Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Margaret Evans Pregnant
Alice Neel American
Not on view
Neel was one of history’s greatest, most incisive painters of motherhood. Avoiding romantic sentiment, she painted mothers before and after giving birth, including a woman named Margaret Evans, the wife of a friend who was expectant with twins. Here Neel brings her usual candor and acumen to bear on the drama of pregnancy, a complex, life-changing experience unique to women and whose physical and psychological intensity are rarely acknowledged in either popular culture or Western art. Neel lavished attention on precisely those characteristics of the prepartum body that society prefers to shield from view, using layer after layer of paint to render Evans’s swollen abdomen, enlarged nipples, linea nigra, and the mottled flesh of her lower legs.
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