Alice Neel

Known for: psychological portraiture of her Harlem community

Alice Neel spent five decades painting the people of Spanish Harlem — her neighbors, their children, Communist Party members, local figures — before her work received significant institutional recognition in the 1970s. Her portraits, made with a psychological directness and raw chromatic intensity, were consistently at odds with the dominant modes of American painting during the decades she made them. A MoMA retrospective in 2021 further secured her reputation as a central figure in American figurative painting.