As with all of her greatest works, Alice Neel’s powerful painting, Jackie Curtis as a Boy, captures the deeply personal and individual idiosyncrasies that underpin the inner truths of her sitters from all walks of life. Executed in 1972, the present work portrays Jackie Curtis, a gender nonconforming performer, playwright, and poet who played an active role within the Lower East Side counterculture as well as in Andy Warhol’s creative circle. A nonconformist herself, Neel gravitated towards figures who pushed cultural boundaries and often existed along the fringes of society. Neel’s psychological paintings are a collaboration, a pouring in of energy from both sides—the sitter and the artist—and today, her paintings embody a universal truth that is as relevant now as when she signed each work in her instantly recognizable, curling scrawl. With an impressive exhibition history, recently included in Neel’s highly acclaimed traveling retrospective Alice Neel: People Come First organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jackie Curtis as a Boy displays Neel’s painterly techniques at their most compelling, utilizing distortion and nonmimetic color to lend an empathetic eye towards a vulnerable rendition of queer subjectivity.

Immortalized as the drag queen "Jackie" in Lou Reed's 1972 "Walk on the Wild-Side" hit single and featured in the Andy Warhol-produced 1968 film Flesh, Jackie Curtis was a gender nonconforming outsized personae and stage actor. They radically eschewed conventional labels of gender identification and instead insisted on the performativity of gender as a cultural construct. Curtis was first portrayed by Neel with feminine attributes in a double portrait with Ritta Redd in 1970. In the present work, Curtis is bare faced and formally posed to reveal the ambiguity of Curtis’s gender identification; here, presenting a rather boyish version clad in a baseball shirt with an ironically phallic embroidery detail. Bony hands unfurl around rich blue jeans and mauve undertones shadow Curtis’s tender face which glances back honestly towards the viewer. As one of Warhol’s close friends and Superstars, an accolade attributed to those featured in the artist’s early interrogations in film, Curtis undoubtedly exuded an aura that could not be ignored. Neel was committed to likeness, and yet equally committed to an inner truth exquisitely exemplified in this stripped-down portrait of the character that was Curtis.

Acutely focused and psychologically charged, Alice Neel’s paintings strips its sitters of their posturing and self-imposed facades, laying bare their identities at the t.mes of execution. While ostensibly a realist, Neel rejected academic exactitude and photographic likeness, never resting on straightforward reportage of the sitter's appearance. Instead, she transformed her figures through expressive brushwork and an almost Mannerist distortion, to achieve a vivid depiction of her sitter's inner psychology. Neel called herself a collects or of souls, evoking her ability to draw out the spirit of a sitter and record it on canvas. Neel took inspiration from every facet of her life, painting subjects from a mosaic of ethnic and class origins. Her t.mes less mastery thus lies in her ability to uncover and lay bare the thoughts, desires and vulnerabilities which individuals are naturally inclined to shield from onlookers. In Roberta Smith’s New York t.mes s review of Neel’s “gloriously relentless” retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art she describes Neel as “an early feminist, inborn bohemian, erstwhile Social Realist, lifelong activist and staunchly representational painter who bravely persisted, depicting the people and world around her” (Roberta Smith, "It’s t.mes to Put Alice Neel in Her Rightful Place in the Pantheon," The New York t.mes s, April 2021).

Throughout her decades-long career, Neel’s milieu was dominated by intellectual, compassionate, creative, and socially active people across the spectrum of humanity. Beginning in the 1960s, the increased queer visibility resulting from the gay liberation movements in New York City coincided with the emergence of queer subjects in Neel’s paintings. Neel’s portrayals of LGBTQ subjects flowed from her broad and steadfast humanism and her commitment to capture life’s alluring diversity. Her sitters were not only marginalized as sexual minorities, but, for much of her lifet.mes , they were criminalized and subject to discrimination in society. With her empathetic portrayal of people, Neel sought opportunities to communicate desire and identity through visual codes in her work. Jackie Curtis as a Boy is no exception, serving “as a foil to Jackie Curtis and Ritta Redd… reveal[ing] the other side of the performer’s expansive play with gender, as, depending on mood and the day, Curtis would don men’s drag rather than women’s, assuming male personae that were similarly rooted in desire.” (Randall Griffey, “Painting Fruit(s),” in Exh. Cat., New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; San Francisco, The de Young Museum, Alice Neel: People Come First, 2021-2022, p. 94).

Widely considered one of the most important figurative painters of the twentieth-century, Neel came to the fore as painterly figuration began to leave the mainstream. Working in her individual mode through successive generations of abstract, minimalist, and conceptual movements, Neel was staid in her determination to craft depictions that were both beautiful and bruising in their honesty. Jackie Curtis as a Boy is a test.mes nt to Neel’s insatiable desire to use her brush as a tool to memorialize people of all social classes—the revolutionary thinkers, the bohemian intelligentsia of New York’s counterculture, artists and critics, mother and children. For Neel, people come first.

Artist

Alice Neel