1982 Annie Sprinkle

This is a piece Alice Neel created in 1982 with oil on a canvas. This is a painting of a woman by the name of Annie Sprinkle. She is posing in a specific way so that the viewer can see every bit of her (I assume).  I assume she is dressed like a prostitute because she is painted in stiletto heels, has a lot of makeup on and is in an outfit made of leather. She is wearing a black feathery accent on top of her curled blonde hair. She also seems to be wearing expensive jewelry; a diamond necklace, ring, earrings and bracelet. I do not know where she is posed because the background is painted white with accents of shadow.  Her breasts and vagina are also exposed and there seems to be a piercing attached.  I know this was meant to represent Annie Sprinkle because I researched her and saw the resemblance.  Annie looks as though she has nothing to be ashamed of while posing nude, which goes to show how confident she is in her own skin. She also seems very relaxed in this painting by the way her arms lay across her thighs in a sensitive fashion.

This piece is of Annie Sprinkle, a prostitute/porn star turned artist/sexologist. She has been dedicated to exploring the world of sexuality for 36 years.  She enjoys sharing her experiences through teaching, art and sex films especially. She knows how it is to work in the so-called “glamorous” life of a paid porn star and how it is on the not so glamorous streets. “She is also an internationally acclaimed artist who tours theater pieces, and shows visual art, about her life in sex and love.” (Sprinkle)

Not only does Annie travel the world sharing intimate details of her life as a prostitute, but she has also “long championed sex worker rights and health care. She was one of the pivotal players in the 80’s “sex positive feminist movement”.” (Sprinkle)  Something I also found interesting was that she was the first porn star to get her Ph.D. in Human anatomy.  I did not initially think this portrait was of a real woman because it is not often that I see women posed in outfits such as these.  Neel decided to paint this portrait because she was interesting in painting very strong people who portray themselves as comfortable with their sexuality in the 80’s. She especially liked to paint women because their comfort in sexuality generally shocks the public. She shows her power through the dominatrix outfit she is wearing as well as the smile on her face. (Buhmann )

I feel that issues of class and gender play into this artwork because although she is a white woman, Annie Sprinkle is a prostitute that would seem to be trying to glorify her status to the public. This piece could possibly have been seen as controversial because she was breaking binaries of how women should act and what they should wear. This is definitely a piece of feminist art because Annie Sprinkle is a feminist herself.  I feel this is especially a feminist piece of art because it explores sexuality in women without them having to be ashamed of their bodies.  I also thought this was a good representation of a woman in general because she did not have perfect skin, nor did she seem extremely skinny.  Annie was portrayed as a very busty yet thick woman in her late 30’s possible 40’s.

I would say this piece of art reminding me of the reading “Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations” Adrienne Rich in that Alice Neel felt she needed to make a statement through her paintings as Rich does. Although Alice Neel did not reject an award for her work, she was still like Adrienne in that her work was her main goal and she wanted to be able to express her emotions through it regardless of any judgments of her work.

I would say the tone of this work is very light-hearted because Alice seems somewhat playful in her pose while she has a smile on her face.  I also feel like the white painted around her left room for interpretation when considering what environment she was in.  I never thought of this picture as seductive, mostly empowering to women who feel free in their sexuality.  I also noticed that Neel did not paint any other women dressed like Annie Sprinkle, so I realized she only painted her because of the strong message of confidence Annie showed.

I personally liked and chose to discuss this piece of artwork because of the way Annie was portrayed in this painting, not as just a scantily clad woman, but a woman in charge of her situation and especially her sexual appetite.  I also found the research I did on Annie Sprinkle very interesting because it gave a lot of background as to why she was chosen and painted the way she was by Alice Neel.


Works cited:
Buhmann, Stephanie. "Alice Neel at David Zwirner and Zwirner & Wirth ." Artcritical: the online
magazine of art and ideas. 01 07 2009: n. page. Web. 14 May. 2012.

Rich, Adrienne. Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations. New York: W.W.Norton &
Company, 2001. 89-105. Print.

Sprinkle, Annie. "Mini Biography." Anniesprinkle.org(asm). Annie Sprinkle, n. d. Web. 14 May.
2012. <http://anniesprinkle.org/about-annie/mini-biography/>.

