Alice Neel

“Painting was more than a profession. It was also an obsession. I had to paint.” The American artist Alice Neel (Merion Square, Pennsylvania, 1900 – New York, 1984) is considered one of the most original and nonconformist figures in 20th-century painting. Over the course of her long and difficult career, she reinvented the portrait genre, painting both ordinary people and prominent figures such as Robert Smithson, Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, and Meyer Schapiro in her own distinctive style. In the 1970s, she gained widespread recognition through appearances on the television show The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and received major accolades, beginning with her first major retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York in 1974. Directed by her grandson Andrew Neel and awarded the Audience Award at the 2007 Newport Beach Film Festival, the film is an intimate and moving portrait of a rebellious woman and artist, woven around her work through a blend of testimonies and memories.