Eliana Willis

It must have taken many hands to rush the Bolognese Mannerist artist Lavinia Fontana’s most ambitious extant painting, a nearly 10-foot-long canvas from 1599, out of a burning building during the French Revolution. Smaller artworks would have been easier to salvage from the Palais Royale when revolutionaries torched it during the days of the Paris Commune, but still, someone thought to rescue Fontana’s The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon. When it entered the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland the next year it was murky and darkened by smoke. And there it has remained for over 150 years, almost always displayed but never fully restored. Until now.
The National Gallery of Ireland has comprehensively conserved the work over the past few years, generating new insights into the practice and patrons of the painter, who was the rare Renaissance female artist to command prices equal to those of her male peers. At the base of an ornate clock held by one of the queen’s attendants in this Biblical story—which, in true Fontana fashion, is dominated by a female cast of exquisitely dressed characters—an inscription reads 1599 (a date previously unknown). And new theories have surfaced about possible real-life models for Solomon and Sheba, maybe the Duke and Duchess of Ferrara.
These discoveries, and others, have spurred the museum to organize a solo exhibition of more than 60 paintings and drawings, “Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule Breaker,” opening May 6. It is the artist’s first major solo presentation in over 20 years.
Lavinia Fontana, The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon (1599). Image: National Gallery of Ireland.
Fontana is known mostly for her impressive life story. She was the first professional woman artist in Italy working outside a convent or court system, and fully supported her husband and children with her work (which included commissions from nobility and popes). She was also the first known woman painter to depict female nudes.
Less is known about the technical side of her work.
“We tend to be, as scholars, preoccupied by women’s biographies, which of course are fascinating when we consider the contexts in which they were working in 16th- and 17th-century Italy,” said Aoife Brady, the National Gallery of Ireland’s curator of Italian and Spanish art. “But sometimes that preoccupation comes at the expense of close looking at their artworks and defining exactly what it is that makes a Lavinia Fontana.”
Preparing around half of the artist’s oeuvre to be exhibited in the show has produced new technical data, better equipping scholars to make firm attributions to Fontana.
There isn’t a firm consensus about how many artworks Fontana produced, but around 130 extant paintings are attributable to her. Given the wave of interest in the artist over the past few years, more people are eager to pin paintings to Fontana and her attributions are “a moveable feast at the moment,” according to Brady. “We’re seeing this massive reassessment of her oeuvre.”
Lavinia Fontana, Minerva Dressing (1613). Courtesy of Galleria Borghese. Photo: Mauro Coen.
This comes as Fontana has recently featured in major group exhibitions at the Prado, the Wadsworth Atheneum, Detroit Institute of Arts, and Milan’s Palazzo Reale. Several Fontana works entered museum collections within the past year: The National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. acquired Fontana’s portrait of musician Lucia Bonasoni Garzoni, for example, and the National Gallery of Victoria acquired the Mystic Marriage of St Catherine. The Getty acquired two Fontana works separately—a small painting on copper and the preparatory drawing made for it.
This swell of interest may seem sudden, but according to Babette Bohn, an art history professor at Texas Christian University and author of Women Artists, Their Patrons, and Their Publics in Early Modern Bologna, attention has come and gone for the Bolognese painter. “From my vantage point she’s always been famous,” Bohn said. “She received more biographies by early modern writers in Italy than any other woman artist during the 16th century.”
Thanks to these biographies, we know that she was born to a successful artist, Prospero Fontana, who was prominent in Bolognese society and trained her in his workshop. The future artist was born into the right family, and in the ideal location.
“Bologna as a city was a very special place, and that provided the perfect Petri dish for Fontana and her career,” explained Brady. Home to Europe’s oldest university, during Fontana’s lifetime it was ruled by an archbishop with liberal attitudes about both artists and women.
Lavinia Fontana, The Wedding Feast at Cana (c.1575-80). Courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.
