Interview

The talent gene seems more prevalent amongactor and musician families than it does in fine-art clans. Very few art-world giants produce kids or grandkids who continue in the fine-art game. One recent exception is the Neel family. Although Alice Neel painted her pellucid portraits of the men, women, and children who came into her world for much of her life, it was only in the 1970s and ’80s that she achieved tremendous acclaim (and New York celebrity) as one of the great figurative painters of the 20th century. Her grandson, filmmaker Andrew Neel, created the haunting documentary Alice Neel about his late grandmother, in 2007. But it is his older sister who stands as the most likely inheritor of the painterly talent. The 34-year-old Elizabeth Neel, who lives and works in Brooklyn, creates violent, gestural canvases that border on abstraction but are in actuality deeply rooted in the facts of the physical world. While she rediscovered painting only as an adult, she has quickly become one of the rising young stars to take on new expressive abstraction (Neel, however, may consider her work more a subjective form of realism, always pushing the barrier between the things she’sobsessed with and how she portrays them in paint). Her subjects tend to swirl around loaded themes of birth, life, and death. Neel grew up on a farm in northern Vermont, but came into New York City often as a child, visiting her grandmother and watching her work. It was in 1982 that she first remembers meeting artist Michel Auder at a party in honor of Alice at Gracie Mansion. Auder was photographing everyone in attendance—the Neel family, Andy Warhol, Annie Sprinkle, and the rest of the motley Manhattan crew there to celebrate the painter. Alice Neel was a central focus of Auder’s film work. Elizabeth reconnected with Auder when she moved to the city to pursue her art in 2002. Here, in Neel’s Williamsburg, Brooklyn, studio, the two talk about old times and new ones and the painterly value of brunch.

ELIZABETH NEEL: I figured you’d be the most interesting person to do this because when we talked in the past, it seemed like even though we work in different mediums, there’s something similar in terms of the immediacy that connects our work. Plus, we’ve known each other for a long time.

MICHEL AUDER: You’ve been painting since ’95 or something like that, right?

NEEL: Well, I started fooling around with it when I was little, with Alice. That was the beginning, when she gave me that Winsor & Newton paint box. That was the “big, fancy gift.” Then I stopped for all of high school and college.

AUDER: How old were you when she gave you that gift?

NEEL: She died when I was 9, so I must have been 7 or 8 . . . something like that. It’s really hard to use oil paints, actually. I would sit next to her when she would set up her things, and I’d set up mine, too.

AUDER: Do you still have some of those early paintings?

NEEL: Yes. I’m sure Mom and Dad do. Everything’s always piled up under something.

AUDER: Right.

NEEL: But I didn’t think of being an artist until after I went away to boarding school. There were other things to be interested in. And it seemed like a nightmare. I mean, look at Alice’s life. From the outside, from a child’s perspective . . . Dad used to joke about artists eating dog food for dinner and stuff.

AUDER: So the information you collected as a child about your dad’s mother, it was a certain hard kind of life?