Artists

Alice Neel (1900-1984) started out with three strikes against her: she was a woman, she was a woman artist, she was a woman artist who ignored American abstraction and painted portraits of real people, people she knew. That she painted portraits not of the rich and famous merely compounded her difficulties. Painting in her home without gallery or museum recognition, her career reflected the larger cultural pattern of ignoring female talent that then pervaded the country. Until the 1970s she had neither recognition nor sales.

The recent traveling Retrospective Exhibition - Previously at the Addison Gallery of American Art, Massachusetts, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, opening this month at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, then moving on the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and Denver Museum of Art - has stimulated renewed interest in her career. As a result, the paintings now sell for upwards of $200,000, the drawings between $16,000-25,000. The prints have not yet escalated in price.