Bologna was one major factor, but Fontana also had a supportive family. This wasn’t a coincidence, since her father proactively found her a spouse who would support her career (and help her negotiate with clients, something decorum prevented 16th-century women from doing). She married Gian Paolo Zappi, a man with good social standing and little earning potential, and their unusual marriage contract (to be exhibited at “Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule Breaker”) stipulated that he’d support her in pursuing a professional career.
Before their marriage was cinched, Fontana painted Self Portrait at the Spinet (1577) and sent it to Zappi’s family as a testament of her skill. This visual proof of her breadwinning abilities proved true. One of her 17th-century biographers, Carlo Cesare Malvasia, pointed out that Fontana’s fees were equal to those of Anthony Van Dyck and Justus Sustermans.
What those male contemporaries didn’t have to contend with, though, was the challenge of working while pregnant and postpartum. Fontana gave birth 11 times between 1578 and 1595, meaning she was pregnant or post-childbirth for a major part of her professional life. Most of her work during her childbearing years (and she sometimes had to return to work sooner than was medically recommended, because she was her family’s earner) was of small- or medium-scale work—more suitable for postpartum recovery. On the other hand, some of her largest works date to the late 1590s when she was no longer having children.
The smaller scale works that were Fontana’s bread and butter were her portraits of important Bolognese figures, at first men and then by the 1580s the noblewomen of the city. She painted more portraits of women than either her predecessors or successors, focusing on their strength of character and detailed rendering of their clothing and jewelry, bringing a distinctly female perspective to female subjects.
Lavinia Fontana, Venus and Cupid (1592). © Réunion des Musées Métropolitains Rouen Normandie, Musée des Beaux-Arts.
“All the ladies of the city flocked in want of her,” wrote Malvasia, “considering themselves lucky to see her in the streets, or to have meetings in the company of the virtuous young woman; there was nothing greater that they desired than to be portrayed by her.”
Fontana’s portraits of women highlight one of her most distinctive qualities—her painstakingly accurate depictions of textiles and jewelry. Written contracts survive between Fontana and her clients showing that the artist sometimes borrowed her sitters’ jewelry, to paint it as accurately as possible when sittings were no longer necessary.
This attention to detail extended to garments, too. “She has this great understanding of paint and can use it like a weaver uses thread,” said Brady. “Just by manipulating lead white pigment and using it almost like thread, she applies paint in a way that’s very intuitive and almost craftsman-like.”
In the late 1590s Fontana moved to Rome, where she was a portraitist for Pope Paul V. Also around this time she painted Vision of Saint Hyacinth (1599), the first altarpiece by a woman to be publicly displayed in Rome, and the ambitious Queen of Sheba canvas that was later rescued from a burning Palais Royale.
As scholars and audiences look closer now at Fontana’s life-sized Queen of Sheba, freshly cleaned from the smokey veil that hid the subtleties of her features all these years, a greater understanding of Fontana also comes into focus.
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As collectors and curators ritualistically shuffled around Berlin, donning Moncler jackets during this unseasonably cold week in April, the mood of the annual Gallery Weekend Berlin felt, in any case, bright.
Spring is certainly here, and, in terms of the Berlin art world, it felt in some ways like the first real spring in years: after several seasons of largely locally attended editions due to the pandemic, Gallery Weekend now, is officially back on its feet. As such, many out-of-towners were spotted perusing the city’s 50 participant galleries, including collector Uli Sigg, Folakunle Oshun from the Lagos Biennial, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea’s Marcella Beccaria, and Hiuwai Chu from MACBA, as well as Cusson Cheng, Para-site Hong Kong.
In the time between normal editions of the art event, Berlin has evolved, too. A new social energy pulses as four of its major institutions welcome new directors. This week, Klaus Biesenbach was touring the preview on April 27, affectionately documenting artists and dealers on his Instagram at various participating galleries. At Gropius Bau, Performance Space’s Jenny Schlenzka will be arriving this summer to take over the reigns from Stephanie Rosenthal; at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung is preparing for his official program unveiling in early June. Tomorrow, April 29, at the Hamburger Bahnhof, new directors Sam Bardaouil und Till Fellrath will host the annual Gallery Weekend dinner, attended by the nearly 50 participating galleries and scores of their invited VIPs.
