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Portrait of Alice Neel

Lynn Gilbert · CC BY-SA 4.0

Alice Neel

American visual artist

1900 – 1984aged 84

A portrait painter who kept painting the human figure through decades when abstraction dominated American art, and paid for it in recognition until the 1960s finally caught up with her. Her portraits of friends, lovers, poets and strangers are noted for depicting women as aware subjects rather than passive objects, a deliberate break from the male-gaze tradition of the nude she inherited.

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