Ahead of the Diminishing World | Sarah Schulman

“Why does somebody create an image of anything?” —Hartley Neel

“Art could be called ‘the search.’” —Alice Neel

A witness sees other people from a safe distance. A participant shares their vulnerability. Alice Neel (1900–1984) painted portraits that often sat precariously between the two positions. Unlike many of her American peers, she didn’t visit Europe until she was in her sixties. It was instead in Havana where, living with a rich Cuban husband in the 1920s, she was first exposed to the contrasts of extreme wealth and extreme poverty—a shock to which she attributed her Communism. Thirteen years later, estranged from her husband and living in East Harlem as a single mother, she herself experienced brutal poverty, making paintings of all her parallel worlds, including artist friends, patrons, her Puerto Rican boyfriend’s family, and her Latino neighbors.

That she sustained her art-making as a mother, amid obscurity and privation, already makes her remarkable. She thought she might have become a portraitist from studying her mother’s face, “which had dominion over me,” to detect any sign of a possible outburst of “dissatisfied morbidity.” She watched and saw people as a defense against their unpredictability. This habit was later cast as a social value. “I always loved the most wretched and the working class,” she said. “But then I also loved the most effete and most elegant.”¹

There is an equality in many of her portraits, repeatedly discovered—they feel alive in the moment. Some of her Latino and Black sitters were only seen in prestigious galleries once she was finally recognized in her eighties; the same is true of some of the feminist art critics, artists, and curators who posed for her. But a different kind of impulse can be found in “At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World,” an exhibition at David Zwirner curated by Hilton Als. While her neighbors were even more marginalized, almost all the gay/queer men she painted were better off than she was and had better opportunities to gain some autonomy for themselves. Painting their portraits increased their interest in her and her work. Critics, dealers, curators, and artists like Frank O’Hara, Henry Geldzahler, Andy Warhol, John Perreault, and John Gruen held the key to her long-overdue and deeply desired recognition.

O’Hara, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, is gangly yet charming in Neel’s portrait of him at Zwirner, awkward with a protruding forehead. He has long, tapered fingers and a smoker’s smile. Geldhazahler wears the same crew neck sweater as O’Hara but is frowning, clinging to his thronelike chair, and flashing a large ring. He was a curator at the Met, and Neel depicts him as contemporary royalty. Pandering to these men’s self-interest, building friendships by giving them attention, and engaging them with her intelligence and charm helped her claw her way out of a woman’s obscurity and into the world that men control.   

Before second-wave feminism, some white heterosexual women cultivated a kind of childishness to make themselves less threatening to men—an impulse that has never stopped paying off. Some, like Neel, used it as a protective cover for intelligence and skill. In archival footage she often puts on a kooky front, even when sharing subtle ideas or expressing strong opinions. Her ability to appear simultaneously helpless and sexually powerful was a protective tactic that did not interfere with the actual creation of her work. Some powerful gay men were attracted to this sort of traditional charm—it wouldn’t have been possible, I think, for them to recognize her talent without the comfort of it. One story resonates with women artists across the decades: in the late 1960s Neel asked Geldzahler to consider her work for a show he was putting together. “Oh,” he replied, “so you want to be a professional?”

Neel always hustled to support her painting practice. In art school she borrowed from boyfriends. In the 1930s she did projects for the Works Progress Administration, and then she was on welfare. She had only eight solo shows from age twenty-seven to sixty-four, and then more than sixty solo shows from that point until her death. It was a woman, Muriel Gardiner, a psychotherapist, who actually handed her money: starting at sixty-four, Neel received a $6,000 annual stipend for life.

But by then the damage of having been consistently and stupidly discarded by male gatekeepers had left Neel with a narcissistic wound. Even near the end of her life, even on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, she was reciting her laurels of recognition, not seeing that the attention itself was its proof. When she talks to Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel in 1978 we find out that she is glad her sons were not homosexual because she wouldn’t want them to be part of a “little group,” which feels imprecise, since she did want them to be artists. She was in advance of her time, yet she still held the kinds of prejudices that afflict even people far ahead of the diminishing world.

