Learning Specialist, Emma Waldman: I want us to make a mental note of all the details that we can recognize in this painting. I’m noticing a lot of people—at the bottom, at the top, on the sides. I see a lot of dark colors adding to this gloomy scene.
Artist, Alice Neel: I’m frankly a psychological painter. But I really love people under all kinds of stresses also, because life does a lot of things to people.
Emma Waldman: That was Alice Neel. She was an American artist known for making portraits or paintings of people. What’s unique about her approach is that she didn’t just wanna show what someone looked like. She wanted to show who they were as a person and what made them special.
Alice Neel: When I paint the person themselves, I talk to them a while. And in that talking, they take their characteristic pose a number of times. And at the same time, you decide what is the essential of them, you know? I need at least four poses, but about two hours each time, ‘til you get a concept in your mind of what you’re going to do.
Emma Waldman: This is a portrait of the poet Kenneth Fearing. He wrote about different anxieties that the everyday person may have experienced during the Great Depression in the 1930s.
Neel uses a lot of symbolic imagery to reference who Kenneth Fearing was. We see a book, which references his career as a writer. If we look past his shoulder on the right-hand side, we see a subway car, which is a source of inspiration. And then all over the painting, we can see characters from his writing.
I’ve always wondered and been curious about the center of the painting, where I see a skeleton that might be squeezing the heart, causing it to bleed out onto the table.
Alice Neel: The reason I put it there was that even though he wrote ironic poetry, I thought his heart bled, you know, for the griefs of the world.