Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Robert Smithson
Alice Neel American
Not on view
Made during the time when Neel began to actively participate in and identify with the mainstream contemporary art world—after decades of working in different but parallel creative and political contexts—this painting of a young Robert Smithson (1938–1973) is one of her earliest portraits of a new generation of artists and art-world celebrities. Neel invited Smithson to sit for her and sketched his gangly frame in virtuosic strokes, highlighting his sharply angular features. Notably, she renders his acne-stricken cheeks in reddish tones, in a manner typical of her unvarnished approach to her subjects. In making visible his painful affliction, Neel tempers the intensely focused and brooding stance of the erudite Smithson with a sense of human frailty.
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