Portrait of the Artist Edward Avedesian
/Alice Neel
1981
American, 1900-1984
Lithograph
Polk Museum of Art Permanent Collection 2004.6
Gift of Norma Canelas and William D. Roth
With an inimitable and immediately recognizable portrait style, Neel stands out as one of the leading lights of American figure painting in the 20th century. Often appearing unfinished — although they are not — a viewer of any Neel portrait gains a sense of the immediacy of the relationship between the artist, her sitters, and her process. It seems always as if Neel has just stepped away for a moment from her work, leaving her subjects in a state of flux that only adds to their timelessness. Neel’s portraits are suffused with emotional and psychological dimension and thus offer a greater sense of truthfulness about the figures within them than they might if they were rendered in a more purely naturalistic manner.
All Neel offers us here is the name of her sitter and his occupation. She leaves the rest to our imagination. Who is this artist Edward Avedesian, who gazes back at us so forthrightly? What is he thinking about? How does he feel about our looking at him — or about our studying him as the subject for a work of art? What assumptions do we make about Edward based purely on Neel’s visualization of him alone?