Alice Neel #3

Alice Neel’s Apartment, Upper West Side, New York.

"....
The settings in her artworks are often mere suggestions: the shade of a blue wall, the outline of a sofa — the room receding while the figure remains.

It can be disorienting, then, to recognize some of those settings in the artist’s final New York City residence — a 1,000-square-foot Upper West Side apartment, into which she moved in 1962 and which has remained largely unchanged since her death in 1984 at the age of 84. In the absence of a person, material details come into sharp relief: The artist’s blue paint-flecked smock hangs from her easel in the front room. Her palette, the globs of pigment now dried into nearly colorless husks, sits nearby on an aging page torn from The New York Times. Familiar furniture — such as the olive green sofa from “Linda Nochlin and Daisy” (1973) and the mustard yellow velvet chair from “Margaret Evans Pregnant” (1978) — is arranged in a circle. A photograph of her by Robert Mapplethorpe, thought to have been taken just days before she died, hangs beside the front door. The apartment is part museum, part time capsule, part home, part communion.
...."
(bron: The New York Times Style Magazine, foto's: Jason Schmidt)


Alice Neel in her studio, 1979. (bron: The New York Times, foto: Alfred Eisenstaedt)


Alice Neel with granddaughter Olivia in her home/studio at 300 West 107th Street, 1979. (bron: Sweet Sabelle, foto: Alfred Eisenstaedt)