Portrait of Benny Andrews

In 1966, painters Alice Neel and Benny Andrews (1930–2006) were paired in an exhibition at the Countee Cullen Library in Harlem, where Neel lived. The two became close lifelong friends thereafter. Neel painted a portrait of Andrews and his first wife, Mary Ellen, in 1972, and then created this imposing lithograph of the artist in 1978. Andrews, who had an even grittier approach to figuration, later produced the larger-than-life Portrait of Alice Neel in 1987, three years after Neel’s death, bringing their mutual admiration full-circle.

Neel, a white woman who came of age during the Great Depression and had a tumultuous personal life, got her start through commissions from the Works Progress Administration. Under recognized in her lifetime, Neel has more recently been celebrated as an inimitable portraitist, who painted friends, family, and neighbors of all colors with the same care and vigor. Writer and critic Hilton Als, who curated an exhibition of Neel’s Spanish Harlem portraits in 2017, wrote of Neel’s “ethos of inclusion,” arguing that her work, which makes her subjects visible without any ideological agenda, captures “the humanness embedded in subjects that people might classify as ‘different.’ ”