Alice Neel
Painted her neighbours, her lovers, union organisers and pregnant women, and was ignored for forty years.
Alice Neel was born in Pennsylvania in 1900, lost a daughter to diphtheria, had a breakdown after her husband took their second child to Cuba, and spent decades in Spanish Harlem painting whoever came to the apartment — neighbours, Communist Party organisers, her sons, art critics, pregnant women, the dying. She called herself a collector of souls. The recognition arrived late: a Whitney retrospective in 1974, when she was seventy-four, and a fuller reassessment only after her death in 1984, which has continued to build ever since.
The market has risen substantially since the mid-2010s and continues to be driven by institutional demand. Portraits lead, and identity of the sitter matters — a known figure, or a picture with a documented exhibition history, sits well ahead of an unidentified one. Neel frequently left areas of canvas unpainted or barely covered, which is deliberate and characteristic and is regularly misreported as unfinished or damaged. Drawings and watercolours from the 1920s and 1930s are scarce and important. The estate holds the archive and the catalogue work.
If you own a work by Alice Neel
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.