1930
May 1: Enríquez leaves for Cuba with
Isabetta. He plans to leave Isabetta with his parents and
travel with Neel to Paris. After his departure, Neel sublets
her apartment in New York and goes back to her parents’
house in Colwyn. She travels every day to Philadelphia, where
she works at the Washington Square studio of friends from art
school, Ethel Ashton and Rhoda Meyers.
July: Enríquez, finding there is not enough
money for two to travel, goes on to Paris without Neel, and
leaves Isabetta in Cuba in the care of his two sisters.
Neel spends a summer of exhaustingly
intense painting.
August 15: Neel returns to Colwyn from a
day of painting at Meyers and Ashton’s studio and suffers
a nervous breakdown. She later recalls experiencing a
‘chill that lasted at least eight hours’ (Hills, Alice Neel, p. 32).
She remains at home under the care of her mother.
In an undated handwritten text from this
time (Neel Archives) she writes: ‘Carlos went away. The
nights were horrible at first ... I dreamed Isabetta died and
we buried her right beside Santillana.’
October: Neel is hospitalized at Orthopedic
Hospital in Philadelphia, where she stays through Christmas of
that year.
1931
January: Enríquez returns to the United
States. He visits Neel a few times in the hospital and takes
her home to Colwyn where her family can look after her. Shortly
after Neel is back home, she attempts suicide by turning on the
gas oven in her parents’ kitchen. She is hospitalized at
Wilmington Hospital in Delaware. After a few days she is
returned to Orthopedic Hospital in Philadelphia, where she
smashes a glass with the intention of swallowing the shards;
attendants are able to prevent her from harming herself. She is
sent to the suicidal ward at Philadelphia General Hospital the
following day, where she stays through Easter.At some point
during this time, Enríquez returns to Paris.
Late Spring: A social worker recommends
Neel’s transfer to the suicidal ward of Gladwyne Colony,
a private sanatorium in Gladwyne (a suburb of Philadelphia),
directed by Dr. Seymour DeWitt Ludlum, chief of staff of the
Neuropsychiatric Department at Philadelphia General Hospital.
After a period of time there, she is allowed to leave the
suicidal ward and live with the other
patients in the main house. She is encouraged to continue
drawing and painting, in contrast with the conventional
treatment of nervous conditions at this time, which prescribes
that a patient cease all activities related to professional
life.
Summer: Enríquez travels from Paris to
Spain, according to letters written to Neel at Gladwyne Colony.
He expresses concern for her condition and says that Fanya Foss
has sent news of her.
September: Neel is discharged from
Ludlum’s sanatorium and returns to Colwyn. She visits
Nadya Olyanova and her Norwegian husband, Egil Hoye, a sailor
in the merchant marine. Olyanova and Hoye live in Stockton, New
Jersey.
There she meets Kenneth Doolittle,
also an able-bodied seaman and a close friend of the couple.
1932
Early in the year, moves with Kenneth
Doolittle to 33 ? Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village.
May 28-June 5: Participates in the First Washington Square Outdoor Art Exhibit, showing Well Baby
Clinic, among other paintings. She
is forced to withdraw Degenerate
Madonna following protests by
the Catholic Church.
At the exhibition she meets John Rothschild
(1900-1975), a Harvard graduate from a wealthy family who runs
a travel business. Their friendship will last throughout their
lives.
June 5: The New
York Times Magazine, in an article
titled ‘Open-Air Art Shows Gaining Favor’, reports:
New York has just had its first open-air
art show, staged in Washington Square by the artists of
Greenwich Village. New to us, these outdoor exhibits are
familiar sights in several European cities, and in
Philadelphia. Hard times have hit the artists of the Village;
the outdoor sale was held to help them market their wares and
perhaps to gain recognition for their talents.
November 12-20: Participates in the Second Washington Square Outdoor Art Exhibit, which includes the work of about three hundred
artists. Juliana Force, who endorsed the exhibits, calls a
meeting on November 20 with the artists: ‘Mrs. Juliana
Force, Director of The Whitney Museum of American Art, invites
you to tea at The Jumble Shop, 11 Waverly Place, on Sunday, ...
for a round table discussion concerning the problems of the
winter’ (Washington Square Outdoor Exhibition records,
1932-1957, Archives of American Art).
1933
January: Participates with Joseph Solman in
an exhibition at the International Book and Art Shop on West
Eighth Street. Solman will be a founding member of the abstract
art group The Ten and will include Neel in a number of group
shows over the years.
March 16-April 4: Exhibits in Living Art: American, French, German, Italian,
Mexican, and Russian Artists at the
Mellon Galleries in Philadelphia, organized by J. B. Neumann.
