Alice Neel (1900-1984), one of the great portrait painters of the 20th century, reinvented the genre by expressing the inner landscape of her subjects, who included luminaries such as Andy Warhol, Bella Abzug, and Allen Ginsberg as well as her neighbors in Spanish Harlem. Directed by her grandson, Andrew Neel, this very personal film captures her struggles as a female artist, a single mother, and a painter who defied convention. With unlimited access to photos, video, art, and letters, Neel reveals a portrait of the artist consistent with the themes of intimacy, family, and survival that were so central to her work.
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The fascinating documentary Alice Neel illuminates history while also demonstrating how an artist's style reveals his or her personality.
Mark Zoller Seitz, New York Times

Catalog Number: MC-831	Type: Feature	Genre: Art / Artist
Copyright: 2008	Length: 81 minutes	Format:  DVD  Region: 1
TV System: NTSC	ISBN: 1-4229-7915-6	UPC/EAN: 767685216286
Label: Arthouse

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Films In Compilation

2010-05-26  Los Angeles Times "As nuanced and complex as its subject, as compelling as her piercingly intense canvases."

2008-11-07  newsblaze.com By Prairie Miller This documentary by the artist's grandson Andrew Neel, delves into the life and imagination of Alice Neel, the defiant pioneering, cutting edge, raunchy and prolific late artist. The examination of the mid-20th century political radical and early feminist distills both the volatile social times that defined her humanistic portraiture, and the suffering she endured as a struggling single mother of four children. For Neel, it was an uncompromising mission to penetrate so far into the souls of her human subjects for inspiration, that she often lost sight of herself as an individual. This was an unfortunate vulnerability which led to her sexual exploitation and abuse by men. In that regard, it was observed that Neel while ascending to the heights of brilliant artistic expression, created enormous depths of suffering for both herself and her two remaining children after one died and the other was spirited away by the child's father. In the film, that unrelieved sorrow over the loss of two children, is traced in her symbolic artwork, and also recollected as leading to her mental breakdown and hospitalization. Alice Neel: A Documentary is hampered by some limitations - especially political oversights concerning her activism - due to the subjectivity of a biographical examination by one's own relative, her grandson. On the other hand, the film is imbued with an informal and extensively versed intimacy, that only family ties would have been able to forge such an organic connection spanning so many decades.

2008-11-07   By Sheri Linden Portraiture talent runs in the family Exploring the life and work of his grandmother, the esteemed portrait painter Alice Neel (1900-84), filmmaker Andrew Neel might have leaned toward hagiography or cathartic exposé. But his documentary is as nuanced and complex as its subject, as compelling as her piercingly intense canvases. The finely crafted "Alice Neel" is at once tribute, investigative journalism and messy family drama. Fellow painters, friends and art historians offer clear-eyed recollections of Neel, who inspires awe -- some of it uneasy -- but never sentimentality. The most fascinating witnesses are Neel's two sons: the director's father, Hartley, and his older half-brother, Richard, raised in material poverty and bohemian riches by a single mother who had already experienced devastating losses. Despite the adversities they faced as kids -- especially Richard, whom Neel failed to protect from her violent lover -- they hold no grudges and defend her right to shun conformity and pursue her muse. It was an obsessive pursuit. Turning her back on Greenwich Village hipsterism, Neel worked for years in relative obscurity. Her adamantly psychological portraits couldn't have been more unfashionable during the postwar ascendance of Abstract Expressionism. She was "an open nerve," the filmmaker conjectures. Tapping straight into that restless passion, he doesn't attempt to allay troubling questions about the artist's life, and his film is all the more moving as a result.

2008-11-07  TV Guide By Ken Fox Like MY ARCHITECT, Nathaniel Kahn's celebrated 2003 film about his father, the architect Louis Kahn, Andrew Neel's fascinating but troubling documentary about his famous grandmother is more than a mere biography of an important 20th-century artist: It's also an intimate portrait of a family member that questions whether or not "great artist" and "good parent" can ever be combined in the same person. The painter Alice Neel dared to defy the conventions of a pre-feminist era to become one of the great artists of her generation, but not with an enormous emotional cost to her self and her family. Using interviews with friends, art critics and, most importantly, family members, as well as clips from previous films made about his now-famous grandmother, Andrew Neel's documentary traces Alice Neel's story from her birth at the dawn of the 20th century, through her years as a struggling artist during the Depression and the equally lean postwar years. As she developed as a painter, she began to concentrate mostly on figurative portraiture — Alice Neel had a knack of finding the detail that would capture the individual as well as the tenor of the times -- and she eventually moved to Spanish Harlem so as to better capture the lives of the people who mattered most to her: the forgotten poor. Neel eventually found the recognition she craved -- she's now considered one of the greatest portrait painters of the 20th century -- but success came late and throughout most of her career Alice Neel lived in poverty. Nevertheless, she remained smilingly obstinate in her refusal to compromise on her art, even when she found herself at odds with contemporary trends in modern painting and society's expectations of how a "good" wife and mother lived her life. This unwavering dedication to her personal vision and her determination to live and paint as she chose, however, had a downside and it's from Andrew Neel's interviews with his father Hartley Neel and uncle, Richard Neel, that the real heart of the film emerges. Richard and Hartley -- sons by two different fathers -- clearly resented the poverty and the lack of certainty and structure of the bohemian lifestyle, as well as the emotional neglect they sometimes faced as the children of a free spirit. Richard in particular felt the brunt of Alice's non-traditional approach to family structure when Hartley's father, a temperamental socially conscious documentary filmmaker named Sam Brody, began physically abusing him. Alice, regrettably, did nothing to stop it. (Interestingly, these bohemian children grew up to become steadfastly bourgeois professionals). The saddest story, however, involves Isabetta, the daughter Alice Neel had with her first husband, a Cuban painter named Carlos Enriquez. Knowing that she'd never be able to support a child on her own, she gave Isabetta to her husband's wealthy family when the marriage ended. The loss of her daughter resulted in a nervous breakdown for Alice, while Andrew Neel's interviews with Isabetta's children tell a tragic tale of abandonment, resentment, deep depression and eventual suicide. But, as Hartley Neel points out, had Alice satisfied the expectations society had of women during her lifetime, she might well have been a great mother, but never a great artist, something that was terribly important to her. He, like most everyone interviewed in the film, seems to realize what Alice Neel faced in her lifetime, and it's this sympathy — if not exactly total forgiveness — that makes the film so memorable.

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