Barnaby Haran – Enclave Review

Everything was Moving: Photography from the 60s and 70s

Robin Foley — Tue, 03 Nov 2015 10:52:58 +0000

While an exhibition entitled Everything was Moving: Photography from the 60s and 70s might summon images of Carnaby Street butterflies, muddy hippies at Woodstock, or anti-Vietnam flowers in rifle barrels, the signifiers of the counter-culture are conspicuously absent in this intelligent and original assemblage of international photographers from a period too often reduced to a minute area of cultural activity in London and San Francisco. The only bell-bottoms on display are in photographs by Malick Sidibé and Raghubir Singh of trendy Malians and Indians respectively. The movement in the title is not the underground version, but refers to a host of other dynamics: intense political events in dramatically shifting social contexts and with world-historical import; social movements geared towards dislodging intransigence, especially in matters of racial politics; the emergence of an increasingly global camera eye serving non-Western photographic subjectivities; and appeals for a profound reexamination of the radical properties of photographic realism in wake of postmodernism. Not to mention that the images assembled by curator Kate Bush themselves carry a potency that is both emotionally moving and potentially consciousness altering. If the ultimate agenda of the exhibition is never plainly stated, and its political suggestions sometimes remain opaque, then its effects linger due to an imaginative and provocative selection and sequencing of established and relatively unknown practitioners working to diverging purposes across multifarious structures of dissemination and display.

The exhibition consists of generous selections of images by twelve photographers on two floors: David Goldblatt, Ernest Cole, William Eggleston, Bruce Davidson, and Graciela Iturbide occupy the lower floor, whilst upstairs the sequence picks up with Sigmar Polke, followed by Boris Mikhailov, Shomei Tomatsu, Larry Burrows, Li Zhensheng, Malick Sidibé and Raghubir Singh. Initially, it seems that the former section tends towards straight documentary images whereas the larger upper display explores photographic experimentation, but there are no obvious attempts at literal bipartition. However, it is striking that the opening brace of Goldblatt and Cole addresses the heyday of apartheid with unflinching reportage of its comprehensive everyday horrors, from the perspectives of white and black photographers respectively, through up-close, direct examinations that are in different ways brutally effective indictments. As an opening gambit, Goldblatt’s photographs bring the viewer bluntly into a non-whimsical 60s wherein facets of South African life, from the banalities of lives on either side of the colour line to the specific brutalities of apartheid violence, cohere into a complex mosaic that eschews platitudes. All the photographs invoke the struggle against apartheid but only a few directly demonize the ruling Afrikaans – even the seemingly ridiculous National Party cavalry in assorted traditional hats somehow invite pathos – nor exacerbate or worse exploit the victimhood of the blacks, as is documentary photography’s occasional wont.

Whereas Goldblatt’s offering marks the opening of a long and fruitful career, by contrast Cole’s work is more concentrated in both temporal terms and in approach. A self-taught photographer (by correspondence course) who started out at the black-oriented Drum magazine, in 1966 Cole fled South Africa for New York, where he amassed his covertly produced photographs of the severity of conditions for blacks into his photo-book House of Bondage, a publication that contributed greatly to the international condemnation of apartheid. In these photographs, apartheid is a ubiquitous and menacing presence: in scenes such as a scattering of white commuters casually observing blacks crowded into the other half of a segregated railway station platform, a white man clouting a young black boy for begging, and a lonely black servant contemplating her tiny, rudimentary living quarters. Yet, conversely, in these images whites and blacks also intermingle in flirtatious laughter, and black teenagers jostle and mug white men. The radicalism of Goldblatt and Cole lies in showing the fluidity of engagements behind the seemingly immovable edifice of apartheid in the 60s and 70s, and this social flux helped its official demise, if not the eradication of its societal injustices.

