Artist, Alice Neel: You see, art for me was more than a profession. It was also an obsession. If I didn’t paint all the time, I probably wouldn’t live. That’s what keeps me alive.
Narrator: Artist Alice Neel, speaking in 1975.
Alice Neel: That’s Kenneth Fearing, who was a poet of those days, and he lived near the Sixth Avenue El. Those people across the bottom are the characters out of his poetry. He said to me, “Why don’t you take that [thing] out of my heart?” But 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.
One of the reasons I painted was to catch life as it goes by. I represent the 20th century. I was born in 1900, and I’ve tried to capture the zeitgeist.
When painting or writing are good, it’s taken right out of life itself and put into the work. Now, that doesn’t mean that the work has to tell about real life. I mean, it can be abstract or anything, but the vitality is taken out of real living and put into the creative project, whatever it is.
Archival audio excerpted from Alice Neel: They Are Their Own Gifts. 1978. United States. Directed by Lucille Rhodes and Margaret Murphy. Courtesy the filmmakers and The Metropolitan Museum of Art