TPO21 L4 走进Alice Neel

TPO21 第四篇讲座

主题：Alice Neel -艺术史

考点：问答 / 定义 / 举例 / 强调 / 因果 / 态度

词汇识记重点：
solo / prestigious / respected / portray / objective / realism /
expressionism /subjective / distort / exaggerate / override /
contradiction /elongated / stretchy / attempt / portraiture /
vicinity span / genre / abstract / dominate

拓展阅读：“Painted Truth；In the company of Alice Neel ” Excerpt ｜Laura Cumming

本篇听力拓展阅读文字节选自刊登在英国卫报上的一篇对Alice Neel 作品解读；
路Sir节选的部分主要围绕文篇作者在描述Alice创作作品的特点用词，考验大家词汇量的时候到了！- 请留意加粗斜体部分

Alice Neel's Pregnant Woman, 1971. Photograph: Estate of Alice Neel

Her pictures are edgy, awkward, candidly unflattering, frequently humorous or grotesque. The heads are disproportionately big, the hands claw-like, the limbs flaccid or cricked and skewed in defiance of anatomy to get across further expression or character. Freckles, fag-browned molars, awkward knees and bulging breasts, the indelible frown, the cavernous cleft, the nose that is more limb than feature: Neel cannot help but notice them all. She pays no attention to the sitter's fears of appearing graceless or gauche (her method, she said, was to converse until they unconsciously assumed their most characteristic pose in a chair, revealing "what the world had done to them and their retaliation".) Having no repertoire of conventional poses, or props, you might say she let her subjects hang themselves. And each is described in Neel's trademark blue outline – looping, breezing, brushing, sweeping in shape and contour – a figure that is then coloured in. To say that the later portraits verge upon caricature is not much of an overstatement.

You might ask why anyone would submit themselves to such an eye. My sense, looking at this exhilarating show with its exceptional range of emotional nuances, of life lessons and warnings and compassionate insights, is to learn more than one kind of truth.

What made Warhol sit half-naked before Neel, exposing his sagging nipples and tea-coloured truss, blanket-stitch sutures embroidering his torso? Look at the portrait, in which he shuts his eyes to the viewer, and you see his complexity of character beautifully condensed: fragile yet commanding, male yet female with his dainty pins, vulnerable yet powerfully controlled. The body may be assailed, but never the soul.

完整阅读链接：

ALICE NEEL 英国卫报

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另奉上可以欣赏到Alice Neel 主要画作的网站
http://www.artnet.com/artists/alice-neel/2

同时路Sir给诸位贴出网站主页对Alice Neel的介绍：

Alice Neel was an American painter known for her Expressionistic portraits of her friends, family, and lovers. Her dynamic use of color and line captured the interior emotional life of her sitters, lending a psychological weight to her subject matter rather than just a likeness of the model. “Whether I'm painting or not, I have this overwhelming interest in humanity,” she explained. “Even if I'm not working, I'm still analyzing people.” Born on January 28, 1900 in Merion Square, PA, she was brought up in a strict middle class family who did not support her decision to become an artist. Neel nevertheless went on to study at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women in 1921. Losing her infant daughter to disease following her move from Cuba to New York with her husband traumatically altered her life and outlook, setting the precedent for her work’s latent focus on motherhood, loss, and anxiety. She died on October 13, 1984 in New York, NY. Neel’s works are included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Tate Gallery in London, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, among many others.