Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Cityscape
Alice Neel American
Not on view
In the entanglement of nature and the built environment in New York, Neel found opportunities for painterly and political expression. In Cityscape she is drawn to the dramatic diagonals of freshly plowed streets against snow-clad islands with leafless trees, her loose brushstrokes perceptively following the muddy tread marks of recently passed vehicles. An earlier painting Central Park, also in this exhibition, is a symphony of contour lines that describe the dense jumble of craggy rocks, silhouetted branches, and teetering stairs in a contrived landscape. Each scene, with its scant or diminutive figures, appears melancholic. Neel seems to identify the human body as being constantly subjected to and engulfed by mechanized processes of urban living, from the commercial activity of the streets to manufactured spaces of respite.
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