5: Neel Sighting

[Click image for zoom-able version.]

Alice Neel
David Bourdon and Gregory Battcock, 1970
Oil on canvas, w142.2 cm x h151.8 cm (56" x 59.8", or 4.67' x ~5')
Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX USA

Continuing the tour of Austin with the Blanton Museum of Art, at a main edge of the university campus.

Full disclosure: I do often get museum fatigue, and when there's an art collection that's not overtly, specifically unique or distinctive in some way I am not always the most whipped to go. That's kind of what I feared with the Blanton, but we ended up having an appropriate time gap so gave it a shot — and we did get lucky! They had an excellent traveling exhibit at the time of our visit based on photography and the American road trip (still there through January 7th), and starting with that probably made us more cheerful about spending brain power on the rest of the collection, but spend it we did and enjoyed it.

Second full disclosure: For reasons not entirely clear to me, I love Alice Neel portraits. As in, I'm not even particularly sure if I like them that much, but it doesn't matter because love. And while I have looked at so many in print and online that I can't be sure, I think the Neel double portrait on display at the Blanton is actually the first one I've seen in person! (I'm inclined to confirm that this is the case, because the relatively large size of it IRL really struck me as adding to the sense of 'presence' these works have anyway.) Of course Neel has a really strong association with New York City, and I should probably pick something a little closer to home to stick with the theme, but...eh.

And for the rest, here's the museum blurb displayed next to the piece:

"Alice Neel did not flatter her subjects. She depicted her sitters—often family, neighbors, or friends that she admired—with candor, capturing them in intense, psychologically charged moments. Here we see David Bourdon and Gregory Battcock, two well-known New York art critics and a romantic couple at the time. Bourdon is shown in a suit and tie, while Battcock is half-dressed and disheveled.

"In many ways, this painting can also be understood as a portrait of Neel and her desire to honestly portray the marginalized bohemian world that she inhabited. Neel painted Bourdon and Battcock at a time when very few people were openly gay in the United States. The year Neel made this double portrait, 1970, the first gay pride parades took place in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago, timed to coincide with the one-year-anniversary of the riots that erupted after the police raid at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York. Critically recognized only late in her life, Neel is now considered to be one of the twentieth century's most significant portraitists."