Go Ask Alice: Alice Neel's telling portraits of friends, family and art-world types

Portraitist Alice Neel has said that "Art is not as stupid as human conversation," and, in the case of her paintings, she is right. The paintings now on display at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Mass. give visitors a more direct line of communication to Neel than speech can provide. The show is a sort of limited retrospective of the painter's work and a centennial celebration of her birth on Jan. 28, 1900. The Addison is the third host to the exhibit, put together by the Philadelphia Museum of Art's Ann Temkin.

The show assembles pieces from all points in Neel's career, featuring prominently her better-known later portraits. But it is the inclusion of lesser-known works, several of which have never before been publicly displayed, which makes the exhibit a treat and an invigorating experience. Too frequently, exhibitions provide an incomplete or edited vision of an artist's work. Those shows that do give a more inclusive view of a career often fail to demonstrate the evolution of the artist. Perhaps the greatest success of the Neel show is that it navigates a smoothly constructed and insightful walk through her growth.

To see Neel's paintings is to see her life. Arguably, this can be said of any artist, but in Neel's case, it is doubly true. Neel's commitment to representing the figure, even when abstraction was the trend, led her to paint the people around her. Family, friends, lovers, artists and writers all appear and reappear with near-brutal honesty, often stripped literally and figuratively, down to their bare skin and most essential character. It is this ability of Neel's to completely reveal her subjects which makes her work stunning. Appropriately, her "Self-Portrait" (1980) awaits visitors at the entrance to the show, on the landing of the Addison's second floor. An 80-year-old Neel sits naked except for a pair of glasses and a paintbrush. It's an unabashed image of an old woman; no attempt is made to disguise the pendulous breasts and sagging face.

Neel, who died in 1984, led a passionate and sometimes turbulent life. Perhaps too often, biographical descriptions of Neel focus on the hardships she experienced-the death of her first child, separation from her husband Carlos Enrquez, who took their second daughter with him, a mental breakdown, a string of sometimes difficult lovers. Certainly the artist did deal with many losses-but over the course of Neel's life, her artistic expression seems to have gained a greater emphasis on the passionate than the turbulent.

Even in Neel's most trying times, her work demonstrates an absorption of death as well as life into her art. Several of the earliest pieces in the show convey Neel's struggle with the death of her daughter Santillana. "After the Death of a Child" (1927-28) is an especially haunting watercolor: children dressed in red and blue appear on a playground, fenced off from the adults in the black and gray street who have been reduced to figures out of Munch's "Scream"-both elongated and hunched with hollow eyes. Shortly after the burial of her father, a railroad clerk, Neel painted "Dead Father" (1946): a gentle-looking man, slightly too stiff to be asleep, lies in the bed of his coffin.

The Addison show clearly chronicles Neel's evolution from a recent art-school grad (she attended the Philadelphia School of Design for Women), dealing with her rejection of academic training, to a confident, comfortable portraitist. Her earlier work is somewhat primitive in its calculated naivet. The tones are earthy and dark, and the way she renders her sitters varies. Some portraits give an impression of purposeful awkwardness, while others are just somehow off. Walking through the show, the figures become more colorful-blacks become blues, browns, yellows; purples appear-and the backgrounds behind them become simpler. The show does not skip over works from Neel's transitional periods, and rightly so-these paintings are essential to the greater comprehension of Neel's progress. Some of the canvases from this time seem to be painful births-one, "Randall in Extremis" (1960), even shows the sitter in a tormented growl-in which Neel's line becomes scraggily and her compositions overcrowded.

The main room of the show, in a gallery with a ceiling installation by Sol LeWitt, holds Neel's large portraits of the late '60s and '70s. These big, light paintings are all a pleasure, each one as grippingly individual as the people who inhabit them. Among the sitters Neel painted during the later years of her life were recognized figures on the art scene, including Andy Warhol. The appearance of large numbers of art-world types reflects the growing recognition Neel received in the '60s, out of which came a 1974 solo exhibition at the Whitney.

The paintings from the years just before Neel died are bold images. In them, Neel arrives at true expression of the individuals she examines, reaching an immediate confrontation with her subjects. One of her last images, "Hartley and Andrew" (1983), depicts her son and grandson. Both father and child are outlined in blue, as was Neel's habit at the time; seated on a stool, they stare not out, but into the viewer. Background is eliminated or, rather, Neel chooses the gessoed canvas for her background, as she does in many of these late works. This is the ultimate demonstration of self-confidence: Neel lets her sitters emerge from the raw canvas, sometimes leaving large amounts of space unmarked, as though saying, "I don't need to fill that in; what I have done is enough." And she would be right to say so.

Alice Neel is on view at the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Mass., through Dec. 31. For more information, call (978) 749-4015.