Alice Neel, Olivia & After Death of a Child

The portrait Olivia depicts Alice Neel’s granddaughter, Olivia, looking at the viewer with a straightforward, spontaneous gaze, as if she has momentarily paused from her activity.

Neel’s use of color to evoke emotions as a compositional choice is one, she used in many of her paintings to reveal her subjects’ personalities and insecurities and possibly her own. However, in the portrait Olivia, Neel uses color sparingly.Shedemonstrates a carefree and relaxing depiction of her granddaughter that reflects a more joyous time in her own life. Olivia is painted lounging in a burgundy upholstered chair with her leg over the arm. While her face is shadowed in typical hues of pale greens and yellows, a purposeful and circular brushing of rosy pink is centered on Olivia’s brow, drawing the viewer’s eyes to Olivia’s forehead, believed to be the seat of the third eye. Moreover, it is noteworthy that Neel did not fully shade her granddaughter’s arms and legs, leaving them transparent for the viewer to see through to the partially colored back leg of the chair. The modern backward sway of the family’s chair is anthropomorphized in its support of Olivia and becomes one with her. Thus, Olivia emits an energy of self -love and acceptance, attributes Neel, did not experience in her youth and in her later years was finally able to express in her art.

Neel endured an extraordinarily difficult life—most of which is embodied in her works as she faced numerous challenges—including volatile relationships with men, a nervous breakdown, attempted suicide, and subsequent hospitalizations. She made difficult and unconventional decisions in her younger years by first leaving her family’s middle-class lifestyle and later marrying the Cuban painter Carlos Enriquez. At one year of age their first daughter Santillana died of diphtheria upon the couple’s return to New York from Havana in 1927. Ultimately, Enriquez left her for a career in Paris, taking their second daughter with him..

Compared to the joy emitted in Olivia, Neel’s painting, After the Death of a Child, depicts the opposite emotion, portraying Neel’s foray into the expression of deep grief within a representational style that borders on abstraction. The dark ghostly figure, a personification of sorrow, walks along a playground full of children dressed in colorful clothes. Cloudy gray skies and a dark barren tree loom large overhead, as he or she walks out of the picture plane.

Much of Neel’s oeuvre, expresses the range of universal human emotions of fear, strength, pain, and defiance, in constant opposition to joy, love, and peace.