Two of her paintings are mentioned in the review in the Philadelphia Inquirer (March
19): ‘Among the Americans there is a one-time
Philadelphian, Alice Neel, whose “Red Houses” and
“Snow” reveal the possession of interpretive gifts
out of the ordinary. There is nothing “pretty”
about these pictures, but they have substance and
honesty.’
March and October: Participates in two
exhibitions and art sales for needy New York artists organized
by the Artists’ Aid Committee, which is headed by Vernon
C. Porter, chairman of the Washington Square Outdoor Art
Exhibits.
December 26: Enrolls in the Public Works of
Art Project (PWAP), a government-funded program run under the
auspices of the Whitney Museum of American Art and its director
Juliana Force, aided by Vernon C. Porter. She later recalls (New York City WPA Art: Then and Now, New York: NYC WPA Artists, 1977, p. 66):
The first I heard of the W.P.A. was when in
1933 I received a letter from the Whitney Museum asking me to
come and see them. I was interviewed by a young man who asked
me ‘How would you like to paint for $30 a week?’
This was fabulous as most of the artists had nothing in those
days and in fact there were free lunches for artists in the
Village ... All the artists were on the project. If there had
been no such cultural projects there might well have been a
revolution.
Paints Joe Gould, a well-known Greenwich
Village bohemian who claims to be writing ‘An Oral
History of Our Time’.
1934
January: Enríquez returns to Cuba from
Spain following the death of his mother. He writes to Neel
expressing a desire to get back together. She, however, is
entangled with Kenneth Doolittle, and being pursued by John
Rothschild. It is too much for her. Although she and Carlos
never obtain a divorce or annulment, they never meet again.
April 17: Neel is separated from the PWAP
payroll. According to an internal memo, on February 12 she had
delivered a painting ‘of good artistic merit but so
inappropriate that it was considered useless.’ She was
given a new assignment to paint a picture showing ‘one of
the phases of New York City life.’ On April 15 she was
asked to bring the picture to the office and appeared the
following day without it, saying her original painting had
turned out so badly that she had scraped it off the canvas and
had begun again. She delivered this painting on April 17, and
‘the opinion of those who viewed it was that it had been
painted the night before on a brand new canvas and that it did
not represent more than one day’s work, although she
claimed to have been working on this picture two
months.’
Summer: Rents a house with her mother on
the New Jersey shore, in Belmar, New Jersey. Her mother and
father come to spend the summer with her. Isabetta, now almost
six years old, comes from Cuba to visit her.
It is here that she paints a nude portrait
of Isabetta.
September 30: Neel is entered on the
payroll of the Works Progress Administration (WPA; later the
Work Projects Administration), which replaced PWAP, at $103.40
per month, in its easel division.
December: Kenneth Doolittle, in a rage,
burns more than three hundred of Neel’s drawings and
watercolors and slashes more than fifty oil paintings at their
apartment on Cornelia Street. Neel’s painting of Isabetta
is slashed beyond repair. Neel later repaints a new image in
the same pose. (Note burned photographs above)
Neel moves out and stays with John
Rothschild, first at a hotel on West 42nd Street and then at 14
East 60th Street.
With some help from Rothschild and her
parents, Neel buys a modest cottage in Spring Lake, New Jersey,
at 506 Monmouth Avenue, four blocks from the beach.
Although she will later in life sell this
house and buy a larger house, Spring Lake will be where she
spends part of each summer for the rest of her life.
Rothschild has decided to leave his wife
and children, the subject of a number of Neel’s
paintings. He wants to live with Neel, but she is ambivalent
about it. She decides to get an apartment for herself, and
moves to 347 1/2 West 17th Street, New York.
About this time, she meets Jose Santiago
Negron, a nightclub singer.
Negron leaves his wife and infant child,
Sheila, and moves in with Neel. Sheila is the subject of at
least three of Neel’s paintings.
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Isabetta in Cuba with Carlos’s
family, Adolfina, Tio and Adoris c.1930
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Alice Neel: Suicidal
Ward, Philadelphia General Hospital,
1931, pencil on paper, 17 x 22 inches.
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Nadya Olyanova and Egil Hoye c.1931
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Neel and Doolittle c.1932
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John Rothschild c.1940
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Painting c.1933 by Alice Neel of the kind submitted to the WPA
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Isabetta on boardwalk in New Jersey1934
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Neel and Doolittle with the painting of
Isabetta 1934
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Neel’s original painting of Isabetta
1934, subsequently destroyed
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Neel’s parents in front of the
cottage in Spring Lake, N.J. c.1934
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Jose Santiago Negron far left with his
Salsa Band c.1935
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