Family members were often Alice Neel's subjects. In a new documentary, the tables have been turned.

ART

A Grandson Paints a Portrait of a Portraitist

By CAROL KINO

Published: April 22, 2007

WHEN Richard and Hartley Neel talk about posing for their mother, the painter Alice Neel, who died in 1984, their conversation slips easily into the present tense.

"She usually draws the person, and then she paints in this, she paints in that," Richard said. "You want to see it before it's finished, but you don't want to see it too soon."

Hartley added, "You know, sitting for a portrait is like an incredibly intensive interview."

Sitting in the West 107th Street apartment in Morningside Heights that had been their mother's home and is still rented by her family, the brothers were discussing the new documentary film "Alice Neel." It was directed by Andrew Neel, Hartley's son, who was also visiting that day. The film is at Cinema Village through May 3 and is to be screened Monday at the Newport Beach Film Festival in California.

Using a mix of historical footage, old family photographs and freshly videotaped interviews, "Alice Neel" portrays some of the intriguing personalities Neel painted, and in the process creates a portrait of the artist herself.

Many of the film's most moving scenes were shot by Andrew Neel in his grandmother's home. A sprawling, decrepit three-bedroom apartment, it is preserved much as she left it at her death. Her clothes hang in the closet; her paintings are stacked along the hallway. Her Burl Ives records and Stokely Carmichael paperbacks line the shelves. ("At least we didn't keep her body," Richard said, laughing.) As Hartley explains in the film: "It conjures up our mother for us. To a certain extent we'd like to preserve that."

Propped on an easel in the living room is a painting of Mary Beebe, who organized a show of Neel's work in Oregon in 1975. A painting smock and paint-encrusted palette sit nearby, and the mantelpiece still bristles with her brushes, stuffed like flowers into vases and coffee cans. The past seems vividly present, just as it often does in the many Neel portraits made in this room.

When Neel painted someone, "she would have this endless flow of conversation with the subject," Richard said. "She would get their life story."

She was adroit at persuading her subjects to stay in place long past their comfort point, a true feat considering the many portraits she made of small children. But often - as in "Dominican Boys on 108th Street - (1955), a painting of two tough-looking kids standing curbside in Spanish Harlem, where she and her sons lived until 1962 - she captured people on the fly. "She said that when she was younger," Hartley said, "she could hold an image in her head for something like 16 hours."

Now 28, Andrew Neel began his film in 2003, almost two years after graduating from Columbia University and before finishing his first feature film, "Darkon." (A documentary that follows the lives of several members of a fantasy role-playing club, it is now in limited release.)

"I figured someone was going to do it eventually, and I felt like maybe I could make a good job of it," he said. "I struggled violently in a creative sense, in terms of the form of the biopic. I'm really bored by the form."

In rough outline the film follows Alice Neel from her early years at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, where she trained with George Harding, an Ashcan School follower and illustrator, through her painful, poverty-stricken decades in New York, as she worked in virtual obscurity, dismissed as an out-of-touch social realist during the male-dominated Abstract Expressionist era. The ending is upbeat, depicting her redemption in the 1970s, when the women's movement claimed her as a symbol and the Whitney Museum of American Art gave her a retrospective. In her last year she appeared twice with Johnny Carson on "Tonight."

Yet Andrew Neel works mightily to unbalance this triumphal cliché. Instead of delving into his grandmother's biography straight on, he starts with a close-up of his father, who appears sad as he contemplates the past.

"People want stability," Hartley Neel says. "They want security and stability. That's human nature, you know."

Then he looks into the camera, at his son. "Why does somebody create an image of anything?" he asks. "Why? I mean, why are you sitting there with that camera, making a movie?"

In a sense this is the larger philosophical question posed by the film.

To invoke his grandmother's presence, Mr. Neel uses excerpts from historical interviews, including Michel Auder's slice-of-life video documentary "Portrait of Alice Neel 1976-1982," and taped conversations with the art historian Patricia Hills and the NPR interviewer Terry Gross. To position Alice Neel in 20th-century art history, he interviews contemporary artists and scholars, including the painters Marlene Dumas, Alex Katz and Chuck Close; the art historians Richard Brilliant and Linda Nochlin; and the curator Robert Storr.

Yet the film's emotional core lies in Mr. Neel's intimate conversations with the family and friends who knew his grandmother best, most particularly his father and uncle. Early on in the film the brothers talk about what it was like to grow up in poverty, with a mother who lived by her own social rules. At one point Hartley mentions the many visitors who would tramp through the boys' bedroom at night, on their way to his mother's front room.

Though the family often subsisted on government relief, much of the money went for art supplies. "We always had this dream that she would be recognized," Richard says, "and she would be able to get some money from her work. It really did not work out that way when we were children."

Now 67 and a self-described "right wing" investment adviser, Richard Neel is frequently filmed sitting beneath a 1979 Alice Neel portrait, "Richard in the Era of the Corporation." "I don't like bohemian culture, frankly," he says to the camera. "I think a lot of innocent people are hurt by it. I consider I was hurt by it."

Later, in a moment that reflects the film's complexity, he offers a different view. "She was a very good friend to me," he says. "It was a gift to have her as a mother."

In another poignant moment, Hartley, 65, a radiologist in Vermont, talks about entering the case review area of a hospital to find the students discussing his mother's X-rays, which revealed that she had cancer. "Did you know that was the death knell for her?" his son asks from behind the camera.

