That devotion to the form, even at its least fashionable, means Neel, who grew up middle class and bored in small-town Pennsylvania, subsisted for much of her adult life on welfare checks. “She’d always say, “I have to paint you,’ not, ‘Do you mind?’” remembers her daughter-in-law, Ginny Neel. Most of her paintings were not commissions: She was brazen about approaching prospective models whose expressions, clothing, or way of carrying themselves caught her eye. It’s hard not to read into the way she chose to title the painting: with Ladew’s full name.īut Neel made portraiture into something else entirely. Decades later, in her late 70s and in the midst of a career renaissance, she donated it to a benefit for a group opposed to nuclear proliferation. She acquiesced but Ladew rejected the doctored version too. When the artist first sold it to her subject for a few hundred dollars, Ladew sent it back, demanding Neel add a pair of panties. (Likely it was Neel’s cat: At one point she kept nine of them in her Harlem apartment.) ![]() In the painting, for which she had posed, at 19, wearing only a pair of demure black ballet flats, she appears pouty and languorous, propped up on one elbow, knees akimbo, a Siamese cat nestled into her hip mere inches from her pubic hair. ![]() Now, Ladew was dismayed to see that same portrait on the cover of an auction catalog that arrived by mail. In December of 1978, a minor but newsworthy fracas erupted between the painter Alice Neel and the sculptor Pat Ladew, a Standard Oil heiress who, three decades earlier, had commissioned Neel to paint her portrait.
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