Benny and Mary Ellen Andrews

Alice Neel, 1972

Alright, start with Benny. He's not posed-relaxed. He's actually relaxed. Like the chair got him before the portrait did. One arm over the back. Legs crossed high. One sneaker thrust straight out at the painter. He remembered sitting for Alice Neel. "It was so beguiling. She lulled you. And you can see it in my portrait. I am just lying in that chair," he said. Lulled. What a word. Then Mary Ellen, beside him. Upright. Knees together. Both shoes on the floor. Hand against her cheek. And she never stops looking at Neel. Same room. Same painter. Completely different way of sitting there. And Neel had time to notice. She said it took several sittings. About two hours each. And during those hours, she talked. She waited for a person to fall into the same position again and again. Their "characteristic pose," she called it. Benny kept melting into the chair. Mary Ellen kept returning to this. Neel said what interested her was that "although they're together, they're also separate." Then there are the edges. Top right, down the side. Bare canvas. And a drawn line she never covered up. Dark blue contours running all the way around both bodies. That's the first drawing, sitting inside the finished painting. The painting is five feet tall, and she never filled the room in. She left the drawing. She left the empty canvas. Then, right in the middle, she finished the two of them. This is 1972. Neel is seventy-two. Two years later, the Whitney gives her a retrospective. Her first.

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