1960
Spring: Paints Frank O’Hara, poet,
critic, and curator at the Museum of Modern Art, over the
course of five sittings, producing two portraits. She had met
O’Hara at meetings of the Abstract Artists’ Club in
the 1950s.
September 4-17: Has a solo exhibition at
Old Mill Gallery, Tinton Falls, New Jersey.
December: Participates in a four-person
show at the A.C.A. Gallery, Alice
Neel, Jonah Kinigstein, Anthony Toney, Giacomo Porzano. Lawrence Campbell reproduces Frank O’Hara, No. 2 in
his review of the exhibition in ArtNews, the first time Neel’s work is illustrated
in this magazine: ‘Miss Neel has made the strongest
impression. She has been painting for years but for some
unknown reason is rarely seen in exhibitions.’
1961
February: Neel’s drawing of W. E. B.
Du Bois is published with Du Bois’s article ‘The
Color of England’ in Mainstream.
August: Neel’s portrait Kenneth Fearing, 1935,
is reproduced on the cover of Mainstream in a special issue dedicated to Fearing.
Fall: Richard Neel begins law school at
Columbia University, having graduated from Columbia College in
the spring.
1962
January 21-February 3: Hubert Crehan, an
artist and art critic, organizes an exhibition of fifteen of
Neel’s paintings at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. To
avoid controversy Joe Gould is set aside in a janitor’s closet.
Spring: Thomas Hess and Harold Rosenberg
visit Neel to consider her for the Longview Foundation Purchase
Award from Dillard University, New Orleans, which is given to
under-recognised artists. Neel receives the award later this
year.
May 21-June 15: Exhibits three paintings in
the group show Figures at the Kornblee Gallery, New York, organized in
response to the Museum of Modern Art’s show Recent Painting USA: The Figure (May 23-September 4). The Kornblee’s roster
of figure painters ignored by the Modern includes, among
others, Milton Avery, Alex Katz, Philip Pearlstein, Fairfield
Porter and George Segal.
June 4-30: Participates in the group
exhibition Portraits at the Zabriskie Gallery, New York.
September: Moves to 300 West 107th Street,
near the corner of Broadway. It is a much larger apartment,
with a front room with rounded north-facing windows where she
will do the majority of her painting for the rest of her life.
October: ‘Introducing the Portraits
of Alice Neel’ by the critic, Hubert Crehan, is published
in ArtNews It is the first major feature article to examine
her work.
1963
Spring: Hartley Neel graduates from
Columbia College and in the fall begins a teaching fellowship
and master’s program in chemistry at Dartmouth College in
Hanover, New Hampshire.
October 1-26: Neel has her first exhibition
at Graham Gallery, New York, which will represent her work
until 1982. In ArtNews Kim Levin writes: ‘Miss Neel’s
work falls somewhere in the realm where sensibility is so acute
that it defies definition; her portraits are not only people,
they are art.’
December 21: Richard Neel and Nancy Greene,
Richard’s first wife, are married. They will live with
Neel for two years.
1964
Spring: Richard graduates from Columbia Law
School.
Neel begins receiving a yearly stipend of
$6,000 from a benefactor, the psychiatrist Dr. Muriel Gardiner,
whom she had met through John Rothschild. The stipend will
continue until Neel’s death. (Dr. Gardiner is the woman
who lies behind the character Julia in Lillian Hellman’s
book Pentimento: A Book of Portraits. She was the editor of The Wolf-Man by the Wolf-Man, a book
relating to Freud’s celebrated History of Infantile Neurosis).
1965
January 12-28: Hartley arranges an
exhibition of paintings and drawings by Neel at
the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth College.
February 5-21: Exhibits Max White, 1935 in the Exhibition of Paintings Eligible for Purchase
under the Childe Hassam Fund at the
American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York. This fund
places works of art in public collections. Neel will
participate in four of these exhibitions through 1975.
Summer: Travels to Europe with Hartley.
Their visit includes Paris, Rome, Florence, and Madrid.
Fall: Hartley begins medical school at
Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.
1966
January: Has her second solo exhibition at
Graham Gallery, which is reviewed in the New York Post (January 16)
and the Herald Tribune (January 9), as well as in Newsweek (January 31) and
the March issue of Arts Magazine.
1967
February 11: A daughter, Olivia, is born to
Richard and Nancy in New York.
June 9-30: Neel is given a show at the
Maxwell Galleries in San Francisco.
1968
January 6-February 3: Graham Gallery
presents a solo exhibition of Neel’s paintings.
Participates in the protest decrying the
absence of women and African American artists in the Whitney
Museum of American Art’s exhibition The 1930’s: Painting and Sculpture in America.
1969
Hartley graduates from medical school and
begins his internship at the University of California in San
Francisco.
January 16: Participates in demonstrations
against the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition Harlem on My Mind. The
protest is organized by the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition,
of which Benny Andrews, Neel’s close friend and fellow
artist, is a co-chair and organizer. Raphael Soyer, John Dobbs
and Mel Roman are the only other white artists in attendance.
April: Travels to the Soviet Union with
John Rothschild.
May 21: Receives a $3,000 Award in Art from
the National Institute of Arts and Letters, New York.
Summer: Travels to Mexico with Richard and
Nancy. While there, they visit Richard’s father,
José Santiago Negron, now an Episcopal minister, as well
as Marcelo Pogolotti, and the Mexican mural painter David
Alfaro Siqueiros.
From Mexico, Neel travels to San Francisco
to stay with Hartley and Ginny, Hartley’s future wife.
While there, Neel paints over ten paintings. Her friend from
the 1930’s, Katharine Hogle, arranges a visit to meet the
Nobel Laureate, Linus Pauling, at his home in Big Sur. Neel
paints three paintings there, one of Linus Pauling as well as
one of his wife, Ava Helen Pauling, and a portrait of them
together.
November-December: Travels to Denmark,
Norway, and Spain with Richard and his family. In November she
visits Jonathan Brand and his wife, Monika, Pennsylvanian
collectors of her work who are living in Copenhagen.
Brand’s father, the novelist Millen Brand, had been a
close friend of Neel’s in the 1930s.
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Hub Crehan sitting by his portrait c.1961
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The hallway of Neel’s apartment at
300 West 107th Street after 1965
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Neel (left) and Hartley (far right) with
guest at the opening of her show at the Maxwell Galleries 1967
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Neel with Hartley (left) and Richard
(back to camera) at the opening of her solo exhibition at the
Graham Gallery c.1968
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Neel with Raphael Soyer at her 1968
Graham gallery exhibition
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