1970
August 15: Hartley Neel and Virginia
(Ginny) Taylor are married at Ginny’s home in Sherman,
Connecticut. Guests at the wedding include friends of
Ginny’s family, former head of the NEA, Henry Allen Moe,
and writer, Malcolm Cowley, both of whom, coincidentally, had
written about Neel’s work in the 1930’s. Hartley
and Ginny move to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Hartley
begins his three-year medical residency at Harvard’s
Massachusetts General Hospital.
John Rothschild moves into the guest room
in Neel’s apartment, where he will live until his death
in 1975.
August 31: Neel’s portrait of Kate
Millett appears on the cover of Time
magazine in an issue dedicated to
‘The Politics of Sex’. Rosemary Frank, the art
editor of Time, periodically asks Neel to paint portraits of public
figures (including Ted Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt) for
possible inclusion in the magazine.
October: Paints Andy Warhol. Brigid Berlin
photographs the sitting.
October 13-November 7: Has a solo
exhibition at the Graham Gallery. Lawrence Campbell, in ArtNews (vol.
69), observes that ‘Miss Neel seems to detect a hidden
weakness in her sitters which she drags out, yelping, into the
clear glare of day.’
1971
January 15-February 19: Moore College of
Art and Design in Philadelphia, formerly the Philadelphia
School of Design for Women, Neel’s alma mater, gives her
a solo exhibition. Jackie Curtis and Ritta Redd, whose double
portrait is included in the show, accompany her to the opening.
January 29: Participates in a panel of
nineteen women who had taken over the floor to demand their own
session at one of the weekly meetings of the Alliance of
Figurative Artists in New York, which had a long tradition of
having only male speakers.
February 25-March 21: Participates in the
National Academy of Design’s 146th Annual
Exhibition and receives the
Benjamin Altman Figure Prize for $2,500.
February 28: Twin daughters, Alexandra and
Antonia, are born to Richard and Nancy in New York.
May: Joins a demonstration against the
Whitney Museum of American Art’s exhibition Contemporary Black Artists in America curated by Robert Doty. The exhibition is
widely criticized by artists as being hastily organized and
ill-conceived.
June 1: Receives an honorary doctorate in
fine arts from Moore College of Art and Design.
September: Participates in a protest
against the Museum of Modern Art organized by the Black
Emergency Cultural Coalition and Artists and Writers Protest
Against the War in Vietnam. The protestors oppose Governor
Nelson Rockefeller’s handling of the Attica prison riot
and the museum bookstore’s refusal to sell their Attica Book (1971).
Winter: Neel’s doctoral address from
Moore College is published in the journal Women and Art. The same
issue announces the circulation of two petitions, one by the
Alliance of Figurative Artists (initiated by Noah Baen) and the
other by Women in the Arts (initiated by Cindy Nemser),
demanding the inclusion of Neel’s work in the
Whitney’s upcoming annual exhibition.
1972
January 25-March 19: Neel’s painting The Family (John Gruen, Jane Wilson, and Julia), 1970 is included in the Whitney’s annual
exhibition.
April 20-22: Participates in the Conference
of Women in the Visual Arts at the Corcoran School of Art in
Washington, D.C. At a panel discussion, Neel takes the
opportunity to present a series of slides of her work. The
format of the slide show would be repeated in the frequent
lectures she will deliver over the course of the next decade.
June: Travels to Greece and Africa with
Hartley and John Rothschild. In Nairobi they attend an
exhibition of Neel’s work at the Paa Ya Paa Art Gallery
and Studio, which was arranged by an African business associate
of John Rothschild, Peter N. Kinuthia, whom Neel will paint the
following year. While in Kenya, on June 19, Neel appears on the
talk show MAMBO-LEO on national television.
Late Summer: Spends a week at the Skowhegan
School in Maine as a visiting artist.
1973
February 15-March 13: John Perreault, art
critic and instructor, organizes the exhibition The Male Nude at the
School of Visual Arts Gallery in New York. Joe Gould, 1933, is
included, as is John Perreault, 1972, which was painted for the exhibition.
Spring: Hartley finishes his residency and
opens a private practice in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. Hartley and
Ginny move to Stowe, Vermont, where Neel will spend several
weeks a year for the rest of her life.