The apparent influx has radiated back on the galleries, which have been perhaps Berlin’s most consistently strong suit over the years. Artnet News tied together a loose grouping three core themes that are worth exploring at this year’s Gallery Weekend Berlin, which opens today, April 28.

The Post-Internet Art Scene’s Eternal Returns
Timur Si-Qin, Untitled (2023) (sculpture) and Untitled (natural origin, 1) (2023) (wall work). Courtesy the artist and Société, Berlin.
One could argue if it really went anywhere at all, but, at least in Berlin—an incubator of the post-Internet art aesthetic that peaked during the 2016 DIS-curated Berlin Biennale—there was a small but noted hiatus. In due course, many of the artists associated with the scene have had celebratory comebacks; last fall, during the annual Berlin Art Week in September, Jon Rafman opened a pair of major exhibitions at Sprüth Magers and the art institution Schinkel Pavilion; at Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, video artist Ed Atkins returned to town as well. Given the city’s own history with the the aesthetics and discourse, artists working at this cusp of technology find an engaged and well-versed audience. For Berlin Gallery Weekend this year, the welcome home party continues with artists who intersect with that cohort.
At Société, New York-based artist Timur Si-Qin (who presented at the 2016 Berlin Biennale) has transformed the gallery into a darkened and serene semblance of a greenhouse using technologically-embedded nature, culled from memories and field notes of physical locations the artist has visited. He folds these disparate geographic sites together here into one all-encompassing environment for his exhibition “Natural Origin.” At Galerie Neu, through a new array of cozy sculptures, Olso-based Ynge Holen explores the contentious 5G networks which have already deeply infiltrated society and the landscape. Across town at Wentrup, German artist Britta Thie brings together a series of paintings depicting the backdrops behind the camera of the cinema industry, including solemn and sentimental portraits of the mechanical hardware—lighting, cameras, and other gear—that quietly drive, document, and populate film sets. More

For children growing up in the New York City metro area over the last three decades, New Jersey’s Liberty Science Center looms large in the imagination as a place of endless experiments and creativity. Now, the interactive science museum and learning center is also becoming a hub for contemporary art, thanks to a new “Big Art” initiative that launched at the start of this month with two installations by artists Dustin Yellin and Leandro Erlich.
“When I was a kid, you sort of had to wear a badge that either said you were an art person or a science person, but I always thought that there was a false dichotomy,” Liberty Science Center president and CEO Paul Hoffman told Artnet News. “Both art and science get at big questions that are at the core of the human experience. Artists and scientists both take risks. The creativity involved is very similar.”
The large-scale art installations are part of a wider overhaul at the center in celebration of its 30th anniversary, which includes a new 30-acre campus. While the majority of the installations planned won’t be ready until 2025, in the meantime, Erlich agreed to kick off “Big Art” early with an ambitious artwork called The Building.
Leandro Erlich’s The Building at Liberty Science Center, Jersey City. Photo by BFA.
The site-specific work, part of the Argentine conceptual artist’s renowned “Bâtiment” series, and the first one shown in the U.S., is an optical illusion that recreates the facade of a New York City apartment building in one-to-one scale—but it lies flat on the floor, reflected into a mirror angled above so that it appears that visitors interacting with the piece are literally scaling the walls or hanging precariously from the fire escapes.
Less monumental but equally stunning is Yellin’s sculpture The Politics of Eternity, a Boschian tableau made from 10,000 pounds of layers of glass laminating tens of thousands of paper cutouts and painted details. (There’s even, hidden somewhere in there, a tiny image of the Mona Lisa and a Where’s Waldo, which Yellin is confident will elude all but the most persistent searchers.)
“Leandro takes quotidian everyday objects and gets you to look at them in a different way,” Hoffman said. “Dustin’s piece is more phantasmagorical.”
Dustin Yellin with his piece The Politics of Eternity at Liberty Science Center, Jersey City. Photo by BFA.
