Dr BJ Sokol is currently Emeritus Professor of English at Goldsmiths University in London. A friend of Neel’s sons Hartley and Richard from their time studying at Columbia University, at the time of this painting he was involved in the 1960s New York scene. Neel painted him more than once, somewhat shy in T-shirt and beret in a 1964 canvas and, in this 1965 painting, scrubbed up in a three-piece suit, confidently facing the viewer without a shred of his former Beatnik appearance in evidence. Despite the formality of Sokol’s appearance, this is a work of bristling energy. Sokol’s vivid green eyes, intensified by the colour of his suit, and his mannerisms – especially the way in which he curls his fingers between cheekbone and jaw as he rests his head on his hand – serve to remind us that Neel’s focus was not only on the physical likeness of a person but how they occupied space, psychologically as well as physically.

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.