Alice Neel and the rest of the world

When i decided to dedicate my blog to one of my favourite painters, Alice Neel, i didnt have to look far to discover her influence in the media World. One of the first journals i found in the library,"Woman's Art Journal", had one of her paintings on the front cover! Was this fate? I just dont know! But inside was 13 pages dedicated to the lovely lady herself! I have found a link to the site (http://www.womansartjournal.org/27-2.php) but unfortunately it doesnt have the articles themselves. So im going to do a bit of summing up so you get the basics...

The first article is written by Mary D. Garrard and is entitled "Alice Neel and Me". Garrard sat for Neel in 1977 after they had met through a mutual friend at a party. Throughout this article she reminises about the times they shared together and their dedication to feminism. She talks admiringly about once of Neel's last pieces, her self portrait: "[Neel] breaks at least three conventions of artistic tradition. One is that the female nude presents women as objects of the male gaze. As if to redeem the Naked Majas of art history, Neel rises upright, trailing pentimenti, defiantly proclaiming the nude's right to come to life and fight back. Next, this naked old woman escapes the critical gaze through irony: she wields a paintbrush, the tool that artists like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner strategically positioned at the groin when painting themselves, forging metaphoric links between pen and penis, brush and penis, to reify the machismo of art...But wait! Artistic virility has not been omitted, merely artfully and cleverly transferred to the big toe of the painter's right foot. As the foot arches up, the toe's erection sets the painting's curves into rhyme, pulling lumpen shapes of a sagging, aging body into aesthetic harmonies of pure design.
The third taboo os that old women are not fit subjects for art...Stripping her own dignity away entirely,exposing all, she dissolves us in laughter where Rembrandt would dissolve us in tears."

The second is entitled "Alice Neel's Women from the 1970s" "Backlash to Fast Forward" and is written by Pamela Allara, the same writer who composed a book on Neel entitled "Pictures of People, Alice Neel's American Portrait Gallery." The article itself talks of Neels feminist activism and her career, as well as looking in depth at her works. Allara described Neels as "a sort of artist-sociologist who revived and redirected the dying genre of ameliorative portraiture by merging objectivity with subjectivity, realism with expressionism."

The final article is by Mira Schor and titled "Alice Neel as an Abstract Painter" and is another in depth look at Neel's works, but this time as an abstract painter. She is quoted in the article by saying: "I don't do realism. I do a combination of realism and expressionism. It's never just realism. I hate the New Realism. I hate equating a person and a room and a chair. Compostitionally, a room, a chair, a table and a person are all the same for me, but a person is human and psychological."