Isabetta

The only surviving child of Neel and her husband Carlos Enríquez, Isabella Lillian Enríquez (1928–1982), known as Isabetta, was born in New York but was taken to Cuba in 1930, where her father’s family raised her. As a child she saw her mother only twice, during summer holidays on the Jersey Shore. Neel painted her daughter in their vacation home during the first of these visits, but the work fell victim to Kenneth Doolittle’s violent outburst in 1934. She created this related version based on her recollections and a surviving photograph, in an act of artistic (and perhaps maternal) recuperation. Here, Neel’s almost six-year-old daughter stands naked before her mother, in a confident and slightly confrontational pose. While the frank nudity of the young child disconcerted viewers then and continues to raise legitimate questions now around consent and children’s bodily autonomy, Neel considered the painting to be a touchstone. She returned to the girl’s self-possessed stance in later paintings of her granddaughters and revisited the composition once again in 1981, in a work titled Memories. As their lives evolved, Isabetta and Alice developed a difficult and distant relationship, becoming increasingly estranged from one another.