Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Black Draftee (James Hunter)
Alice Neel American
Not on view
In 1965, the year President Lyndon B. Johnson decided to significantly increase ground forces in South Vietnam, Neel met James Hunter by chance and asked him to sit for a painting. The young man had just been drafted and was scheduled to leave within a week. Following her usual practice, Neel started by outlining the body directly on the canvas and then filling in parts of the head and hands. When Hunter failed to return for their second sitting, Neel declared the work complete, despite its unfinished state, signed it on the back, and exhibited it nine years later in her retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
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