Neel is awarded a $7,500 grant from the
National Endowment for the Arts.
Between 1973 and 1975 Neel will participate
in at least eight exhibitions devoted to the work of women
artists, organized by the Women’s Interart Center and
Women in the Arts, among others.
1974
February 7-March 17: The Whitney Museum of
American Art presents the first retrospective exhibition of
Neel’s work, Alice Neel, curated by Elke Solomon. Fifty-eight paintings
are included, and an eight-page brochure accompanies the
exhibition. Although Neel’s admirers consider it an
inadequate tribute, Neel herself views it as a triumph.
April 17: A daughter, Victoria, is born to
Richard and Nancy in New York.
1975
January 23: A daughter, Elizabeth, is born
to Hartley and Ginny in Stowe, Vermont.
Summer: Neel helps Hartley and Ginny
renovate space on their property in rural Vermont to serve as
Neel’s studio during her visits.
September 7-October 19: The Georgia Museum
of Art in Athens, Georgia, presents Alice
Neel: The Woman and Her Work, which
includes eighty-three paintings and is accompanied by a
catalogue. Neel has six other solo exhibitions this year and
participates in sixteen group exhibitions.
An interview with Neel is included in Cindy
Nemser’s book Art Talk:
Conversations with 12 Women Artists (New
York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975).
November 2: Participates in a panel
discussion at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York ‘Women
Artists, Seventy Plus.’
1976
Neel is inducted into the National
Institute of Arts and Letters, New York (now the American
Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters).
February 26: Receives the International
Women’s Year Award (1975-76) ‘in recognition of
outstanding cultural contributions and dedication to women and
art.’
December: Neel’s T. B. Harlem, 1940, is
included in the groundbreaking exhibition Women Artists, 1550-1950,
organized by Linda Nochlin and Ann Sutherland Harris, first
presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
1977
Working with master printmaker Judith
Solodkin, who is teaching at Rutgers University, Neel creates
her first prints, a lithograph and an etching. The prints are
published by 724 Prints, a company run by Dorothy Pearlstein
and Nancy Melzer. She will produce four more lithographs with
Solodkin over the next two years.
Among many other exhibitions this year,
Neel participates in two shows focusing on WPA artists of the
1930s, one at the Parsons School of Design, New York, and the
other a traveling exhibition organized by the Gallery
Association of New York.
1978
May 18: A son, Andrew, is born to Hartley
and Ginny in Stowe, Vermont.
November 1-25: Graham Gallery organizes Alice Neel: A Retrospective Exhibition of
Watercolors and Drawings, the first
show dedicated to her works on paper.
1979
January 30: Receives the National
Women’s Caucus for Art award for outstanding achievement
in the visual arts, along with Isabel Bishop, Louise Nevelson,
and Georgia O’Keefe. President Jimmy Carter presents the
award.
An interview with Neel is included in
Eleanor Munro’s book Originals:
American Women Artists (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1979).
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Andy Warhol sitting for Neel’s
portrait. Photo by Brigid Berlin 1970
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Neel with Rita Redd (left) and Jackie
Curtis (center) at the opening of Neel’s solo exhibition
at Moore College 1971
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Neel in Greece 1972
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Neel at Hartley’s house in Vermont
after 1973
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Neel at Whitney opening, 1974
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Neel in her studio in Vermont after 1975
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Panelists at Brooklyn Museum for Curators,
Critics and the Economics of the Woman Artist and Women Artists,
Seventy Plus. Pictured left to
right, top row: Lilly Brody, Susan Martin, Isabel Bishop, Alice
Neel, Lil Picard, Judith Von Baron, Lois Mailou Jones, Janet
Schneider, Sari Dienes. Bottom row: Patricia Mainardi, June
Blum. Photo by Maurice C. Blum
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Neel painting Stephen Shepherd in the front room of her apartment at 300 West 107th Street 1978
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Neel, Selma Burke and Isabel Bishop with
President Jimmy Carter at the first National Women’s
Caucus for Art award in 1979
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Neel and Louise Nevelson at the awards
ceremony for the above award, January 30, 1979. Photo by Gina
Shamus
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