Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Mike Gold
Alice Neel American
Not on view
Neel tended to paint members of her professional family, individuals with whom she collaborated on endeavors both political and creative. Such was the case with Communists Mike Gold (1894–1967) and Phillip Bonosky (1916–2013), (Neel's portrait of Bonosky is also included in this exhibition), who supported Neel’s work and edited periodicals to which she contributed in the 1940s and 1950s, including New Masses, a copy of which appears near Gold’s hand. By the time Neel painted Gold’s portrait, both the Cold War and McCarthyism were at their zenith, putting Communists very much on the defensive, politically compromised and often in real personal danger. Fittingly, Gold seems rather shrunken and beleaguered, far from the heroic firebrand of the 1930s, when Neel first met him as a new member of the party.
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