The bohemians she painted in the 1950s and 1960s had something she wanted: access to cultural institutions and financial support for their own intellectual and artistic development. Generally speaking, they were very far from my own queer world in downtown New York in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet Neel did choose some gay and queer subjects who were socially marginal. In these paintings we see her refusal to punish people for difference and her disobedient interest in those who are not supposed to matter. As Vivian Gornick reminded me in a smart but negative review of my novel Rat Bohemia (1995), bohemians leave, but the lesbians, gays, and people with AIDS at the center of my world were thrown out. That is a significant difference.

I was born on 10th Street in 1958 and so was exposed in some unconscious way to queer life from the beginning. The first words I learned how to read were “Hotel Albert,” the large green letters that hung off the side of the building across the street. Later, by reading queer history, I learned that the people who hung out on the corner below and got welfare checks from the open wooden mailboxes behind the hotel’s desk were the trans and drag folks with whom the Cockettes chose to stay when they made their New York debut at a former Yiddish theater on Second Avenue. I remember hearing about a gay man jumping from the now abandoned police station on 11th Street and getting impaled on the spiked iron fence below.

Our next door neighbor was a never-married, strangely Protestant woman named Grace who had moved to the Village in the 1920s and lived alone in an apartment filled with furniture from the 1930s. What was she doing there, I vaguely wondered. Though I didn’t know it, homosexuals were everywhere. On Sunday mornings my father would go buy rolls at a bakery called Sutter’s and I would stand out front waiting (helicopter parenting did not exist), staring at the Women’s House of Detention across the street. Women yelled out the window and people yelled back from the sidewalk. Only later, when I read Joan Nestle, did I learn that women were arrested in bar raids on Saturday nights and that on Sunday mornings—as the Schulmans got their rolls—their lovers and pimps and friends would yell up to them from the sidewalk.

It was around that same time, in 1962 at age three, that I first crossed paths with a queer subject of a Neel painting: John Gruen, the father of my nursery school classmate Julia Gruen. John was an art critic and biographer married to the New York School painter Jane Wilson, Julia’s mother. He reviewed Neel favorably in the New York Herald Tribune in 1966; four years later, she painted The Family (John Gruen, Jane Wilson, and Julia) (1970) and hoped he would purchase the portrait for a price far beyond his means. I remember playing with Julia, who grew up to be the founding director of the Keith Haring Foundation, under the table at her parents’ apartment on 10th Street between Avenues A and B while her mother might have been painting on fur coats. John was a Jewish Holocaust survivor and bisexual; after his death he was included in the In Memoriam section at the LGBT Lambda Literary Awards.

When my parents rejected me for being gay in 1975, my life became chaotic. Yet one consequence of their stupidity and cruelty was that I escaped being embedded in a ridiculous family and a dead world. The night of the great 1977 blackout, my high school girlfriend came to meet me at Circle Repertory Company, where I worked, and we finally had the nerve to go into the Dutchess, the lesbian bar next door, with its blacked-out windows and Danny, the bouncer from the Israeli mafia. We weren’t carded because of the blackout; the usually dark place was lit by candles on tables and—surprise!—the waitress was a girl from our high school. The lesbian world was still criminalized, but the presence of our classmate serving the bottles of beer made it more welcoming and sensical, and soon the underground society of lesbian culture, romance, predation, aesthetics, partying, disobedience, and codes would become the center of my life.

In 1979 I dropped out of college and returned to New York, renting a room on 7th Street and Avenue C from a white woman named Tennessee. Every morning, walking to the subway to go to my job as a substitute bartender for a chain called Brew and Burger, I passed a beat-up pizza place on 7th and A where a strange woman, of the category I then thought of as “bag lady,” sat talking to the pizzaman. When I returned at night she was still there. Tennessee told me the woman was Valerie Solanas, the playwright who shot Andy Warhol. Alice Neel famously painted Warhol with a bare chest, revealing the scar left by Solanas’s bullet.

