backstory: Another painting from the past
Last week I saw Alice Neel: People Come First at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Neel is an artist in whom I’ve long been interested, particularly since I studied and then included her subway and elevated train works in my book, Art and the Subway: New York Underground, years ago.
Many of those works were in this show and it was a treat to view them again, particularly Nazis Murder Jews, a deeply haunting work that was featured on the cover of the catalogue for the Robert Miller Gallery show of her 1930s work (my favorite period of her work) in which I first saw her subway and elevated train works.
But that’s not the painting from the past to which I’m referring. Rather, as was the case with last week’s backstory, it was another work from the collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts entitled T. B. Harlem, a portrait of the Neel’s lover’s brother, Carlos Negrón, recovering from a procedure to treat tuberculosis. While Neel’s portraits in her later years of painting feature friends and family, as does this work, they are typically named, straight portraits in the artist’s signature style. T. B. Harlem, rather, appears metaphorical, pointing to the ways in which illness swarmed the neighborhood in which she was living at the time.
See the show, if you can.
Be safe, be well…
But that’s not the painting from the past to which I’m referring. Rather, as was the case with last week’s backstory, it was another work from the collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts entitled T. B. Harlem, a portrait of the Neel’s lover’s brother, Carlos Negrón, recovering from a procedure to treat tuberculosis. While Neel’s portraits in her later years of painting feature friends and family, as does this work, they are typically named, straight portraits in the artist’s signature style. T. B. Harlem, rather, appears metaphorical, pointing to the ways in which illness swarmed the neighborhood in which she was living at the time.
See the show, if you can.
Be safe, be well…
Tracy Fitzpatrick
Director, Neuberger Museum of Art
Interim Managing Director, The Performing Arts Center
Find me on Twitter @tracyfitzart
p.s. I’ve been doing this work a long time now and it absolutely never gets old to see an object from a collection with which I’ve worked in the past and know that I was entrusted to be among the team that cares (curare—the Latin from which we derive the word curate) for the work … and that I actually helped carry that work from one place to another. Never, never gets old.