People Come First: Alice Neel's human facets in retrospective exhibition
The first retrospective of US artist Alice Neel in Spain opens at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao on September 17.
People Come First is the name of the retrospective of U.S. realist artist Alice Neel (1900-1984) that will open at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao on Friday, September 17, 2021. On view through February 6, 2022, the exhibition will feature approximately one hundred of Neel's paintings, drawings, and watercolors that convey the artist's radicalism on social justice issues as well as her humanist stance.
The works on view focus on the human facets for which Neel had a special eye: diversity, resilience, and passion are illustrated in the people of Neel's adopted home of New York, which always provided the model for her work. Her nudes from the 1930s, particularly of pregnant women, also reveal to visitors to People Come First Neel's rigorous openness, which was unprecedented for Western art of the time. The title to the exhibition comes from Neel herself, who is reported to have said in 1950: »For me, people come first.«
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