An abrupt shift of gears occurs when we encounter William Eggleston’s languid vistas and sullen portraits, as the exhibition takes a left turn away from black and white topicality into the richly colourful dye transfer prints of the notorious flâneur of highways and hinterlands. The juxtaposition of Eggleston’s incidental snaps of the American South, at once both elegiac and laced with violence and sexuality, with the tense quotidian details of Goldblatt’s and Cole’s works, intelligently extracts the oft-ignored critical engagement immanent in Eggleston, whilst simultaneously enhancing the poetics of the South Africans. A similar move occurs between Eggleston and the next photographer, Bruce Davidson, who accompanied the civil rights crusade of the Freedom Riders through the southern states in the early 60s. The latent narrative of racial conflict in Eggleston’s simmering studies of African-Americans remains inscrutable, foiling Davidson’s sharp and assertive high contrast commentaries on the persistence of legislated segregation and its brave opponents. The effect is to liberate Eggleston from the torpor of self-determining expression by resituating him amidst a shifting sociality, a configuration that risks casting his vision as disengaged and decadent. Yet the lower floor culminates with Iturbide’s quizzical portrayals of the residues of Zapotec culture in Mexico, which were produced under the auspices of an artistic cum ethnographic workshop in Juchitán. At times, her photographs outdo Henri Cartier-Bresson in snaring the uncanny in everyday life and dramatizing the exotic allure of idiosyncratic popular rites, but her focused study of this embattled demographic in a particular locale jars with his genial universalism. Fittingly, Iturbide’s technique of overt estrangement chimes with Eggleston and, to a degree, Goldblatt, just as her social engagement corresponds with Cole and Davidson’s works.

Whereas the lower storey selection moves elegantly through degrees of confrontation and reflection, the larger upper level display intensifies the disparity between the exhibited photographers and expands from the hitherto implied theme of changing patterns of resistance to racism. For one thing, the specter of the Cold War hovers in the background, expanding the (already atypical) post-colonial agenda into unexpected areas and making more strident imaginative leaps. The upper section begins with Polke, an artist who used photography unlike the aforementioned, heralding an expanded terrain both thematically and pictorially. His purposefully tarnished prints showing the violent clash of a black bear and two white dogs surrounded by Afghans spectators, obscure the event that they supposedly record, and encourage a non-linear allegorical reading about putative Soviet colonialism. The warped, decaying aesthetic creates surface static that impairs literal decoding, acting as a haunting presence that both disrupts topical urgency and suggests fissures in supposed totalitarianism.

Moving into the Soviet Union proper, Mikhailov’s equally distorted mode imports into photography the improvised diversionary tactics of Samizdat culture (which ranged from contraband novels to homemade vinyl transfers of Beatles albums) via colourful, crude tableaux comprising multiple exposures. These images of people and objects hold an eroticism that oscillates between creepiness and comedy. In one astonishing image from the late 70s, Mikhailov appended a giant ear to two ominous KGB-type men in overcoats and hats who survey assorted passing longhairs (who a decade previously would have been forcibly shorn). The narratives of these pictures are often deliberately impenetrable, as if Mikhailov’s assembled protagonists perform a secret language made to confound the censor, although these works were conceived for private dissemination.

The mix of formal experimentation and darkly erotic coding continues with Tomatsu’s photographs of Japan in the aftermaths of the atomic bombs and American occupation. A substantial figure whose photography has appeared in books such as Nippon (1967) and Oh! Shinjuku (1969), and has been presented in major institutional shows, Tomatsu’s work ranges from straight photographs of young Japanese appropriating American popular culture to inky abstractions. The images are by turns visceral and lyrical, yet nonetheless contingent to the total impact of America upon postwar Japan. Polke, Mikhailov, and Tomatsu combine into a trio of medium experimenters concerned with interlinked themes of occupation, sexuality, and language, in which any potential political messages are veiled in symbols or somehow ingrained in the image surface.

A further switch occurs in the sudden jump to the photojournalism of Larry Burrows, whose dramatic scenes of the American invasion of Cambodia appear as a blast of professional photojournalism after the above creations, but in other respects pick up on Tomatsu’s theme of American operations in Asia as well as the latter’s action shots of protestors clashing with police. Although Burrows was London-born, his work was paradigmatic of Life magazine’s vivid reportage and presented an American perspective (literally shooting behind the shoulder of a GI firing off M16 rounds), conveying the melancholy heroicism of soldiers at war in rich cinematic colour, blown up in large prints that show muddy scenarios of battle-weary troops in disrepair, whooshing rotor blades, and exploding paddy fields. It could not be more different than the secret archive of self-portraits and public panoramas of mass events in the China of the Cultural Revolution, which characterize Li’s decidedly odd contribution to this Asian corner of the exhibition (notwithstanding a very well-behaved state sponsored anti-Vietnam demonstration). As multitudes wave giant poster heads of Mao in Li’s official work, the photographer represents himself in assorted (and often silly) postures that constitute a proto-conceptual private practice. As with Burrows, his work is not intentionally critical, but via this curatorial recontextualization receives implicit reframing as part of a global movement against tyranny.