1978 Margaret Evans Pregnant

This is a piece Alice Neel created in 1978 with oil on a canvas. It is a nude painting of a young pregnant woman. She appears to be far along in her pregnancy, causing her nipples and stomach to be enlarged. The woman has short dark hair that falls close to her head and is sitting in a yellow chair, focusing right at the viewer. There is a mirror in the background that reflects the back of the chair and the woman’s upper back and arm. Her shadow is also cast onto the wall behind her. There is not extensive detailing about the woman’s whereabouts, other than the fact that she is indoors. The woman, the chair, and the mirror behind her are the only things in the painting.

          This painting displays a true representation of a woman bearing a child. It displays the physical changes the human body undergoes in order to make room for a baby. Because the subject, who for the purposes of this blog I am going to assume is named Margaret Evans, is nude, the viewer is exposed to the reality of the physique of a pregnant female body. Judy Chicago used a similar tactic in her piece “The Dinner Party”, where she painted various representations of female genitalia onto 39 dinner plates, each for a specific woman from history. There was a lot of controversy concerning Chicago’s work. Some said that it was pornographic and inappropriate. However, there was nothing sexual about the plates at all. Society tends to associate the vagina and other female genitalia with sex, and both Neel and Chicago work to break that train of thinking with their artwork. Margaret’s pregnancy in the painting shows one of the many ways that a woman’s body and genitalia is used for other things besides sexual activity and sex appeal. It shows the natural process of pregnancy and the changes women go through during the process.

This piece also deals with issues concerning sexuality. Though it is a nude portrait,  the painting has no sexual undertones or characteristics to it. In a society that is continually sexualizing the women with scantily clad outfits and rap videos, Neel displayed a nude female body in a way that did not sexualize or objectify her. Joanna Frueh, author of “The Body Through the Women’s Eyes”, explains how viewing “…genitals as symbols of sexual essence delimit imagination and behavior,” (194).  Seeing women as only sexual objects is a very narrow path to look down. Neel’s work expands those limits and causes the viewer to see a woman for what she really is, rather than what society can create of her, because being sexy and being nude are not always synonymous. It is also significant that this is a depiction of a female’s body as told by a woman. Frueh goes on to describe how it is important to, “reclaim the female body for women, [by asserting] women’s own ability to create their own aesthetic pleasures by representing women’s bodies and women’s bodily experiences” (190). These bodily experiences include things like pregnancy, because it would not make much sense for a man to try and portray how he perceives pregnancy. Women representing women is a way to start a more positive, and less sexualized, outlook on the female body.

      Neel’s piece also speaks to issues concerning gender identity. In the painting, Margaret has very short hair. Hair that short is more often seen on men than women. Judith Lorber, author of “‘Night to His Day’, The Social Construction of Gender. Enterprise Learning Management System”,  voices that, “a sex category becomes a gender status through naming, dress, and the use of other gender markers,” (33). If Margaret were not pregnant or nude in the piece, there would be no explicit way for the viewer to be able to label her as male or female. Society creates strict binaries for people to categorize themselves and others into and sometimes not everything is black and white. I think it was very strategic of Neel to make Margaret’s hair so short and what society would label as more “masculine”, yet also make her in the later stages of pregnancy. Margaret breaks the boundaries society built concerning what is “feminine” and what is not.

      I would most definitely consider Alice Neel to be a feminist artist. Her work speaks to several issues like the ones I mentioned before, and many more. I appreciate the work she does because these issues don’t just affect women and there is no way that society is going to change and move forward unless people like Neel, Chicago, and other feminist artists push us. As I have heard many times throughout the semester, the personal is political, and gender issues and sexualization are only a couple of problems all of society is up against everyday. I am a young woman and I know how hard it is to be who you are while trying to also meet tons of other criteria society sets up for me. These artists give me the piece of mind that I am not the only person who sees woman being sexualized and being called butch because of how they look. Art propels society forward, to think outside of the box, and for that I think we are way overdue.

- By Caroline Eves

Works Cited

Frueh, Joanna. The Body Through Women's Eyes. Enterprise Learning Management System. University of Maryland, College Park, n.d. Web. 9 Feb.2012.<https://elms.umd.edu/courses/1/201201_WMST250_rjarmon_0301/content/_3653413_1/Frueh.Body.pdf?bsession=318161036&bsession_str=session_id=318161036,user_id_pk1=2651807,user_id_sos_id_pk2=1,one_time_token=>. 

