Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Still Life with Fruit
Alice Neel American
Not on view
Regarded primarily as a portrait painter, a designation she resisted, Neel pursued the genre of still life throughout her career. Among other qualities, still lifes provided her with attractive opportunities to experiment with abstraction. The fruits in this example from 1940 appear as flat passages of bold impasto paint, as does Neel’s rendering of the cup’s opening. Flattened shadows that fall on the tabletop, which seems to tip up toward the viewer, likewise register as forms that are somewhat detached from observed reality. Like other still lifes that Neel painted, this composition also gives some insight into the painter’s modest life and domestic space.
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