Alice Neel (1900-1984) was one of the most remarkable American artists of the 20th century. Best known for her intense portraits, Neel was never especially fashionable or in step with avant-garde art movements; pursuing her own path and sympathetic both to the expressionist tradition of Northern European painting and the darker aspects of Spanish art, she worked in a style that was distinctly her own. Although widely admired in her lifetime, Alice Neel's paintings have only recently begun to receive the attention they deserve, and this is in no small part due to the impact of the recent retrospective of her work, Alice Neel: Painted Truths, organised by The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which travelled to the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and the Moderna Museet, Malmo.