Lorber, Judith. "Night to His Day", The Social Construction of Gender. Enterprise Learning Management System. University of Maryland, College Park, n.d. Web. 9 Feb.2012.<https://elms.umd.edu/courses/1/201201_WMST250_rjarmon_0301/content/_3653412_1/LorberNight%20to%20his%20day1.pdf?bsession=318568299&bsession_str=session_id=318568299,user_id_pk1=2651807,user_id_sos_id_pk2=1,one_time_token=>.

Senna, Danzy. "To Be Real." To Be Real. By Rebecca Walker. New York: Doubleday, 1995. 5-20. Print.

Biography

On January 28, 1900, Alice Hartley Neel was born in Merion Square, Pennsylvania to George Washington Neel and Alice Concross Hartley. Neel's father worked as an accountant, and her mother was a descendant to a signer of the Declaration of Independence. She was the fourth child of five, and she had two brothers and two sisters. Shortly after her birth, Neel's family moved to Colwyn, Pennsylvania, a small town just outside Philadelphia, where she spent most of her childhood (AliceNeel.com).

In 1918, Neel graduated from Darby High School and immediately began a secretarial job with the Army Air Corps. While working, Neel took evening art classes at The School of Industrial Art in Pennsylvania until she was offered a secretarial position at Swarthmore College, which she declined. In 1921, Neel enrolled in the fine art program at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women where she would attend classes for the next four years. In 1923, Neel won her first award, the Francisca Naiade Balane Award, in her portrait class. The next year, she would win the award again, along with the Kern Dodge Prize for best painting in life class. While in school, Neel met a Cuban artist Carlos Enriquez, whom she would marry in June, 1925. The two moved to Havana, Cuba for a year, where Neel gave birth to their first child (AliceNeel.com).

In 1930, Neel began suffering nervous breakdowns and suicidal feelings after Carlos left for Cuba with their daughter. She was hospitalized after attempting to commit suicide, and eventually recovered two years later. In the mid 1930's, her career began to flourish. She began with minor exhibitions, while her popular painting subjects included her family and others in her neighborhood, along with painting still lifes, landscapes, city scapes, and narrative and genre scenes. Her art was known for its use of color, and for its “unfinished look”. Neel liked to create work that reflected current politics, such as her 1933 painting, “The Synthesis of New York-The Great Depression” and her 1936 painting “Nazi Murder Jews”. She also painted numerous portraits of well-known people such as author Joe Gould in 1922, and communist labor organizer Pat Whalen and poet Kenneth Fearing in 1935 (AliceNeel.com).

For the next decade, Neel cut back on some of her artwork, in part due to the Great Depression as she struggled to raise her two children. In 1950, and again in 1954, Neel held a major solo exhibition at the ACA gallery, which marked the revival of Neel's career. In the late 1950's, Neel's style began to change, becoming bolder. Several popular art critics felt that Neel's work was too “casual”, and as Grace Glueck of the New York Times stated, “Working in a style that might be called Expressionist-realist, she laid brush to canvas in a plain, straightforward manner, using the paint not fancily but simply to convey an image.”(AliceNeel.com)

In the 1960's, Neel's work grew in popularity, in large part due to her portraits of Andy Warhol, Joseph Papp, and Aaron Copeland. Neel began painting satirical portraits of art dealers and historians, but continued to portray everyday people in her artwork. Neel treated details very meticulously, and emphasized gestures in her portrayals. Neel always “spoke the truth, without embellishments or evasions” , as stated by Theodore Wolff. Neel was also popular for convincing her subjects to pose nude for her, as did John Perreault in 1972 (AliceNeel.com).

The women's movement in the 1970's led to an increased popularity of Neel's work. Neel was the subject of multiple retrospectives, leading to a broader audience and increased acclaim. In 1976, Neel was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a 250 member honor society that works to “foster, assist, and sustain excellence” in American literature, art, and music. Neel began lecturing in the 1980s, explaining to people how she convinced many of her subjects to pose nude. Eventually, Neel did her own nude portrait, along with several paintings of her children and their families. Neel became the first living American artist to have a major exhibition in Moscow, in 1981. Numerous of Neel's paintings became magazine covers for popular companies, such as Time Magazine (AliceNeel.com).

Neel continued painting despite health issues including cataracts. Neel died of cancer in 1984 in New York. Neel owned a majority of her work at her death, as she rarely allowed to have her work sold. After her death, Neel was widely regarded as one of the most underrated artists of her time, and an influential and persistent worker despite the many obstacles she had to overcome (AliceNeel.com).

Sources Cited:
"Alice Neel." Alice Neel. Web. 12 May 2012. <http://www.aliceneel.com/biography/>.