Alice Neel's Portrait Of Margaret Evans

All of history is narrated and illustrated through art. Certain artists stand out as revolutionaries in their mediums and in their time, using art to express their voice to the people. As society develops and evolves it can be easy to identify the creative thinkers that fueled the fires of progress. During the 1960s painter Alice Neel produced a body of work that not only analyzed those around her but also criticized the world she lived in. As a witness to art movements from Abstract Expressionism to Conceptual Art, and refused to follow any of them. Instead, she developed a unique, expressive style of portrait painting that captured the psychology of individuals. Inspired by the concept of male gaze in art, Neel’s work stands as a metaphor for the feminist movement during the period. In her portrait of Margaret Evans, Alice Neel explores a woman’s position in society by the honest almost uncomfortable way she paints the expectant mother of two.
The painting Margaret Evans Pregnant is of a woman eight months pregnant with twins. The image shows a young pregnant woman seated on a small yellow chair. Evans sits upright, eyes focused straight ahead, hands clutching the chair. Completely nude, her skin consists of a series of shades, which reveal bathing suit tan lines and spotted legs
She does not generalize, exploit or romanticize Evan’s condition instead chooses to paint her in an honest depiction of a pregnant woman. Neel removes the labels and expectations placed upon Evans as a pregnant woman and forces the viewer to confront their own thoughts on how a woman ‘should’ look. Alice Neel creates a kind of relaxed an honest world within her work where the subjects of her portraits are free to be without gender roles or boundaries. This alone makes her work not only revolutionary for her time, but essential for our point of view on gender even