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Lot Essay
Mother and Child (Nancy and Olivia) is the first double portrait which Alice Neel made of her daughter-in-law and her first grandchild, capturing with exceptional clarity and remarkable emotive force the simultaneous joy and fear in being a new mother. Neel accommodates her new family into the traditional motif of the Madonna and Child, channeling art historical and religious tradition towards remarkably novel purposes. Motherhood was deeply significant to Neel, who endured a series of traumatic tragedies early in her life. Her first child, Santillana, died of diphtheria just shy of her first birthday in December, 1927. Neel, then living in poverty in Harlem, blamed herself, lamenting her inability to save her daughter. “You see if I’d had the money… the baby maybe wouldn’t have caught it like she did—and then if I could have paid the doctor[.] I wouldn’t have been so slow to call one” (quoted in K. Baum, “Political Creatures,” in Alice Neel: People Come First, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2021, p. 204). Her loss and solitude are gut-wrenchingly expressed in a watercolor Neel made just after Santillana’s death, which shows a secluded figure in black under a skeletal tree, severed from a brighter scene of little children in a playground.
A second tragedy struck Neel just three years later—soon after the birth of her second daughter, Isabetta, Neel’s husband abandoned her, absconding to Cuba with her child, whom she’d never see again. Neel broke down with this second loss, spending a year in the psychological ward of Philadelphia General Hospital. The mother’s despondency is conveyed in the agonizing works Futility of Effort and Degenerate Mother, both made in 1930, the year of Neel’s loss. Neel appropriates the visual tradition of the Madonna and Child, warping the motif into a study of abject misery with allusions to her two lost children. Neel visualizes her reproductive grief as a therapeutic against unimaginable loss, a strategy which Frida Kahlo later adopts in The Lost Desire, her 1932 painting solemnly mourning her terrifying miscarriage at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.
Almost forty years following the traumas of her young motherhood, Neel stood poised to reevaluate motherhood and the Madonna motif. She had given birth to and raised two boys, Richard and Hartley, who were now grown-up, and Richard had married Nancy. No longer caught in the “awful dichotomy” of being both a mother and an artist, she sought to capture the drama of motherhood in others. “Women were always sacrificers,” Neel discovered. “I used to feel guilty about being an artist, because I used to think the way the normal world thinks: there’s a certain function for women, that they have to do the ordinary things” (quoted in H. Judah, Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood, New York, 2024, p. 123).
Here Alice’s goal was sincerity without sentimentality, and in this she succeeded, rebuffing stereotypes that had long plagued representations of mothers, from beatific caregiver to the saintly Madonna. Unlike the fanciful, cloying facsimiles that appear in art and popular culture, all of them sanitized, domesticated, and disembodied, Neel’s mothers are both frank and concrete.
Kelly Baum
As the artist recalls of the portrait, “Olivia was three months old and Nancy looks afraid because this was her first child. Olivia was very active. I painted this in the country on a rainy day in 1967” (quoted in P. Hills, Alice Neel, New York, 1983, p. 123). Carefully analyzing the new mother, Neel must have recalled the turmoil she herself experienced as a young mother. In her The Family, a watercolor from 1927, Neel summarized the frantic chaos as she returned home from the hospital with Santillana: “I had just come home with this baby, and I’m sitting holding the baby. My mother is frantically cleaning the floor… My mother had a wild look; no doubt she saw the future” (quoted in ibid., p. 19). Neel draws this same emotional turbulence out in Mother and Child (Nancy and Olivia)—Nancy has the same wide-eyed, nervous look as she stares directly at the viewer (and her mother-in-law). Olivia is captured in the midst of movement, her left leg liberated from her mother’s lap in mid-swing. Nancy clutches her daughter close to her chest as Olivia teeters, the three-month-old infant pausing momentarily to also look deep into her grandmother’s gaze. “I remember Olivia was a very active child; she was about three months old,” Nancy recalled of sitting for the portrait. “Olivia was always jumping around, she couldn’t keep still” (quoted in Alice Neel: Painter of Modern Life, exh. cat., Ateneum Art Museum, Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki, 2016, p. 166).
Exceptionally, Neel paints objects in the background of Mother and Child (Nancy and Olivia). A reflective silver pitcher wobbles indecisively upon an unsteady three-legged stool whose sprawled spatial relations recall Van Gogh’s Chair. Neel rarely included objects in her backgrounds, and the inclusion here further accentuates the sense of indeterminacy garnered in the pose of the mother and child—as Olivia totters over her mother’s lap, the pitcher likewise struggles to resist gravity’s pull. The physical anxieties conveyed by Neel’s composition convey Nancy’s interior apprehension. “She was my first child, and I knew nothing of taking care of kids. I thought that the uncomfortable look I have in the portrait was just me trying to keep Olivia still, but what Alice picked up on is that I didn’t know what I was doing” (ibid.).
