Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Suicidal Ward, Philadelphia General Hospital
Alice Neel American
Not on view
Beset by a series of personal tragedies, including the death of her first daughter, Neel suffered a nervous breakdown in August 1930. Created shortly after she returned to her parents’ home from the hospital, this drawing recreates in lurid, harrowing detail the "frightful" conditions of Neel’s confinement. Though the artist herself is absent, she telegraphs her experience through seven fellow patients, who she described as "poor scraps of humanity"—women systematically dehumanized by what passed for psychiatric treatment in the 1930s. At the center of the drawing is Neel’s psychiatrist, Dr. Breitenbach. He seems avuncular enough, but the artist remembered him as "the enemy." Here he lords his authority and masculine reason over the riot of female distress around him. For Neel, the suicide ward was a quintessentially patriarchal institution.
Due to rights restrictions, this image cannot be enlarged, viewed at full screen, or downloaded.
