here.

We also want to draw attention to this fantastic new feature from the Met – a digital “primer” on the exhibition.

From the Met:

Alice Neel: People Come First will be the first museum retrospective in New York of American artist Alice Neel (1900–1984) in twenty years. This ambitious survey will position Neel as one of the century’s most radical painters, a champion of social justice whose longstanding commitment to humanist principles inspired her life as well as her art, as demonstrated in the approximately one hundred paintings, drawings, and watercolors that will appear in The Met’s survey. […]

Neel was a longtime resident of New York, and the city served as her most faithful subject. Indeed, the sum total of her work testifies to the drama of its streets, the quotidian beauty of its buildings, and, most importantly, the diversity, resilience, and passion of its residents. “For me, people come first,” Neel declared in 1950. “I have tried to assert the dignity and eternal importance of the human being.”