Portraits by Alice Neel are on exhibit for the first time in Asia at Gallery Hyundai, Seoul.

The exhibition “People and Places: Paintings by Alice Neel,” which began on May 2, features 15 portraits of Neel’s family, friends and lovers that are regarded as unique in the expression of her subjects’ inner personalities.

Neel, who didn’t receive much attention during her lifetime, is now considered one of the greatest portrait painters of the 20th century, along with Lucian Freud, for her distinctive portrait style that is not defined by the dominant categories of her lifetime. 

Her style is notable for its expressionistic brushwork, which captures the psychological and emotional condition of the subject. It had a great influence on contemporary artists such as Marlene Dumas, Elizabeth Payton and Eric Fisher.

“When you look at the portraits, normally you have a very strong feeling that you are looking at someone who’s no longer alive. But when you look at portraits of Alice Neel, you feel that you are looking at someone who’s still alive,” said Jeremy Lewison, former director of Collections of Tate and art adviser to the Estate of Alice Neel, during a press conference last Thursday in Seoul. 

Most of the portraits feature her family and friends, but there are also portraits of pop artist Andy Warhol and former New York mayor Ed Koch. But those portraits were rarely sold in her lifetime as they revealed too much about her subjects, causing discomfort to the viewers, according to Lewison.

Her famous portrait of Andy Warhol reveals the artist’s naked upper body with surgical scars on his torso, scars from a gun shot wound, and sagging nipples.

But most of her subjects were people around her, including her son Hartley Neel and his wife Jinny Neel, who attended the press conference with Lewison.

“Alice was a very loving, sympathetic woman. When you sat for her, she connected very much with you. She worries over you. She finds out things about you. She connected very strongly to you that she said when she’s finished painting that ‘I’ve gone so much into the other person that I have nothing left in myself,’” said Jinny Neel.

Neel drew two portraits of Jinny ― one in a striped short-sleeved shirt and short pants and the other in a yellow winter hat with different mood and faces.

She also drew her son Hartley on a rocking horse as a baby and as a full grown-up man in a white shirt on a couch.

Portraits on display at the gallery are works made in the 1940s, the mature stage of her art, and up to the final years of creation.

In “Sue Seely and Her Husband,” Neel captured the sadness of a couple after a miscarriage, who visited the artist in 1948.

Neel not only painted portraits but also did landscape paintings. Her paintings of hydrangeas and of buildings in snow are on exhibit as well.

The exhibition runs through June 2 at Gallery Hyundai, Jongno-gu, Seoul.

For more information, call (02) 2287-3500.

By Lee Woo-young  (wylee@heraldcorp.com)