Alice Neel was good at painting double portraits. With the years she began to lose interest in things and you can see this in her work.
In 1955, Neel painted "Two Girls in Spanish Harlem," which feels different and magical. How evenly and scrupulously the artist has attended to each child. The effect is redoubled, of course, by the rhyming tilt of their heads and the steady gaze both subjects return. It’s as if Neel, determined not to miss anything, hadn’t wanted to blink.
Painting two young girls has had a special meaning for Neel. Neel had given birth to two girls, one of which died from natural causes and another was kidnapped by her own husband, who took her back to Cuba. Having lost both daughters and her husband, Neel went through a mental breakdown and was hospitalized for a year.
The double portrait of the two young girls feel too alive to be tragic. Many kinds of damage are beyond repair. But they can be amended. And what amended Neel’s heartache was each new human connection: the sympathy, the noticing, the sense that being here, with you, in this moment and the next, might be funneled into an art that feels indistinguishable from life.
