Her tumultuous love life then led her to live in Spanish Harlem, where immigrant communities abounded, and where she produced breath-taking portraits of characters from her daily life. If we are unable to resolve your complaint, or if you would like more information about IPSO or the Editors’ Code, contact IPSO on 0300 123 2220 or visit ipso. Based predominantly in New York, Neel painted figuratively during a period in which it was deeply unfashionable to do so. The young Black family is almost shimmering with tension: the mother with her kids is wracked with worry, the boy with his knife is threatening yet tender.

I waited until now, when people would accuse me of insanity rather than vanity,” Neel said of the image. Neel presumably paints him because he is a subject whose commitment to class struggle she thinks worthy of representation.Yet even with all this going on, Neel’s brush takes you back every time to the central fact of his gleeful face.

The exhibition features 70 such works of Neel’s friends, her sons, their ex-girlfriends, loners, drop-outs, draftees, revolutionaries, expectant mothers, poets, museum curators, and strangers off the street. The artist, who described herself as “the collector of souls”, moved to Harlem in the early 1940s with a nightclub owner.Neel communicates well the hardship and trauma weighing on her subjects through distracted eyes or even a slump of the shoulders. Roosevelt in 1934), a prog ram that employed artists to create works for public buildings and parks during the Great Depression .