i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

The Creation (of a) Myth / 7death of their ƒrst child, Santillana (1927); the break-up of their marriage andloss of custody of their second child, Isabetta, followed shortly therafter by anervous breakdown (1930); the post-recovery move to the bohemian world ofGreenwich village (1931); the destruction of over 300 of her paintings and watercolorsby her jealous lover, Kenneth Doolittle (1934); the move, with José,to Spanish Harlem, where her two sons, Richard (1939) and Hartley (1941),were born; years of poverty in Spanish Harlem (1939–1962); the beginnings ofher own professional success as her sons entered their careers; and ƒnally,fame, and ƒnancial and critical success (1974–1984).This narrative, repeated in all of the newspaper reviews of her exhibitions,culminated in Patricia Hills’s judiciously edited autobiography from 1983. AliceNeel is Neel’s life as she wanted it told, the grand summation of her lecturesand interviews. Indeed, it reads like a psychological novel of the 1930s such asher friend Millen Brand would have written. Lively and engaging, the book isa testimony to Neel’s prodigious and vivid memory for people and events, andto her exceptional storytelling abilities. Her life’s traumas are not at all irrelevantto her artwork, but it is important to recognize that Neel was fashioningthe recounting of her life as if it were a piece of ƒction. In a true stroke of “genius,”she did not write her own autobiography, even though she was a ƒnewriter; she let others use the material she supplied in interviews to write it forher, so that the recounting conveyed a sense of objectivity.Yet, the traumatic events thus transcribed can help elucidate her art onlywhen lodged in the social and intellectual milieu of which she was a part, asLawrence Alloway noted in his review of Hills’s book in Art Journal:In Patricia Hills’ Alice Neel . . . the hand of the artist seems a bit heavy to me. Thebulk of the book, “Alice By Alice” . . . is the artist’s oral history of herself, and Hills ispresent only as the author of an eight-page, unillustrated Afterword. This disparitywould matter less if a solid core of critical discussion on Neel had already existed,or if her monologue were more interesting. Anyone who has heard the artist’s garrulouslectures will recognize many of the anecdotes printed here . . . [T]he artistshould have realized that if she is to move off the lecture circuit and enter art history,the cooperation of people like Hills should not be abused. 3The anecdotes and observations so familiar from Neel’s lectures are bestunderstood in their art historical context, where they provide clues to thesources of her intellectual development. Although isolated in terms of herexclusion from exhibitions, she was highly visually and critically literate. Althoughshe professed disinterest in other artists and used her lectures as a vehiclefor reinforcing the notion that her art stemmed directly from her personallife rather than from any outside in„uence, her extensive knowledge of art andliterature permitted her to forge her art from a very broad base.