Alice Neel’s Female Nudes: Society, Feminism and Art

Alice Neel is one of the most prolific contemporary American artists, a realist in an age of abstraction. Her tenacity in portraying the people, the world and the issues that come with them led her portraits to carry not just a likeness to the subject, but also the subject’s social, political, economic baggage. With that, Neel’s candor in portraying her subjects also allowed for representation of women of all circumstances, something historically lacking. Specifically, in her ground-breaking nude portraits of women, she breaks down previous conception of female nudes by incorporating the status quo of the woman as a key element; not just an escapist object of the male gaze but a person. This paper aims to reveal the tangled interconnectivity of the relationships between Neel herself, with feminism, society and her art through the analysis of her female nude artworks.