Malick Sidibé: A Yé-yé posing,1963.© Malick Sidibé. Courtesy Fifty One Fine
Art Photography, Antwerp.

The negotiation of identity through photography continues in Sidibé’s upbeat studio portraits of young Malians in their finery (especially the brilliant sartorial display in Very Good Friends in the Same Outfit, Evening of 3 June, 1972, an identically clad group of five young men, resembling The Temptations preparing for the stage) as we finally meet the ‘Swinging 60s’, albeit morphing into the ‘Funky 70s’. In this context, the fascination with pop culture is particular – black American music and especially James Brown – and reveals an identification with the aesthetics and politics of Black Power. The liberatory gestures detectable in these photographs are nuanced assertions of identity through fashion and pop music against an authoritarian socialist regime that saw Afros, flares, and all other trappings of Western mass culture as signifiers of colonialism. Colonialism might be a thread between these images and the final section of the exhibition, which features a selection of Singh’s images of India, but there is no such obvious sequential continuity. Singh’s display does not so much conclude the various narratives of the exhibition, but presents a body of images that have a summary effect, alternately echoing elements such as the vibrant colours, post-colonial communist iconography, social and ethnic fissures, and extraordinary nature of everyday life amongst the country’s countless poor. In his photographs, the colour red is ubiquitous in cars, a hipster’s loons, ice lollies, and hilariously the red banner that makes a communist leader’s head seem either disembodied or part of a socialist realist mural of Lenin addressing a crowd. These scattered reds leave an impression, a perplexing retinal ghost, which eventually provokes reflection on the implicit political narrative of this exhibition.

You might well categorize Singh’s work as documentary, a term that typically would describe several of the photographers in this exhibition. Yet not all of the photographers warrant the description of documentary, which in its most literal sense is a mode of recuperative realism predicted on the veristic mythology of the photographic medium, which is rhetorically effective even when the viewer knows that the camera is habitually mendacious and sensitized plates are slippery. In his catalogue essay, Gerry Badger argues that the exhibition suggests ‘a multicultural and multi-faceted … photographic art where the word documentary has little meaning, but a genuine sense of authentic means everything’ (‘Spirit of the Times’, 2012). Indeed, the exhibition includes overtly manufactured images that are unambiguously inauthentic, thus drawing attention to the dangerously arbitrary nature of photographic truth, but which nonetheless operate in oppositional discursive frameworks or use covert, absurdist language systems within nominally totalitarian environments. These subverted documentary images, by Polke and Mikhailov for example, might be called ‘counter-documents’ or ‘post-documentary’ works that eschew the naïve truth narrative of documentary, and paradoxically manipulate the indexicality of the photograph for social contingency At any rate, these are images that never occlude the real, but lead the viewer into a dialogue about genuine political situations via the opacity of the photograph rather than its mythic transparency, and as such have a mediated yet intractable documentary quality.

Kate Bush writes in her introduction that ‘the now rather one-dimensional postmodern discussion around realist photography, and its proscriptions over who has license to photograph who, will become more subtle and more complex in the twenty-first century’ (‘Everything was Moving’, 2012). As Bush says, there is a definite need to recast the realist determinates of photography in the wake of postmodernism, due to enduring needs for images that engage, rebuke, and insist upon transformation. For this reason, I argue that there is no urgency to abandon the term documentary, a choice that risks slippage into indeterminacy, but rather we should continually assert that it is a contested terrain at the centre of any possible radical photographic art. In this case, the collation of doctored and straight photographs from a global camera eye coheres the works into a potent document of troubled times, but one that is saved from melting pot generalizations through sharp segmentation. If a substantial overriding message is not evident (nor perhaps viable, especially given the diversity of the exhibits) there certainly are radical implications in the multiplicity of images of instances of structural inequalities, small-scale resistances, medium plurality, and lively interruptions of everyday life on global basis. The achievement here is to offer new opportunities for reconsidering the photographic medium through an original form of reframing, although conversely there is a danger of emptying out the contingency of each manifestation. This balancing act is secured through the post-colonial subtext, which disavows the generic account of the world turning on its axis (likely sound-tracked by Buffalo Springfield’s ‘For What its Worth’) into which the exhibition narrative occasionally blends. Everything was moving could be merely ‘shit happened’, but I think that the more profound suggestion is that change can always be bargained for and won. We should remember, as this exhibition mostly does, that everything was indeed moving, but was not necessarily moving forward for everybody at the same speed.

