VERY ANXIOUS PEOPLE: ALICE NEEL’S LATE PORTRAITS

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dc.contributor.advisorShannon, Joshuaen_US
dc.contributor.authorCallahan, Mauraen_US
dc.contributor.departmentArt History and Archaeologyen_US
dc.contributor.publisherDigital Repository at the University of Marylanden_US
dc.contributor.publisherUniversity of Maryland (College Park, Md.)en_US
dc.date.accessioned2023-02-01T06:30:51Z
dc.date.available2023-02-01T06:30:51Z
dc.date.issued2022en_US
dc.description.abstractIn the mid- to late 1960s, as her previously underrecognized work as a painter started to secure visibility in the art world, the American portraitist Alice Neel (1900-1984) began to minimize her subjects’ physical environments, often leaving the surrounding area a blank white field. She instead concentrated her paint within the figure, the boundaries of which became emphasized by a vivid blue outline. This attention to the figure and its borders reveals a critical nuancing of the humanist ideals her paintings purportedly defended. Rather than merely affirming the autonomy of the human subject, Neel's late portraits suggest an anxiety toward the coherence of selfhood and its sheltering within the body. This essay considers a small selection of these paintings, created between 1965 and 1982, alongside the work of preceding and contemporary artists who used portraiture to work through Western culture’s shifting conceptions of the human subject to different ends. These studies ultimately explore the possibilities and limitations of portraiture in revealing and validating the subject, and how these challenges were negotiated by Neel during the culturally transformative decades which coincided with her late career.en_US
dc.identifierhttps://doi.org/10.13016/5vje-2mgx
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/29537
dc.language.isoenen_US
dc.subject.pqcontrolledArt historyen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledAlice Neelen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledAmerican arten_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledContemporary arten_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledHumanismen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledPaintingen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledPortraitureen_US
dc.titleVERY ANXIOUS PEOPLE: ALICE NEEL’S LATE PORTRAITSen_US
dc.typeThesisen_US

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