BENNY AND MARY ELLEN ANDREWS
ALICE NEEL, 1972
Look at how relaxed Benny is. Not posed-relaxed. Actually relaxed. Like the chair got him before the portrait did. This is Benny and Mary Ellen Andrews. By Alice Neel. Benny Andrews was a painter. Mary Ellen was a photographer. Neel knew them both well. That matters, because this does not feel like a formal sitting. It feels like a room where everyone has stopped trying quite so hard. No flattery, no glamour treatment — no little cloud of importance around them. Just: here they are. And that sounds simple, but with Neel it never is. Most portrait painters are, at some level, helping you out. Making you taller, calmer, more resolved than you probably felt that day. Neel does something stranger. She leaves the nervous system in. Look at the paint. Thin in places, almost transparent. You can still see the drawing underneath — that dark blue line circling their bodies, like she never fully erased the first encounter. The painting doesn't feel polished into certainty. It feels caught. And Neel did this for decades with very little encouragement. While the art world was busy congratulating Abstract Expressionism — all that heroic paint-flinging, very serious, very macho — Neel stayed in her apartment painting people. Not because it was fashionable. Because faces were still where the trouble was. Then in 1974, the Whitney finally gives her a retrospective. She's seventy-four. Forty years of paintings, suddenly treated like they'd been there the whole time. Too late to help with the rent, but still. Now look at Benny again. He later said sitting for Neel was "so beguiling. She lulled you. And you can see it in my portrait. I am just lying in that chair." Lulled. That's the word. She made you comfortable enough to stop performing. Then she picked up the brush. That's what people miss when they call her portraits brutal. They're honest, yes. But not cold. The confrontation comes from how safe the sitter got first. Benny isn't posing as importance here. Mary Ellen isn't being turned into an accessory. They're just in the room, caught in that strange Neel state where you look completely ordinary and completely exposed at the same time. And the portraits are still doing what they always did. Not flattering people, not judging them — just waiting until the performance drops. And then looking straight at what's left.