Alice Neel Movie 1pm Peacock Hall

The Rossmoor Art Association will show Documentary on painter Alice Neel March 6th, 2024; Wednesday @ 1:00 pm
Peacock Hall/Theatre

Alice Neel’s paintings have been described as having reinvented the genre of portraiture by expressing the inner landscape of her varied sitters. This film tells the story of Neel’s life, exploring the struggles she faced as a woman artist, a single mother and a painter who defied convention.

Alice Neel (1900-1984) was an American artist known for her portraits depicting friends, family, lovers, poets, artists, and strangers. Her career spanned from the 1920s to 1980s. Her paintings have an expressionistic use of line and color, psychological acumen, and emotional intensity. She pursued a career as a figurative painter during a period when abstraction was favored, and she did not begin to gain critical praise for her work until the 1960s.

Her work contradicts and challenges the traditional and objectified nude depictions of women by her male predecessors. She does this by depicting women through a female gaze, while aware of the objectification by men.
Neel was called “one of the greatest portrait artists of the 20th century” by Barry Walker, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which organized a retrospective of her work in 2010.