Everything was Moving was on view at the Barbican Art Gallery, 13 September 2012 – 13 January 2013.

Myth, Manners, and Memory: Photographers of the American South

Robin Foley — Wed, 28 Oct 2015 16:39:05 +0000

The phrase ‘myth, manners, and memory’ neatly combines several narratives of the South with a poetic notion of photography in an alliterative escalation of syllables, rhythmically introducing a photographic exploration of, as exhibition curator Celia Davies puts it, the ‘mind of the South’. In a spare yet insightful essay, Richard Grey develops the theme by ranging widely across a rich cultural landscape, drawing in Muddy Waters and William Faulkner and the historic legacies of race, religion, and resistance. Grey introduces these images of the South with almost hypnotic repetition, discussing ‘place, past, pessimism, and performance’ in a way that emphasizes the otherness of the region. The piece is notably entitled ‘Another Country’, referring both to the perceived difference of the cultural and social character of the South and the failed secession that ended in military defeat by the North. Arcane and archaic, this mythic South appears as a haunted presence within contemporary America, a folkloric phenomenon that emerges most vividly in cultural representations, namely songs, films, novels, and especially photographs.

This hugely enjoyable exhibition clusters work by five contemporary photographers, largely hailing from the southern states, alongside canonical photographs from the 1930s by Walker Evans. If Evans’s work serves both as a thematic epigraph for the show and a literal historical precursor, then it is interesting that his was an outsider’s vision, an aesthetically charged analysis of the South performed for Northern magazines, government agencies, and museums. Evans conveyed people and places in an up-close yet curiously unsentimental manner, an almost forensic observation of incidental yet poignant details that MoMA exhibition curator Lincoln Kirstein memorably termed ‘tender cruelty’ (‘Walker Evans’ Photographs of Victorian Architecture’, 1933). Although this is an excellent selection of his work, it is a pity that none of his images of Louisiana planters’ mansions were included. Dilapidated monuments in a crudely parochial rendering of Neoclassicism, these abandoned houses stand eerily picturesque upon the scrubbed ground, guilty reminders both of a thriving cotton economy predicated on slave labour and America’s desperate plight during the Depression.

Many of the images on display are indebted to Evans’s potent idiom. William Christenberry often quotes Evans’s motifs and techniques, such as a fixed viewpoint onto a wall monitoring poor black southerners passing by, or multiple shots of a creepy green barn. Christenberry knew Evans well and accompanied him on his final Polaroid sorties, and this unofficial mentoring perhaps informed the striking Green Warehouse series, a study of light and colour made up of twenty-one ektacolor prints assembled in a grid. William Eggleston is arguably Evans’s logical heir as a supreme botanist of the everyday uncanny and this is a fine taster of his deeply resonant dye-transfer prints, including his most famous photograph, the brilliantly macabre Red Ceiling, Greenwood, Mississippi of 1969-71. Alex Soth’s images of an abandoned iron frame bed in the undergrowth, a kitchen knife and Bible combo, and a cluster of motley juveniles in a graveyard also invoke an Evansesque iconography of disaffection and dissipation. Whilst there is much to admire in the works of these photographers, ironically the exhibition’s theme is most pronounced in the selections of photographs by Carrie Mae Weems and Susan Lipper, both of whom invoke Evans’s photography less directly than the aforementioned.

Susan Lipper: From The Grapevine Series (1988 -1992), Archival Pigment Print, Courtesy of the Artist

