Born January 28, 1900, the painter Alice Neel grew up right along the twentieth century, though she was less a product of her time than a harbinger of times to come. Significant success eluded her until the sixties; a true Aquarian, she was built for that decade of upheaval–and this new century of upheaval, too. Today, her hard gems of truth and beauty illuminate what we most need to see.
Neel first came on my radar as I was rushing through a gallery of contemporary paintings at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, were I screeched to a full stop in front of her 1974 portrait of former museum department head John I. H. Baur. With a palette of slate and ochre and a bold, almost slapdash brushstroke, she’d conveyed him as an institutional hack and a bemused enabler. It was rueful and rich, and though I hurried on, when I saw the Zwirner gallery was hosting a show of her work, I hurried right there as well.
These paintings of her family, neighbors, friends, lovers, and political comrades in Spanish Harlem and the Upper West Side are not perfect. In some cases, they could ask more, tell more. 
But they resonate as few twentieth-century portraits do because they are so vibrant and cock-sure – so defiantly gripping.
Hilton Als reviews theater, not fine arts, for The New Yorker. Yet he curated this Zwirner exhibition, perhaps because Neel’s intensely democratic curiosity mirrors his own. (His Neel book will be released this June.) In a catalog essay, he shares what this child of West Indian immigrants, raised in deep Brooklyn to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, initially recognized in her work Continue Reading →
I have been a professional film critic for more than a decade, but anyone who’s ogled my personal library knows that my most ardent cultural passion is actually food writing – not just cookbooks but essays about restaurants, markets, cooking, and foraging. In short, I like to read about eating. Everything lives inside a great piece of food writing: history, science, art, crafts, politics, culture, even our connection to the divine. The best part? In most cases reading about great meals confers less guilt and more pleasure than the meals themselves – especially when rendered by the writers I’ve selected below.
I often write here about the astrologer