In Yellin’s work, there are animal-headed figures surrounding an ancient totem on one side, and jetpack-powered astronauts building a technologically advanced society on the other, both burrowing into underground warrens, diving deep into the aquatic depths, and soaring toward the sun. Together, they tell an elaborate, seven-part story about civilization—past, present, and future.
“I’m really thrilled to present this work here,” Yellin said. “These kind of projects where we are able to collaborate and create things beyond the boundaries and specifications of our practice will lead us to something to new.… We can come up great new ideas that potentially help us with the challenges that we have ahead.”
The artist and a team of four assistants spent 20,000 hours making the piece over five years. This is the first time it’s been out of Yellin’s studio. (He hopes it will continue to travel to other institutions.)
Dustin Yellin, The Politics of Eternity (detail). Photo courtesy of Liberty Science Center, Jersey City.

“I think any institution that is creating a crossover of interdisciplinary things is building something unexpected,” Erlich said of the new initiative. Hoffman, who is effectively the institution’s curator, plans to stage two exhibitions a year, and is open to suggestions.
“We’re trying to make a statement with the art world that we’re open [and that] there are things that you can do in our space that you can’t necessarily do in a gallery,” he said. “I want stuff that can speak across ages, across cultures, across economic background.”
“The Building” and “The Politics of Eternity” are on view at Liberty Science Center, Liberty State Park, 222 Jersey City Boulevard, Jersey City, New Jersey.

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This morning, Tate Britain made its annual announcement of the four artists shortlisted for this year’s Turner Prize: Jesse Darling, Ghislaine Leung, Rory Pilgrim, and Barbara Walker. Their work will be exhibited at Towner Eastbourne museum in East Sussex from September 28 to April 14, 2024, with the winner later crowned at an award ceremony on December 5.
British artist Barbara Walker, 58, reflects on her life and the experiences of those around her on a range of scales, from intimate studies on paper to large murals. She was nominated for her “Burden of Proof,” exhibited at the current Sharjah Biennial (until June 11), a series of sensitive charcoal portrayals of people impacted by the Windrush Scandal, which saw hundreds of Caribbean workers who arrived to the U.K. between 1948 and 1971 wrongly detained or deported. Identity papers documenting the sitters’ right to remain have been layered into some of Walker’s portraits.
Ghislaine Leung, 42, a Swedish artist based in London, was nominated for the show “Fountains” at Simian in Copenhagen earlier this year. Known for her use of a “score,” or a set of instructions, in her artworks, Leung’s direction is always open to interpretation by the specific gallery working in collaboration with her. For example, the score for Fountains (2022) read, “a fountain installed in the exhibition space to cancel sound,” which led Simian to make use of its subterranean location beneath a public fountain to allow water to cascade down into the gallery space.
Installation view of Jesse Darling, “No Medals, No Ribbons” at Modern Art Oxford, 2022. Photo: Ben Westoby, © Modern Art Oxford.
The British-born, Berlin-based artist Jesse Darling, 41, makes installations from a range of materials and was nominated for two solo exhibitions from 2022: “No Medals, No Ribbons” at Modern Art Oxford and “Enclosures” at Camden Art Centre in London. The Oxford show was the largest of his career, and featured precarious sculptures stitched together using everyday items that had been strangely anthropomorphized, as in the case of plastic bags with metal limbs or a roller-coaster track rewrought into a misshapen, skeletal form.
The British artist Rory Pilgrim, 35, who works between the U.K. and The Netherlands, was nominated for RAFTS, a film commissioned last year by the Serpentine in London. Using music and song, he explores the symbol of a raft as a last resort structure during challenging times brought on by the pandemic and the climate crisis. It features perspectives voiced by eight residents of Barking and Dagenham in East London.
Though there is no obvious common thread between the shortlisted artists as was the case last year, when the cohort were all women or non-binary, but Tate Britian’s director Alex Farquharson commented that vulnerability was a shared theme, with each of the artworks speaking to “social themes, social structures, as well as a real sense of tenderness and humanity.”