Soon I was working for an all-women’s trucking company that drove old post-office delivery vans painted pink to bring gay male pornography to corner newsstands. The business’s owners had previously run a feminist newspaper called Majority Report, and stacks of back issues sat in the rear of the garage. I found one that covered the Warhol shooting, the remanding of Solanas to the Women’s House of Detention, and her legal guidance from the attorney Florynce Kennedy. Most interesting to me were the letters back and forth on the editorial page debating whether or not Solanas was setting an example for the collective and whether the moment had finally come for women to “take up arms” against male derision.

The East Village was not a destination neighborhood until the galleries started the gentrification process in the early 1980s. The only people there seemed to be locals, which, in many ways, was what attracted queers to the area. You could go outside dressed basically any way you wished (weirdly, that is still true). Unlike the gay male West Village, the East Village was cheap, and gay women were poor. Most “clones” wanted the West Village or, later, Chelsea, but lesbians, trans people, and hippie, faggy gay men came to the East Village because it was affordable. The primary exception to the closed-world feel were the cars with New Jersey license plates looking for heroin.

Rent was so low that people really didn’t need to have jobs. I could work ten to fifteen hours a week and live. I started at Leroy’s, the first coffee shop in Tribeca, where the food was so bad that we, the waitresses, brought our own lunches from home. (This became the material for my third novel, After Delores.) I waited on artists like Meredith Monk, Yvonne Rainer, and John Kelly.

A bunch of gay-girl artists in the East Village started a food club. Everyone put in $2.50 a week and I would cook. Banana omelets, rice omelets, bananas and rice, kasha varnishkes. Breakfast at Veselka was ninety-nine cents with coffee, and the dirtier places were even cheaper. We bought and sold our clothes in an open-air market on Astor Place in front of Cooper Union. I also worked doing “put-in,” a standard lesbian job. Trucks filled with equipment for staging shows would arrive at a theater and we would carry everything into the venue. I did all kinds of stage crew jobs, plus two days spent telemarketing for Learjets. I once dressed up like an eggplant to advertise a farmer’s market. Our lesbian lives were very connected to being artists. Many of us would not have stuck with being artists if we had been straight. There was no reason to. But once you were out there on the lesbian limb, the world looked like a phony and hypocritical place, so it was hard to aspire to fit into it. There was so much that needed to be said.

“Dividing up the canvas is one of the most exciting things for me,” Neel told the painter Jordan Casteel in 2021. Her paintings of figures from the world I knew divide the canvas with particular energy. In her paired portrait of Jackie Curtis and Ritta Redd, the two best friends sit shoulder to shoulder in a pose of intimacy, but with grim expressions, staring forward. Ritta, in shoulder-length locks, and Jackie, in a flip, are dressed for opposite occasions. Ritta’s jeans and striped polo shirt take a backseat to Jackie’s skirt-and-blouse ensemble, right out of the office dramas about career girls that moved from movie screens to television in the 1960s.

Penny Arcade, the brilliant and singular performance artist whose lack of institutional recognition parallels Neel’s first sixty-four years, wrote a stunning tribute to Redd in her play Invitation to the Beginning of the End of the World (1990). A middle-aged middle American woman is standing bewildered on an East Village street corner at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Seeing that she is clearly out of place, a young gay man stops to see if she needs directions; she asks if he knew her son Ritta Redd, who has just died of AIDS. The man has never heard of him, and the bereaved mother is even more confused. “He did shows,” she says over and over again, “he did shows.” Finally, out of kindness, the passerby pretends to remember him.

A Google search on Redd turns up almost nothing beside the Neel portrait. Penny told me that she’s heard many people mistakenly assume, based on the painting, that Redd and Curtis were a couple: “Ritta Redd was Jackie’s handmaiden and lieutenant for a while, 1969 till 1974. Jackie moved on to other identities and other people. That Jackie and Ritta were lovers is a complete myth created by people who need a reason of why Alice Neel painted them together other than the simple reality that they were joined at the hip.” In Neel’s solo portrait of Jackie Curtis “as a boy,” he is sullen in traditional blue jeans and a baseball uniform top. Clearly these clothes were not where he belonged.

