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Ay Ay Ay
Alice Neel American
Not on view
Although she almost always relied on direct observation, Neel occasionally based her work on preexisting images. Here she found inspiration in a photograph of Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara, taken after his execution in Bolivia on October 9, 1967, and published in the October 11 issue of the New York Times. Ay, inscribed three times at lower left, is an exclamatory phrase with several meanings in Spanish. It can be translated as "oh no!" or "oh dear!" and sometimes simply as "cry" or "moan." Here ay signals Neel’s despair at the death of a man whose political sentiments she admired.
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