Neel met the documentary filmmaker, film critic and photographer Sam Brody (1907–1987) in 1940. Together, they had a son, Hartley, in 1941. Julian Brody, born in 1930, is Sam’s son from an earlier marriage with the artist Claire Gebiner. Throughout her life, Neel expressed an interest in conveying the complexities and nuances of familial relationships. A number of Neel’s paintings from this period feature her own sons, Richard and Hartley, and occasionally their friends, each capturing the individuality of her sitter while giving a more universal impression of boys becoming men, moving in their own direction. A genius at mathematics, Julian was admired by Neel’s sons Richard and Hartley, and he was extremely close to Neel herself (the artist typed his Princeton PhD for him and they remained in touch throughout her lifetime, after his relocation to Hong Kong where he taught at Hong Kong University). Julian, like his father, possessed a certain intensity which is captured strikingly in Neel’s painting of him in his mid-twenties. He died in 2014 at the age of 83.

About the artist

Alice Neel was born near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1900 and died in 1984 in New York. Renowned for her paintings of friends, family, acquaintances, fellow artists and critics, Neel was among the most important American artists of her time.

Neel’s work is in the collections of major museums including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; the Denver Art Museum; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Tate, UK, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

The ambitious survey Alice Neel: People Come First, which ran from March to August 2021 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, will open at the Guggenheim Bilbao this autumn (17 September 2021–6 February 2022). Alice Neel: Un regard engage, the Centre Pompidou’s major retrospective highlighting the political and social commitment of the painter, will open in Paris in October 2022.