Weems’s photographs from the series The Louisiana Project match the spookiness of Evans’s South, conjuring a past that seeps into the present through the barely healed scars of racial segregation. A young black woman clad in a Victorian cotton dress is the protagonist of these photos, a lone figure who wanders through an array of Southern spaces, from railroads to cemeteries. In the exquisitely composed A Distant View, the woman languidly reclines on the grass under a tree pondering a gleaming mansion, in a scene that recalls the bucolic serenity of Pictorialist photographers like Clarence White or Gertrude Käsebier. As this building is in fine repair, the effect is that past and present are blurred, and so the scene becomes essentially timeless. In this instance a ruined house might pander to liberal sympathies by insisting upon a facile dialogue of progress and redemption. Furthermore the viewer of these photographs is unwittingly rendered a voyeur by the positioning of the subject. Regardless of the background, the woman looks or walks away, like a spectre crossing the photographic frame, somehow inhabiting these homeless places that recall the crime scene quality of some of Evans’s architectural images (following his enthusiastic discovery of Eugene Atget’s Parisian studies). However the gentle lyricism of these images refuses any monolithic accusation of the crimes of the past, but indicates a more profoundly engrained trauma, a haunting that cannot be exorcised.

Susan Lipper’s grotesque investigations into caricatural perceptions of the South consist of ersatz documents of the Grapevine Hollow area of West Virginia, where friends and neighbours perform staged scenarios that work, as Davies puts it, by ‘playing to our own stereotyped understandings’ of poor whites. A deer hangs from the gallows of a basketball goal as if lynched, two burly bikers adorned with leather caps, one armed with a handgun and a beer can, perform a homoerotic blowback on a joint, and a terrifying disfigured man stands in an open doorway with a Magnum pistol on his hand looking ready to coldly waste the (implied) cowering viewer. These snippets from the fractured narrative of a contemporary gothic saga are brutal, alluring, and comical. Lipper uses the rhetoric of the reality effect of documentary photography to create a portfolio of fictional episodes that tell possible truths about the habits and fantasies of a small segment of the white working class of the South. By spending several months in Grapevine her immersion into the community mirrors Evans and Agee’s embedded stay with the sharecroppers, and whilst the photographs develop the latent dark humour of Evans’s work there are also hints of Cindy Sherman’s imaginary movie scenes, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, and the frantic and ribald opening credits of the TV series True Blood, a gruesomely erotic montage that pastiches the mythology of the South.

Indeed, with its garish ensemble of a polite yet visceral southern gentleman vampire, a telepathic waitress, a Cajun serial killer, a faith healing supermarket worker, and a bar-owning canine doppelganger, True Blood has cheerfully riffed on myth, manners, and memory by indulging such metaphors with the subtlety of an automatic shotgun, ironically producing a nuanced yet consistently entertaining take on the social fissures of the South. Whilst similar notes are struck in photos by Lipper and Soth, this exhibition by contrast offers a more elegiac meditation on an area that was only an actual place for a short while in the secession, but that nonetheless echoes menacingly yet majestically in the contemporary imaginations of both its populace and outside observers.

‘Myth, Manners, and Memory: Photographers of the American South’ was on view 1 October 2010 – 3 January 2011.

Alice Neel: Painted Truths

Robin Foley — Wed, 28 Oct 2015 11:02:58 +0000

Sam Brody was a formidable figure in the film culture of the Red Decade, an activist, artist, and intellectual with integrity and ability. One might therefore interpret Alice Neel’s 1958 portrait as a paean to a taciturn but resolute hero of the Left. Brody was Neel’s on-off lover from 1940 onwards, a supportive if irregular figure in her life and the father of her son Hartley. There is a sense of placid domesticity in the sullen yet thoughtful expression, the easy pose, the muted palette, and the patient study of the fall of light on skin. It is certainly unlike Neel’s earlier portrait of the unionist Pat Whelan who grimaces with the clenched fists of a working class warrior, furiously grasping The Daily Worker, or the nightmarish allegory of the coolly grinning communist poet Kenneth Fearing, whose torso is opened to reveal a gruesome skeleton pouring blood from a punctured heart. Yet Brody and Neel’s relationship was always turbulent, and they finally parted just months after the painting was completed. Their life together was coloured by Brody’s dramatic mood swings which were allegedly visited upon his stepson Richard, Neel’s son from her brief affair with José Negron, in the form of violent abuse. In a fascinating documentary by Hartley’s son Andrew, on show at this exhibition, Brody is conveyed as an intemperate bully. Whilst Neel’s portrait of Brody is positioned alongside her haunting 1945 painting Richard Aged Five there is no mention of this grim account of domestic cruelty. Yet this narrative is nonetheless implied in the juxtaposition of the brooding stepfather with this eerily elongated partially blind child, whose huge eyes render him both vulnerable and self-possessed.

