Although she showed sporadically early in her career, from the 1960s onwards Neel’s work was exhibited widely in the United States and her later paintings, made after moving to the Upper West Side, reflect a changing milieu, yet remain engaged more or less explicitly with the political and social issues that shaped her early work, as well as the particularities of living and working under, as Neel put it, ‘the pressure of city life.’

It is likely that Neel’s lifelong devotion to liberal causes cemented her attraction to the great scientist and activist Linus Pauling, who won the Nobel Prize twice (in 1954 for chemistry and in 1962 for peace activism) and his wife, Ava Helen Pauling, a celebrated human rights activist.

This work was painted during the summer of 1969, when Neel left her home in New York City to visit her son, Hartley, and his future wife, Ginny, in San Francisco. At the invitation of a friend, Neel travelled to Big Sur and spent several days visiting the Paulings. Evidently fruitful, the trip resulted in a number of paintings – a portrait of Ava, a portrait of Linus, now in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, and this double portrait of the couple. Characterised by a poised, fluid, forthright handling of paint, the work also embodies one of the key shifts in Neel’s art of the 1960s, which saw her painting grow brighter and more experimental. During this time, Neel began leaving extensive areas of the canvas unpainted, a characteristic she admired in Cézanne’s late work. Here it serves to accentuate Neel’s expert handling of blues – in clothing, shadow, outline and, notably, in Linus’s piercing eyes which, in contrast to those of his wife which address the viewer, look upwards into the distance, a device used for centuries in portraiture to indicate a subject who exemplifies the life of the mind.

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 is 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, opened recently at the Guggenheim Bilbao (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.