America's social realist
From Stephen Schwartz Sir: Andrew Lambirth was quite wrong to say in his article (Arts, 5 June) that the artistic 'work of Alice Neel (1900-84) has never been shown outside her native America'. Ms Neel's last major exhibition during her lifetime was held in 1981 at the Union of Artists in Moscow, capital of the then Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, of which social experiment Ms Neel was a lifelong enthusiast. She also illustrated wretched social-realist works of fiction by an American Stalinist author, Phillip Bonosky, and painted portraits of American communist functionaries.
In 1999 she was portrayed by the leftist actress Susan Sarandon in a film about New York Bohemia, Joe Gould's Secret. Forty years before that she herself acted in Pull Itly Daisy. a surrealist film made by the Beat poets Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, alongside the French actress Delphine Seyrig in her first film role. All in all, Alice Neel was a curious sort, to say the least.
Stephen Schwartz
Washington, DC
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