Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Futility of Effort
Alice Neel American
Not on view
Described by Neel as one of her most "revolutionary" paintings, Futility of Effort was inspired by two tragedies. In December 1927, her first daughter, Santillana, died of diphtheria. Shortly thereafter, she learned of an infant who had choked on the bars of its crib while its mother ironed in the kitchen. From this latter event, Neel drew the painting’s iconography. Here a small child faces straight ahead, its body suspended between the crib’s rungs. A black line crosses its midsection, severing its upper torso from its lower half. The two parts are displaced left to right, a slippage in both space and logic that intensifies the work’s haunting atmosphere. Rendered with an extreme economy of means, the painting distills the experience of loss into an abstract dreamscape.
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