Alice Neel's Portraits of Mother Work

The American painter Alice Neel (1900-1984), who is best known for her riveting portraits of public figures, also created a rich and remarkable range of images of mother work from the late 1920s to the early 1980s. Transgressing, parodying, and critiquing the Madonna and child genre and the social construct of mother as it shifted over most of the twentieth century, Neel consistently made the experiences of mothers, the interrelationship of mother and child, and familial relationships the subjects of her work. These images of mother work also included class and race analyses of mothering and family. They included a degenerate Madonna, macabre surrealistic images of babies, her daughter-in-law as a first-time mother anxiously holding her squirming infant, a breastfeeding Haitian mother and her disabled child, many intimate portraits of Neel's own children and grandchildren, families from her neighborhood in New York's El Barrio and from the primarily white art world.