The ‘painted truths’ in Neel’s paintings were clearly multi-faceted and profound. Her idiom changed gradually throughout a career spanning six decades until her death in 1984, beginning in the late 1920s with darkly symbolic portraits and macabre nudes with caricatural genitals. Her mature work is characterised by carefully designed close-up compositions, rich colour modelling, fluid brushwork, bold outlines, exaggeration of physiognomy combined with striking resemblance, resonant skin tones, and sophisticated treatment of light effects. Her most obvious peer as a figurative painter is Lucien Freud, but Neel’s portraits avoid the visceral meatiness of the latter’s work for a poignant yet unflinching examination of the subject. A less likely comparison but analogous project would be Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests, where even the most hardened hipster crumbled under the unrelenting gaze of the artist’s inert yet merciless cine-camera. Suitably, Neel’s portrait of Warhol epitomises her gentle autopsy of the sitter. Denuded of his habitual shades, a topless Warhol seemingly winces with blushing face and clenched eyes, reluctantly submitting to the forensic glare that forsakes his customary deadpan persona. The elegant spare line drawing of the bed on which he is perched draws attention to the convincing volume of this exposed body, but also echoes the scars on his violated torso, results of operations that followed his shooting by S.C.U.M. member Valerie Solanis. Yet Warhol is nonetheless granted dignity in this compassionate treatment via the lyrical handling that typifies Neel’s later style, used to great effect in several studies of Factory luminaries in which she trades gaudy sensationalism for breezy intimacy.

Alice Neel: Andy Warhol (1970). Oil on canvas, 152.4 x 101.6 cm. Courtesy of Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, gift of Timothy Collins

The range of people in her pictures reflects the scope of her nebulous social world, encompassing family members, friends from the art world, and local acquaintances from greatly varying economic backgrounds. Neel’s approach appears thoroughly democratic, bestowing equal importance upon art critics and house cleaners from her local area (a rare exception is a grotesque of collector Ellie Poindexter, produced in a fit of enmity). Even when she paints strangers such as a cheerfully tragicomic salesman there is evidence of a probing observation, as is she is capturing her subject unawares. Her paintings seem simultaneously private and public, perhaps due to her lifelong practice of portraying colleagues, friends, and family. Images of mothers with children are numerous in the show, but Neel’s take on this traditional subject is hardly conventional. Indeed, there is a definite radicalism to her focus on close relationships that tacitly question the authority of the normal family unit, and her group portraits, whether of gay couples, single parents or her sons and daughters-in-law, emphasize the potency of bonds that disrupt a patriarchal order. In the sole family portrait the father (John Gruen) sits centrally but without authority—his manneredimpassive expression is over-shadowed by the assertive and acute glance of his partner (Jane Wilson) and the quietly searching look of their gangly daughter. Neel’s portraits are never neutral reproductions concerned with likeness or painter/sitter affinity but interventions into the social, and the relationships between Neel and her subjects and amongst the sitters themselves have political substance.

Although Neel was closely connected to the communist movement in the 1930s (less actively thereafter), and produced some fabulously moody street studies for the WPA arts project, her politics were personal and intuitive rather than formal or doctrinaire. This related in part to her negotiation of a tough life as a mostly single mother and a woman artist— and not least a female portraitist amidst the ascendancy of Abstract Expressionism and the attendant machismo of the colour field, during the period from the 1940s to the 1960s when figurative art was the straw man of High Modernism. Her late but no less welcome success from the 1970s onwards marked a revision of both elisions, but this exhibition demonstrates that her commitment to her work transcended the vagaries of critical fashion.

In her long career, Neel created a neighbourhood of personalities that ran parallel to if not against orthodox family values, a constellation of everyday people stripped naked, whether figuratively or not. Perhaps the over-arching emphasis on the personal relationship of artist to work occasionally veers into inappropriate psycho-biographical explanations, so that two paintings called Fire Escape of 1946 and 1948 are described as metaphors for Neel’s restricted life as a mother working outside of the structures of the gallery system, an overly literal mapping of Neel’s frustrating predicament onto the images. Nevertheless, this is a minor complaint against a brilliantly realized exhibition that pays tribute to an artist whose extraordinary paintings are imbued with an irreverent yet deeply inquisitive and sympathetic sensibility.

Alice Neel: Painted Truths was on view at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, 8 July – 17 September 2010.