One of the world’s most important accolades for contemporary art since 1984, the Turner Prize is known for showcasing radical artistic practices that have historically sparked debate. This year’s jury, chaired by Farquharson, comprises Martin Clark, director of Camden Art Centre, Cédric Fauq, chief curator at Capc Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux, Melanie Keen, director of the Wellcome Collection and Helen Nisbet, artistic director at Art Night.
The award ceremony on December 5 will take place at Eastbourne’s Winter Gardens, with a prize of £25,000 for the winner and £10,000 for each runner-up.
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Occasionally someone is lucky enough to come across forgotten or undervalued treasure in a charity shop, but it’s not often that they accidentally find an artist’s entire oeuvre. This is what happened to British artist Andy Holden, who discovered not only a collection of paintings by artist Hermione Burton, who died in 2007, but also her framed photographs and self-published autobiography while rifling through a shop in his hometown of Bedford a few years ago.
Now, Holden is presenting more than 20 of the artist’s paintings alongside his own interpretative films in the exhibition “Full of Days” at the Gallery of Everything in London.
With her slightly naive style, Burton would be classified as an outsider or self-taught artist today, but Holden was immediately drawn to her works’ fantastical, otherworldly nature. After reading her autobiography, which narrates the events of her life as well as delving into her lifelong struggle with rheumatic heart disease, Holden even tracked down some of her subjects to record their memories of Burton.
A still from Andy Holden, Kingdom of the Sick. Image courtesy of Andy Holden.
In the exhibition’s longest film, Kingdom of the Sick, which runs for 40 minutes, a motion capture animated version of Burton played by musician Sarah Cracknell is brought to life in the artist’s trademark red beret. The documentary/biopic gives audiences an overview of her life before offering Holden’s own interpretation of this found material that seeks to explore the ways in which sickness and grief can affect our experiences of time.
Burton was born in 1926 in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, but later moved with her second husband to live the U.S., where she became the one of the first-ever patients to undergo open-heart surgery. It was during her recovery that she turned to art.
Made homesick one day by hearing Tom Jones’s Green Green Grass of Home on the radio, she returned to England where she met her third husband, Frank Burton. As her health continued to decline and she was forced to undergo more surgery, Burton kept up her artistic practice and slowly started to gain local recognition, even exhibiting at the Gallery in Wellingborough in 1987.
As Burton frequently painted herself and those that were close to her, Holden has read her undated artworks as though they are a diary, but one without a strict linear structure. He has searched for narrative clues elsewhere. For example, perspectival shifts in the composition that might easily be written off as technical ineptitude have instead been read by Holden as being intentional expressions of a change in Burton’s worldview.
Through his own study of Burton’s art, Holden prompts the viewer to consider both the tempting possibilities and the limitations of interpreting the work that any artist leaves behind.
Preview some of Hermione Burton’s paintings below.
Installation view of “Full of Days” exhibition at the Gallery of Everything in London. Photo: Jorge Antony Stride.
Hermione Burton, Did She Fall or Was She Pushed?. Image courtesy of Andy Holden.
Hermione Burton, God Bless You, Vicar. Image courtesy of Andy Holden.
Hermione Burton, Untitled. Image courtesy of Andy Holden.
Hermione Burton, Untitled. Image courtesy of Andy Holden.
Hermione Burton, Jacqui’s Father. Image courtesy of Andy Holden.
Hermione Burton, Pleasant Thoughts, Jacqui on a plinth. Image courtesy of Andy Holden.
Hermione Burton, Still Life. Image courtesy of Andy Holden.
“Full of Days” is on view at the Gallery of Everything, 4 Chiltern St, London, through April 30.
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Iconic outfits worn by Whitney Houston, Tina Turner, and other “divas” will star in a new exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) this summer.
The show, simply titled “Diva,” celebrates era-defining performers and the various looks they donned in their heydays. Some 250 objects, including dresses, accessories, and photos, will go on display; many have never been shown in public before. 
Billed as the first of its kind, the exhibition is set to go on view June 24 through April of next year.  