"Yes, just a matter of time," he replies sadly. "And not that long a time."

For these interviews Andrew Neel worked without a crew. "It was just mano à mano," he said. "I didn't have a sound guy, and I tried to shoot them in natural light. I felt that being alone with them in a room would really allow me to get into some of the deeper interpersonal stuff that I wanted to talk about."

Some of that involved Alice Neel's many relationships with men, beginning with her husband, the Cuban artist Carlos Enriquez. They had two daughters: Santillana, who died of diphtheria in 1928, and Isabetta, who was raised by her father's family in Havana after he left Neel in 1930. These losses led to Neel's nervous breakdown, and to her lifelong interest in portraits of mothers and children.

After her recovery, the film relates, Neel embarked on a series of affairs: with Kenneth Doolittle, an opium addict who destroyed much of her work; José Santiago, a Puerto Rican jazz musician and Richard's father; and the left-wing filmmaker Sam Brody, Hartley's father.

Though Mr. Brody ardently supported Neel's art, he had loud fights with her that sometimes became physical, and was physically abusive to Richard, until she kicked him out. ("The situation was just awful," Hartley says in the film.)

A more stabilizing influence, occasionally including financial support, came from the socialite John Rothschild, for years Alice Neel's sometime lover.

Depicting this aspect of his grandmother's life was tricky, Andrew Neel said. "Obviously a certain amount of the drama in the film swirls around the men. But it was very important that it not become a defining issue, because you start to take away from Alice just being a great artist. It's actually a very typical thing with women."

Yet her complicated personal history seems relevant to the clearsighted scrutiny of human frailties so evident in her portraits. As she says in the film, "The self, we have it like an albatross around the neck."

She had the ability to see into many different types of selves. "I have this overweening interest in humanity," she says in the film. "Even if I'm not working, I'm still analyzing people."

Whether depicting a union organizer, as in her 1930 portrait of the humorless-looking longshoreman Pat Whalen, or an art-world celebrity like Andy Warhol, whom she painted in 1970, looking vulnerable in a medical corset, her people always resonate as individuals, rooted in their place and time. This is so even when their condition is universal, as in her many portraits of naked pregnant women. While one might seem burdened by her belly, as in "Pregnant Betty Homitzky" (1968), another looks frankly sensual, as in "Pregnant Julie and Algis" (1964), in which a naked woman lies beside her clothed partner on a rumpled bedspread.

Neel could find the odalisque in men too, as in her notorious nude of the critic John Perrault (1972). And she saw beyond the cliché: in "Fuller Brush Man" (1965), a portrait of a salesman who survived Dachau, the man's eager face and posture suggest the hunger behind his American dream.

A small selection of her portraits, some of which depict people in the film, is on view through May 19 at the Robert Miller Gallery in Chelsea.

One major question the film poses is whether Alice Neel's motherly influence was loving or malign. The film presents contradictory viewpoints without offering easy conclusions.

One sequence examines the mystery of Isabetta, who committed suicide in 1982, two years before her mother's death. They saw each other only three times after 1930; during the most extended visit, in 1934, Isabetta, then 6, posed naked for a portrait. In the film her daughter, Cristina Lancella, a Cuban emigre who lives in Miami and has never met her uncles, complains bitterly about Isabetta's abandonment. Speaking of the portrait's possibly damaging effect on her mother, she says: "I think it's disgusting. I would never have my children naked like that."

This is followed by footage shot in 1984, of another 6-year-old posing naked for Alice: her grandson, Andrew himself. The child complains to her about the painting and then cavorts happily around the room, alternately mooning the camera and showing off his penis. His grandmother laughs heartily as an unseen adult tries to persuade him to stand still.

Earlier in her career Alice Neel's perspective on her sitters was as unfashionable as her desire to paint them. "When I gave a slide lecture," she says in the film, "I would have to apologize for being psychological, because that was considered a weakness."

Her grandson encountered a different problem. "In my generation," he said, "all you're ever doing is analyzing yourself and talking about all your feelings all the time." So in making the film, he always remained off camera and tried to keep his personal drama out of it. "I didn't want to make my own me-generation issues trump Alice's story and her biography," he said. "But I also wanted my intimate perspective on it to yield a certain emotional weight."

So he has chosen to open and close the film with excerpts from a 1969 home movie: a 16-millimeter film shot by Hartley that shows Neel painting "Ginny in Blue Shirt," her first portrait of her son's wife-to-be. In the end it is Ginny, the filmmaker's mother, who voices the paradox of the artist biopic.

"The interesting thing about this story is that she became famous," she tells her son, "so it was worth it. Just the slightest twist and she could have never been much heard of. And then what, it wouldn't have been worth it?"

Mr. Neel says he doesn't have the answer to that question. With artistic suffering, he said, "there's this myth that everything will work out in the end, and most likely it doesn't."

His father, sitting in the room where he had posed for his mother so many times, pondered the question.

"If somebody would say, was it worth it?" he concluded, "I would say, sure. Unless we write or we paint or we take photographs, who the hell's going to know how we existed, except our family?"

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

Andrew Neel, right, with Richard Neel (standing), his uncle, and Hartley Neel, his father.

Sam Brody, courtesy of Seethink Productions

The painter Alice Neel, Andrew's grandmother, in 1944, from his documentary about her.