i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

A Gallery of Players / 115Campbell’s review of Neel’s group exhibit at the ACA gallery in ARTnews inDecember 1960 was illustrated with the portrait. Frank O’Hara, No. 2 thusproved pivotal to her career.During the ƒrst of his two sittings, Neel painted O’Hara in proƒle with hisprominent hooked nose conveying a keen alertness. The second, and in herview deƒnitive, portrait pushes the stock expressionist motif of the torturedartist, which she ƒrst used with Sam Putnam, into a visualization of pure hysteria,a man in the throes of a nervous breakdown. His physical and psychologicaldissolution is as complete as that of the aspiring artist in the contemporaryRandall in Extremis (1960, ƒg. 104). The lower half of his angular body is dislocatedfrom the upper, his boneless hands hang limply, and a black gash of ashadow cuts a deep trough in the side of his torso. The focal point of the painting,the garishly lit head itself, is a skull with tombstone-like teeth and a rectangularear protruding like a red „ag from the side of his face. Perhaps Neel wasaware of the poet’s alcoholism and his conviction that he would not live past40, 7 for she also roughed-in a still life of dead lilacs at the artist’s side. Perchedon the triangular point of the chair seat, he is less a man creatively inspiredthan one living on the edge. In reviving and reinterpreting the legacy of workssuch as Kokoschka’s Father Hirsh (1907), Neel creates a dramatic entrance intothe gestural-realist school and initiates the new direction of her portrait gallery.In May 1962 the Museum of Modern Art would validate the renewed interestin ƒguration that had been gathering momentum over the previous decadewith the exhibition “Recent Painting USA: The Figure.” As would become thenorm in the future, the exhibit at the prestigious MoMA generated satelliteshows—at the Kornblee and the Hirschl & Adler galleries and at the FinchCollege Museum. Neel’s Milton Resnick and Pat Pasloff was included in theKornblee exhibit, which was accompanied by a short catalog by Newsweekcritic Jack Kroll. However, the network’s cooperative venture did not coalescein a new movement that could generate its own critical literature. As ValeriePeterson pointed out in her ARTnews review of these exhibits, “A coherence isbeing enforced where none naturally forms...” 8 Nonetheless, just as the Clubhad granted permission, in a way, for each of the gestural realists to ignore theorthodoxy of abstraction and to pursue their own investigation of the ƒgure, sothe Museum of Modern Art’s “Recent Painting USA” and satellite exhibits legitimatedthat activity.That summer, Neel would enjoy a retrospective exhibition organized atReed College in Oregon by the painter-critic Hubert Crehan. Shortly thereafter,Crehan’s article, “Introducing the Portraits of Alice Neel,” the ƒrst featurearticle to be published in a national magazine, appeared in the October1962 ARTnews. With her portrait of Hubert Crehan (ƒg. 105), Neel visualizesthe “beat” artist archetype, the contentious, rumpled intellectual. Whereas