In 1924 she met the Cuban artist Carlos Enriquez Gomez, and in 1925 they married and relocated to Havana.

Her life wasn’t easy, and she was never well off, but she knew what she wanted, having discovered in herself the qualities needed to be a good artist: ‘hypersensitivity and the will of the devil. Crowned the "court painter of the underground,” her canvases celebrate those who were too often marginalised in society: labour leaders, Black and Puerto Rican children, pregnant women, Greenwich Village eccentrics, civil rights activists and queer performers.

Nick Moss reviews Hot Off the Griddle , an exhibition of Alice Neel's art at the Barbican Art Gallery, till 21st May 2023. By the 1940s, Neel had two sons, the first with a Puerto Rican musician and the second with a communist intellectual. By the end of her career, everyone from taxi drivers to drag queens, poets to art world doyennes had been honoured with the same unflinching gaze. It starts in Havana, where Neel moved with her first husband in 1926 – at a time when women still weren’t really meant to paint – with a couple of hazy, sludgy portraits. Beyond Georgie, Neel’s extensive oeuvre not only depicts her friends and family but also marginalized people in New York, including nude pregnant women, who often weren’t found in dignified portraits, part of which has made her into a feminist icon today, though she may not have agreed with being pigeonholed as one.

It finishes with a video montage that showcases Neel’s exuberance as she paints her amused subjects, flashes cheeky grins, and plants kisses on friends. Much of the French critical reception focuses on the political nature of the exhibition, especially the works’ engagement with American class politics and Neel’s brave depiction of race.

The Jack Kerouac film ‘Pull my Daisy’ from 1959 plays, and Neel takes part alongside Allen Ginsberg, among other artists and poets.

Only the local taxi driver Abdul Rahman appears tickled with conspiratorial laughter to find himself now her sitter and not the other way round. For me, people come first,” journalist Mike Gold quotes Neel saying in 1950 in The Daily Workers , a newspaper published by the Communist Party USA.Part of what I find so compelling about looking at her work is how they don’t calcify into a single fixed image of a person,” Nairne said. The book starts and ends with a run of documents and photography of Neel from throughout her life, portraying her character ahead of her work. Yet Neel transformed her personal dramas into a source of radical empathy, focusing on the fate of her fellow citizens with passion, to nourish her work as an artist. It was important therefore to represent human beings in painting and create especially a space for those who otherwise went unseen.