The two gay men she painted who were closest to my life were both by association. Geoffrey Hendricks, the Fluxus artist, sat for a portrait with his partner Brian Buczak, who died of AIDS in 1987. Geoff and I became friends later when he partnered, until his own death, with my pal Sur Rodney (Sur), gallerist, archivist, and East Village neighbor. Geoff is younger in this painting than I had ever seen him in real life, but his spacey, endearing quality is very present. Neel depicts him wearing a green crew sweater and traditional button-down shirt.

Geoff often had a toned-down, kind of conservative presentation, but his fairy name was “Cloud” and he often stood on his head, dangling Buddhist prayer flags between his toes, as I saw him do at Jill Johnston’s eightieth birthday party. Brian, on the other hand, is dark, somewhat crazed, with his shirt open—much as it is in a solo portrait at Zwirner—and his chest hair on display. His head is cocked in a seductive manner, his arm draped around his more reticent partner.

I never met Roger Jacoby, whom Neel painted in 1963 as an intense yet somewhat vacant-eyed young man with long hair, wearing a crinkled gray suit. He had been the lover of my longstanding collaborator Jim Hubbard before Jim and I met. Roger invented the hand-processing technique for Super-8 film that Jim has used all his life. It was, in part, Roger’s death from AIDS that moved us to co-found MIX: The LGBT Experimental Film Festival in 1986. It lasted for thirty-three years and has just been revived by a new generation.

Neel painted the members of these downtown avant-gardes with a sensibility formed by the avant-gardes of her own youth. As a Communist she spent her life at demonstrations, later picketing the very institutions from which she and other artists wanted support, because she could not ignore their power—the Whitney Museum of American Art for hiring a white curator for a show on African American art, or the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the infamous Harlem on My Mind (1969) show. She said that the Depression made artists confront poverty; many became Communists or joined social movements even if it wouldn’t advance them professionally.

Looking at the social dynamics of Neel’s work often makes me think of Nan Goldin, a photographer as associated with the subcultural artists and rebels of the 1980s and 1990s as Neel was with those of her era. Both portraitists reflect and then articulate their historic moment, representing well-known people, forgotten people, the dead in their open caskets. Both depicted themselves or others with bruises from violent lovers. They share a gift for recognizing the individuality of people otherwise forgotten, for making others real in the storm of self-destruction or oppression, no matter who they were and no matter how chaotic the artist’s own life became.

Everyone can now see that Neel’s stress on sexuality, reality, motherhood, relationships, and the physical self was feminist, in that she spoke truthfully—against the grain—about her life as a woman. But she seems never to have been interested in the collective aspect of the feminist art movement. Later in life, as the movement’s emergence helped open social space for her, her sister artists and critics saw the vital meaning of her work, even as some of them complained that she did not share the spotlight or let other people speak on shared panels and at community events.

Yet she made their portraits: she did commissioned pictures of Adrienne Rich and Kate Millet for, respectively, Parnassus: Poetry in Review and Time. “At Home” includes her portrait of Annie Sprinkle from 1982, one of the few by Neel where the subject’s character is strangely absent. Neel focuses on Annie’s breasts and genitals, her elaborate leather gear. But the feminist porn star’s well-known warmth and humor is missing. Somehow Neel could not connect. For some other, more obscure women artists and intellectuals, meanwhile, Neel’s paintings ended up being primarily how they are remembered, as her subjects.

Art for Neel was a search for visual ideas, for belonging, for income, and for recognition, but also a search for understanding among difference and for a more visually and materially just world. That she integrated her politics and principles into her art may have deepened the exclusion she faced as a woman artist with a singular eye. But it was at the center of her vision.