“Today the word ‘diva’ holds a myriad of meanings,” said V&A curator Kate Bailey, who organized the show. “At the heart of this exhibition is a story of iconic performers who with creativity, courage, and ambition have challenged the status quo and used their voice and their art to redefine and reclaim the diva.” 
“Diva” will be divided into two “acts.” The first explores the historical context into which the modern concept of the diva was born. Honored here are opera singers like Adelina Patti and Jenny Lind; silent film sirens such as Clara Bow and Mary Pickford; and actors from Hollywood’s Golden Age, including Vivien Leigh and Mae West. Marilyn Monroe, who fits into the latter category, will be represented by the fringed black dress she wore as Sugar “Kane” Kowalczyk in 1959’s Some Like it Hot. 
Photograph of Maria Callas in Verdi’s opera La Traviata at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, 1958. Photo: Houston Rogers. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
The second act looks at how more contemporary stars have reclaimed the title of “diva” in recent years, often in the face of their own male-dominated industries. Jazz greats Billie Holliday and Ella Fitzgerald make appearances, as do politically minded performers like Nina Simone and Aretha Franklin, while Grace Jones, Prince, Bjork, and Rihanna represent the late 20th and early 21st centuries. 
Included in this section is Edith Piaf’s famed “little black dress” of the 1950s; the powdered wig and train worn by Elton John for his 50th birthday; and the “Vulva pants” designed for Janelle Monae’s 2018 Pynk music video. 
“It is wonderful to see the divas celebrated in this exhibition, and to see the V&A reclaiming the title,” said Dame Shirley Bassey, whose Julien MacDonald-designed pink gown that she wore on stage at Glastonbury in 2007 is included in the show.  
“To me,” Bassey went on, “‘diva’ is all about the power of the voice and the ability to entertain, to succeed against odds, to fight, and break through barrier after barrier: to have your voice heard.” 
See more material from “Diva” below. 
Lizzo is seen in midtown New York on September 25, 2021. Photo: Gotham/GC Images.
Costume, designed by Christian Dior, worn by Vivien Leigh as Paola in Jean Giraudoux’s play Duel of Angels, 1958. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Tina Turner, performing live onstage c.1979. Photo: Gai Terrell/Redferns.
Elton John’s 50th birthday look with wig and boat hat, designed by Sandy Powell, 1997. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Photograph of Theda Bara as Cleopatra in the 1917 film Cleopatra. Photograph: ScreenProd / Photononstop / Alamy Stock Photo.
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In Georgie Arce, No.2 (1955), a painting by the Pennsylvania-born artist Alice Neel, a young Puerto Rican boy sits on a dining chair wearing a striped shirt and a large medallion. He holds a toy knife and, with furrowed brows, returns the viewer’s gaze. Neel painted and drew her neighbor, Georgie, starting from around ten years old, many times throughout the 1950s, inadvertently documenting his growth from a child to a teenager. Neel and Georgie both lived in Spanish Harlem, a heavily multicultural part of New York, where the artist resided from 1938 to 1962. 
“For me, people come first,” journalist Mike Gold quotes Neel saying in 1950 in The Daily Workers, a newspaper published by the Communist Party USA. After a chance encounter, Georgie and Neel became friends for around three decades until Georgie was imprisoned for a double murder in 1974. “I have tried to assert the dignity and eternal importance of the human being in my portraits,” Neel added. Her painting of Georgie is on view in “Alice Neel: Hot Off the Griddle,” the most extensive U.K. retrospective of Neel’s work to date, at the Barbican Centre in London until May 21.
Neel–who died almost four decades ago at 84 years old—was relatively unknown for most of her life, but the vulnerability of her portrayals has made the artist into a household name across the globe today. There have been multiple major exhibitions on the artist’s work over the last few years, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2021 and last year at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Guggenheim in Bilbao and the de Young Museum in San Francisco. She has also inspired many prominent artists alive today, including Amy Sherald, Wangari Mathenge, and Chantal Joffe. “Neel captures the soul of her subjects,” Sherald said. “Her authenticity is an inspiration.” 