Mother and Child (Nancy and Olivia) is a seminal work in Alice Neel’s oeuvre, indicating the fulcrum point where the artist’s enduring exploration of motherhood evolves from distilling autobiographical tragedy towards analyzing and deciphering the enigmatic relationship between mother and child. As the curator Kelly Baum describes, “Here Alice’s goal was sincerity without sentimentality, and in this she succeeded, rebuffing stereotypes that had long plagued representations of mothers, from beatific caregiver to the saintly Madonna. Unlike the fanciful, cloying facsimiles that appear in art and popular culture, all of them sanitized, domesticated, and disembodied, Neel’s mothers are both frank and concrete” (K. Baum, op. cit., p. 40). Of the dozens of paintings depicting pregnant women, childbirth and women and children across Neel’s career, Mother and Child (Nancy and Olivia) is remarkable in its interweaving of a close familial subject and Neel’s own experiences of motherhood, capturing in one tableau the celebratory triumph of a new mother and the anxieties it brings.
A second tragedy struck Neel just three years later—soon after the birth of her second daughter, Isabetta, Neel’s husband abandoned her, absconding to Cuba with her child, whom she’d never see again. Neel broke down with this second loss, spending a year in the psychological ward of Philadelphia General Hospital. The mother’s despondency is conveyed in the agonizing works Futility of Effort and Degenerate Mother, both made in 1930, the year of Neel’s loss. Neel appropriates the visual tradition of the Madonna and Child, warping the motif into a study of abject misery with allusions to her two lost children. Neel visualizes her reproductive grief as a therapeutic against unimaginable loss, a strategy which Frida Kahlo later adopts in The Lost Desire, her 1932 painting solemnly mourning her terrifying miscarriage at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.
Almost forty years following the traumas of her young motherhood, Neel stood poised to reevaluate motherhood and the Madonna motif. She had given birth to and raised two boys, Richard and Hartley, who were now grown-up, and Richard had married Nancy. No longer caught in the “awful dichotomy” of being both a mother and an artist, she sought to capture the drama of motherhood in others. “Women were always sacrificers,” Neel discovered. “I used to feel guilty about being an artist, because I used to think the way the normal world thinks: there’s a certain function for women, that they have to do the ordinary things” (quoted in H. Judah, Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood, New York, 2024, p. 123).
Here Alice’s goal was sincerity without sentimentality, and in this she succeeded, rebuffing stereotypes that had long plagued representations of mothers, from beatific caregiver to the saintly Madonna. Unlike the fanciful, cloying facsimiles that appear in art and popular culture, all of them sanitized, domesticated, and disembodied, Neel’s mothers are both frank and concrete.
Kelly Baum
As the artist recalls of the portrait, “Olivia was three months old and Nancy looks afraid because this was her first child. Olivia was very active. I painted this in the country on a rainy day in 1967” (quoted in P. Hills, Alice Neel, New York, 1983, p. 123). Carefully analyzing the new mother, Neel must have recalled the turmoil she herself experienced as a young mother. In her The Family, a watercolor from 1927, Neel summarized the frantic chaos as she returned home from the hospital with Santillana: “I had just come home with this baby, and I’m sitting holding the baby. My mother is frantically cleaning the floor… My mother had a wild look; no doubt she saw the future” (quoted in ibid., p. 19). Neel draws this same emotional turbulence out in Mother and Child (Nancy and Olivia)—Nancy has the same wide-eyed, nervous look as she stares directly at the viewer (and her mother-in-law). Olivia is captured in the midst of movement, her left leg liberated from her mother’s lap in mid-swing. Nancy clutches her daughter close to her chest as Olivia teeters, the three-month-old infant pausing momentarily to also look deep into her grandmother’s gaze. “I remember Olivia was a very active child; she was about three months old,” Nancy recalled of sitting for the portrait. “Olivia was always jumping around, she couldn’t keep still” (quoted in Alice Neel: Painter of Modern Life, exh. cat., Ateneum Art Museum, Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki, 2016, p. 166).
Exceptionally, Neel paints objects in the background of Mother and Child (Nancy and Olivia). A reflective silver pitcher wobbles indecisively upon an unsteady three-legged stool whose sprawled spatial relations recall Van Gogh’s Chair. Neel rarely included objects in her backgrounds, and the inclusion here further accentuates the sense of indeterminacy garnered in the pose of the mother and child—as Olivia totters over her mother’s lap, the pitcher likewise struggles to resist gravity’s pull. The physical anxieties conveyed by Neel’s composition convey Nancy’s interior apprehension. “She was my first child, and I knew nothing of taking care of kids. I thought that the uncomfortable look I have in the portrait was just me trying to keep Olivia still, but what Alice picked up on is that I didn’t know what I was doing” (ibid.).
Mother and Child (Nancy and Olivia) is a seminal work in Alice Neel’s oeuvre, indicating the fulcrum point where the artist’s enduring exploration of motherhood evolves from distilling autobiographical tragedy towards analyzing and deciphering the enigmatic relationship between mother and child. As the curator Kelly Baum describes, “Here Alice’s goal was sincerity without sentimentality, and in this she succeeded, rebuffing stereotypes that had long plagued representations of mothers, from beatific caregiver to the saintly Madonna. Unlike the fanciful, cloying facsimiles that appear in art and popular culture, all of them sanitized, domesticated, and disembodied, Neel’s mothers are both frank and concrete” (K. Baum, op. cit., p. 40). Of the dozens of paintings depicting pregnant women, childbirth and women and children across Neel’s career, Mother and Child (Nancy and Olivia) is remarkable in its interweaving of a close familial subject and Neel’s own experiences of motherhood, capturing in one tableau the celebratory triumph of a new mother and the anxieties it brings.