Even with Georgie’s determined stare, tight posture, and the way he firmly wields his ‘weapon,’ there is a tenderness to Neel’s portrait. “It feels like we see a boy who’s yearning to be a young man but who still cowers under his own childhood as well,” Eleanor Nairne, curator of the Barbican show, said. “You see that in many of Neel’s adult portraits, too,” Nairne added. “That sense of how we as people are often reaching for something but also intimidated by that thing we are reaching for.”
Alice Neel, Geoffrey Hendricks and Brian (1978). ©The Estate of Alice Neel. Courtesy The Estate of Alice Neel.
According to Emma Baker, head of contemporary evening sales at Sotheby’s, part of what has also enticed contemporary viewers and buyers to Neel’s paintings is the artist’s social consciousness, and how her portraits anticipated many issues that have only in recent years come to the forefront of mainstream conversations. It has been widely reported that Georgie’s incarceration was a result of the chaos, violence and underfunded system he grew up with. “She was very much attuned to what was going on socially and politically and translating that through the subjects that she chose to depict,” Baker said.
For some, Neel’s depictions of the boy can be seen as a sense of foreboding, from the cheerful little character seen standing with his leg pressed up against the chair in a painting from 1953 to the more pensive personality that comes later. But, for others, like the rest of Neel’s oeuvre, each portrait of Georgie shows the multidimensionality of being human—Neel provides an honest illustration of his innocence, hopes, struggles, and joy, all perfectly entwined. “Part of what I find so compelling about looking at her work is how they don’t calcify into a single fixed image of a person,” Nairne said. “They have some sense of multiplicity in them because we are all, as people, multiple.” 
Beyond Georgie, Neel’s extensive oeuvre not only depicts her friends and family but also marginalized people in New York, including nude pregnant women, who often weren’t found in dignified portraits, part of which has made her into a feminist icon today, though she may not have agreed with being pigeonholed as one. “She painted everyone: people of colour, the elderly, the poor, and gay and transgender people, and persevered through a time when figuration was renounced,” artist Amy Sherald said.
Alice Neel, Pregnant Julie and Algis (1967). ©The Estate of Alice Neel . Courtesy The Estate of Alice Neel.
Neel actively went against the grain of her time, which included disregarding Abstract Expressionism during the 1940s and ‘50s, Pop art during the 1960s, and Minimalism. Consequently, she struggled financially. From 1933, she received a small sum to produce pieces as part of the Public Works of Art Project (replaced by the Works Project Administration created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934), a program that employed artists to create works for public buildings and parks during the Great Depression. “It wasn’t a very big income, but it gave me enough to live and paint on,” Neel told the American art historian Cindy Nemser for the book Art Talk: conversations with 12 women artists, published in 1975. In 1943 when the payments ended, she immediately went on welfare until the 1950s, bringing up her children on a tight budget. They managed to live a “nice lifestyle” nonetheless, Neel’s son Hartley told a journalist after her death. “The only reason it was sensitive is that something is embarrassing about being on welfare,” he said. “It’s a certain stigma associated to that.” 
Over the last two decades, “we’ve seen a real return to figuration for many artists,” Nairne said. Who has been and is being represented, and how, has also been a topic brought to the fore, especially with movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. “It’s interesting to look back to who some of those historical figures were during the 20th century who became important role models or influences on those artists.” 
Sticking with these portraits for so long shows that Neel knew that one day society would value these sorts of paintings and understand the power that portraiture holds to spark conversations around social issues. “She’s a testament to the idea of perseverance, Sotheby’s Baker said, “and to having faith and commitment and belief in what you’re doing.” 
“Alice Neel: Hot off the Griddle” is on view through May 21 at Barbican Art Gallery. The accompanying book Alice Neel: Hot Off The Griddle, edited by Eleanor Nairne, with essays by Eleanor Nairne, Hilton Als and poetry by Daisy Lafarge, is published by Prestel, March 2023.
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